I am a Ghanaian – an African child for that matter, but if you ask me what the main difference between whites and blacks is, my answer will be simple – MINDSET.

As the saying goes, ‘if you can control the mind of a person, forget about his actions.’ Meaning, the way every human being thinks, is actually the total character worksheet of the fellow; so if you can manipulate how a person thinks, whatever you tell the fellow, he/she is most likely to follow or obey.

African leaders are busy building schools, but the naked truth they fail to recognize is that the schools they build and what they teach their people do not make their people wealth creators or entrepreneurs, but rather, graduates who graduate with the MINDSET of writing plenty job application letters and hoping from one company to the other, seeking non-existent or already occupied job positions.

Meanwhile, if African leaders are to work on the MINDSET of their people and teach them job creation, it is the people who will create jobs and the burden of creating jobs will not squarely or solely lie on leadership – which is the case now! Our academics don’t help in this regard.

African leaders are busy borrowing loans and grants from World Bank and IMF to build more and more hospitals. Instead of working on the MINDSET of their people so they don’t willfully throw rubbish into gutters/drainage systems or throw garbage about anyhow – which gets chocked, breed mosquitoes, cause malaria and kill thousands and millions of people.

Meanwhile, if African leaders can imbibe positive MINDSETS into their people on waste management, people will not create insanitary society/communities/cities/towns as we have – which demands borrowing huge monies to build hospitals to treat preventable diseases (though diseases are inevitable).

African leaders spends over 400 million dollars annually, importing common rice (and of course other things) into their various countries, hence, always having deficits in their national budgets – when they could grow their own rice and work on the MINDSET of their people to lose taste for foreign rice and consume local rice.

Africans are not lazy but because their leaders can’t work on their MINDSET, they seem to be (lazy). Fact is, if truly Africans are lazy people, why is it that when they travel to the West, they work hours unending without complaining and obey rules? Answer: when they get to the West, they change their MINDSET to conform to the MINDSET there – made so by leaders or leadership!

African leaders spend huge monies constructing roads, but because they don’t work on the MINDSET of their constructors, shoddy roads are manufactured. Because they don’t work on the MINDSET of drivers, they too cause carnage on the already poor roads haphazardly!

Boxing my points into one, Africans leaders are trying to solve the problems of their people from the effect and not from the cause. If they are to solve their problems from cause first, that is where MINDSET will be paramount or expedient!

Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first President, built many state owned bodies. Today, over 90% of them are no more – all because of our MINDSET! If there is anything Kwame Nkrumah could not complete doing for Ghana which pains me, it’s not about the companies, hospitals or schools, but his inability to work on our MINDSET!

Changing the MINDSET of Ghanaians – Africans for that matter, was one of Nkrumah’s priorities as a leader. That is why he said “the Black man is capable of managing his own affairs.” Nkrumah is one of the few African leaders who understood the psychology in leadership or leading a people; the rest…….especially those of today, your guess is as good as mine!

There are many types or forms of leadership. The type of leadership I theorize from my school of thought for African leaders is ADVOCACY LEADERSHIP – thus, leadership that works solely on changing the MINDSET of people towards positivity! Africans need positive MINDSET orientations!

To me, ADVOCACY LEADERSHIP is what African leaders MUST apply and stop reading long rehearsed speeches embellished with big grammar which solves no problem of their people. ADVOCACY LEADERSHIP will not only change the MINDSET of Africans but the leaders themselves – so that they can be exemplary leaders.