Yene Assegid's "Butterflies over Africa", Preface by NEPAD CEO

A continent with half of its population under the age of twenty owes it to itself to invent a new way of governance, adapted and contextualized to the challenges imposed by its demography as well as its development. This way of governance would only be able to emerge with a leadership that is conscious of our reality, in order to create an enabling environment for security and progress. The question that we would ask for Africa, is whether or not we have such leadership capacity and if not, how we could possibly create it?

Yene Assegid’s book asks this key question and brings us a range of answers that come both with reason and passion. Her life as a development practitioner at the grassroots level has given her a particular vantage point allowing her to see and analyze the policy and development strategies aiming to bring progress and transformation within the African societies and communities. She has seen the best and the worst of situations in the given context, she analyses theories and experienced the practice. Despite the common and generalized pessimism, she offers new approaches that cut away from the mainstream theories of “development professionals”; that rather reinstate women and men in the heart of the debate about their own future.

I consider this book to be an essential instrument for progress because it probes us to ask ourselves deeper questions about our approach to development and to reflect on the true core issues, causes and obstacles obstructing our way forward. This need to innovate development policies by African peoples for African peoples, is a precondition for us to face up to the challenges of the coming century, without which our marginalization only risks further accentuation.

My own personal experience makes me feel intuitively that her quest is not only worthy of consideration but also ripe with necessary institutional strategies corresponding to whom we are as a people as opposed to strategies and systems that think of and on behalf of us.

It goes without saying that it is not only about thinking in terms of “fabrication of miracles” but rather of intelligently building a leadership that is responsible, democratic and open to dialogue. To speak of technical tools and methods in this field of leadership might of course be a bit of a provocation but we must also appreciate the innovation that it brings. Our youth must be groomed to assume this leadership that we so dearly need and the programs described in this book must constitute an inspiration to our leaders.

Let us remember that the invention of “development” at the end of the Second World War lined the way in which our respective national strategies were entrenched: essentially desktop strategies that have dried out our imagination and creativity and given only backstage roles to our populations. One of the major causes of the weak quality of our socioeconomic indicators is very much related to our propensity to look for solutions “outside first” without really “reflecting and thinking from within first.” By putting our usual approaches, the usual ways of formulating our strategies and implementing our practice, back on the table for reflection and evaluation, we not only say “No” to failure, but at the same time, we give way to our sense and capacity to innovate.

When Yene Assegid embarks on such questions, she does it with the passion of an African with the conviction that the key to our “emergence and presence in the world” is in our commitment to invest in our people.

We cannot fully say that in the twentieth century, our leaders have let their peoples become actors of progress; now for the twenty first century, let us move forward with the spirit and belief that another kind of governance is possible.