Social Development and Leadership in Africa

Abstract

Researchers and scholars who have investigated social development on the African continent have paid some attention to the co-relation between social development and leadership and how this promotes the struggle against poverty, as articulated in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1. This chapter seeks to contribute further by examining the correlation between social development and leadership and arguing for the significant impact that transformational servant leadership would bring to social development in Africa. Using an evaluative methodological approach that combines the desk-top and participant observation-based analysis, it interrogated the relevance of a hitherto neglected leadership factor to narratives on social development in Africa by three prominent African scholars. This chapter hypothesizes that the adoption of transformational servant leadership at general functional (emergent) and positional official (appointed) leadership levels in society, and its public and private institutions, would make it unnecessary to adopt the wholesale rejection of capitalist development models as has been advanced by some post-development theorists. It argues that the intersectional nature of local African historical, political, social and economic conditions, whereby development needs and development potential vary, may not validate the adoption of a totalitarian or fundamentalist rejection of Western capitalist development aid models. It further postulates that the practice and promotion of such transformational servant leadership would accelerate and enhance the quality and sustainability of transformational social development in African societies with their public and private institutions.