An Ambitious Africa Demands Africans With High Expectations

ON Sunday, the first African World Cup will reach what appears to be a peculiar conclusion. For the first time in the history of the Fifa World Cup, two European teams will play in the final on a continent other than Europe.

It will also be the first time for a European team to win the World Cup outside Europe.
Oddly, it will happen in Africa; a continent European nations had colonised and looted for centuries. It is expected that 16 African Heads of State will attend this European final.
I don’t know how the attending Heads of State view this event, which for some of my friends appears to be a political humiliation.
This is particularly the case for some in light of earlier pronouncement during the group phases when many European teams failed to make the cut to the last 16.
At the time, many African football analysts and amateurs predicted an enduring shift from Europe to Latin America.
Alas, and depending on how you look at it, this shift never occurred.
Be that as it may, what bothers me up to now is not necessarily the exit of the African teams at a very early stage of an African World Cup, but our attitudes and how we frame defeat and failure.
Since I live in Paris, my South African friends rushed to call and sent me text messages after the French defeat at the hands of South Africa, telling me how badly France fared at this showpiece.
They were pretty oblivious and indifferent about the disgraceful exit of the host nation, Bafana Bafana.
In reply, I reminded my friends that as Africans, we should be exceedingly worried about our own failures, not those of the French national team.
Second, for some, the failures of the European teams during the group phase of the competition were cause for celebration.
Shockingly, they even went as far as saying that Africans should not worry too much about the exit of the African teams during the group phase because European teams did as badly.
Third, when Ghana lost to a modest and unfashionable Uruguay, the word from Africa was that Ghana did Africa proud.
Newspapers and social networks were laced with congratulatory messages.
Looking at it from this side, I fail to capture how Ghana did us proud by losing to minnows.
There are two interconnected issues that I seek to raise here.
The first concerns ambition and expectations, while the second relates to how Africans should frame these ambitions and expectations.
As Africans, we seem to have unashamedly developed a culture of low expectations, even when the logical thing to do is to have higher expectations. For Africa to move forward, we need to reframe and rethink what we expect from ourselves, including those who represent us at home and abroad.
A culture of high expectations and achievement should permeate all levels of life, from village councils up to the higher echelons of government and leadership.
For as long as we the citizens believe that it is fine to have mediocre and non-performing leaders on the basis of flimsy explanations, we will remain countries of non-achievement.
We will simply be perpetuating a culture of mediocrity. For as long as Africans believe that people have done well, while by any objective and reasonable criteria they haven’t done so, Africa is unlikely to become a continent of major achievements.
The bases for a culture of achievement are there in some instances, so what is needed is the political will to carry such a culture forward. The case of South Africa hosting a world-class Fifa World Cup is more than revealing.
The challenge is not to say that we should seek excellence when Fifa is involved, but importantly it means that every service that the South African government offers to its citizens must be of world-class standards.
If we see it as important to protect and serve thousands of World Cup visitors, using all the sophisticated means, such measures must also apply to the safety of ordinary South Africans well after the World Cup.
The lives of ordinary South Africans are not less important than those of visitors. It is such demands that ordinary Africans must place before their governments.
Second, Africans must deconstruct the culture and mentality of the victim. It is true that colonialism destroyed many of our bases and reconfigured our reflexes.
But it is less than helpful to think that when Europe fails, Africa has done well.
To think of European failures as African successes is less than helpful, notably when these are not punctuated by any objective and identifiable African successes.
Similarly, it is less than helpful to think that a global economic shift to the East translates into African successes.
It is at best stupid! We should set high and ambitious expectations, irrespective of what happens in other parts of the world. It starts with identifying failures and calling them as such.

* Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari is a PhD fellow in political science at the University of Paris- Panthéon Sorbonne, France.