Lois Mensah is that brilliant lass from Chemu Senior High School, Tema, who won the overall national best public speaker in 2022. The competition organised by Speech Forces for 14 schools in Ghana, including Achimota School, Legon Presec, Legacy Girls and Mfantsiman Senior High, provided a platform to unearth intellectual potential critical to leadership and national development. In the process of winning this prestigious award, Lois Mensah demonstrated a rare leadership skill: the ability to think on your feet; and was adjudged the best impromptu speaker. Rising above the pack, she brilliantly in 30 seconds unleashed a cogent extempore on a complex theme, "the myth of imperfection". This spontaneous delivery revealed the high-end aptitude in problem solving hidden in this ordinary African teenager from Chemu Senior High School. Although her school came in forth position, she was the best overall speaker and was thus selected to participate in the African Leadership Academy Model Africa Union (ALAMAU). Other brilliant students from Legacy Girls also participated. Lois won a Best Speaker award at ALAMAU-2023.
ALA IS DOING SOMETHING VERY RIGHT
But the story is not about Lois, per se. it is about the ALAMAU platform and opportunities opening in Africa for cross-cutting excellence. The African Leadership Academy Model Africa Union (ALAMAU) is designed to show what happens at the African Union (AU) as continental leaders, including heads of State, Ministers and other leaders from the private sector and civil society brainstorm to fashion out efficient solutions and proactive measures that respond innovatively to the fast-changing circumstances of our times, with far-reaching consequences. It provides "a platform for young leaders to explore the inner workings of the African Union and to practice international diplomacy by assuming the role of African Leaders". This is a very good initiative for our great continent which has the fastest growing cohort of young people and would by the middle of the century result in one in four people in the world, 25%, being African; if what the Vice President of the US, Kamala Harris,recently said at the Black Star Square is a fact.
MERITOCRATIC SELECTION PROCESS IS CRITICAL
Because of how the African Leadership Academy (ALA) is working hard to fish out germs on our continent to become our future leaders, ALAMAU participation could evolve into a very credible criteria for identifying and supporting continental and global leadership development. The meritocratic approach ALA used to find people like Lois is very commendable because these days people are cutting corners and using wrong short-cuts to access leadership and this is one of our big problems, even globally. For example, politicians are almost buying elections and democracy is becoming a tool for the rich. ALA partnered with a local organisation that did not just hand-pick students from well-endowed schools but, despite the limited time and resources, did a good sample to include not very known public schools like Chemu SHS, where Lois was "hidden". There are many other brilliant, even more brilliant, young people who remain hidden in remote villages in Ghana, Liberia, Congo, Lesotho, Uganda, Tunisia and Madagascar, inter alia. Who is finding them when? If adults won't do it by themselves, young people should increase healthy pressure on State Parliaments in Africa to have more resources invested in talent-discovery ventures.
ENGAGING REAL ISSUES
The African Union has several structures by which its functions are processed. This includes the Committees on Political Affairs, Peace and Security (PAPS), on Health Humanitarian Affairs and Social Development (HHS) and the Trade Industry and Mining Committee (TIMC) as well as the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the Pan-African Parliament (PAP). ALAMUA simulates the processes in these AU structures: Lois Mensah was in the PAPS, representing Zimbabwe. Together with her teammates from other countries, they presented brilliant discourses on "leveraging human right courts to settle intrastate conflicts". Keeping in mind the undergirds to the concept of human rights, in this case to the context of Africa, this topic could be quite daunting to such young minds with little experience; especially because of the complexities surrounding intrastate conflicts, including global geopolitical influences, overt and covert. But they did justice to the subject matter, having their resolution passed on a 9-2 vote at the Committee level. Perhaps what is more significant in the ALAMAU process is the attitude of diplomacy inculcated into these intelligent and energetic young leaders. It is not too difficult to notice that it is the deficits of diplomatic culture that we have in our power-brokering mechanisms that fuel many a conflict in Africa and elsewhere in our global village, where one neighbourhood sneezes and the other catches the cold probably, this inculcation is needed more at this time for the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, NATO, China, Iran, United States of America, United Kingdom, and Israel, among others.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
WHAT AFRICAN HERITAGE CAN TEACH GLOBAL CULTURE
As the world rushes in on Africa, taking advantage of our double demographic dividends of young populations and intelligent teens who they are pulling with all sorts of enticement in a brain-drain we gleefully succumb to, it is important for us all to identify and efficiently harness what is it about us that humanity can adopt for collective thrive. In God's word, the Bible, we learn that all men we created equally and from one blood; and have been placed in a specific generation and locality for the best opportunities to a godly and satisfying life in him, of whom we live and move and have our being (Acts Chapter 17). The African heritage of character and collective morality is not only indispensable to us but necessary in these times of global abuse of moral standards and reckless freedoms threatening the very survival of the whole human race. Therefore, the convergence of young African minds on the ALAMAU platform should not be misused in the promotion of destructive diversity when we can harness it for instructive unity and leave behind the sophistries that usurp our collective human identity.
Well done ALAMAU. Congratulations to Ms. Lois Mensah for the honour done Ghana and thanks to Speech Forces.
