Among the multitude of things many African countries have consistently lacked since Independence is one that is at the root of most of the bad publicity Africa gets: The capacity to maintain political stability, ensure internal security, and enable citizens to live peaceful, stable, and generally happy, if not necessarily prosperous, lives.

The problems this incapacity begets explain why ordinary Africans tend to feel no particular attachment to or appreciation of their governments and the leaders at the top.

Much thinking and talking goes into discussions about how to build this capacity. They almost always lead to imported solutions that might have worked well in far-away contexts but which are presented as one-size-fits-all “best practice.”

Those who are old enough recall the heady late 1980s and 1990s when African countries emerging from one-party rule or military dictatorships became a veritable marketplace for new ideas about how to fix broken states and collapsed economies, end Big Man politics and authoritarianism, and bring the ordinary citizen into the arena of decision-making. Many advances were registered as a result.

That, however, was before many reforms hit what the late Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi dubbed “dead ends,” prompting him to call for “new beginnings.” As a result, he projected himself powerfully into the centre of the debate about how to pursue the change Africa needs.

The late Zenawi was one of a small minority of assertive political elites on the continent who have sought to claim policy space for themselves and to lead the search for workable and practical solutions to Africa’s challenges, often using their own countries for the necessary testing.

Now one would think that such aspirations are the sort of thing to be encouraged. That, however, is not how things work in real life. Claiming policy space from actors accustomed to the idea that the role of fixing broken states or at the very least that of overseeing the fixing belongs to them, is no easy task.

Among the price tags challenging orthodoxy and daring to think and act outside the box carries are attacks, demonisation and subtle and not-so-subtle harassment.

Besides Zenawi, the list of the brave, controversial and, like all humans, imperfect individuals who have led this charge in recent times includes, whatever one may think of them, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

Had he not led his country much earlier, the late Julius Nyerere would have featured. Some may want to contend that Nyerere was in his own league.

However, those who like to argue that there is no comparison between him and my shortlist will be the same people who praise him for leaving power while he was still popular and for building the foundation on which democratic Tanzania now sits.

That is all very well. However, they forget, possibly conveniently, that he was in power for a long time, ran a one-party state and recommended it to others, and didn’t always tolerate criticism or opposition.

On the other side of this argument are political elites who have ceded space rather easily to a wide assortment of good Samaritans with hearts in the right place and driven by noble intentions, but with limitations in terms of understanding the root causes of the problems they seek to tackle and how to go about finding durable, context-specific solutions to them. I will not name names.

However, if you want to know some of them, look no farther than countries experiencing some of Africa’s most intractable armed conflicts or wars that end today and erupt again tomorrow, despite the long-term presence there of armies of experts, including, and this is important, experts in “conflict resolution” or “conflict management.”

These reflections crossed my mind as Burundi went to the polls a few days ago, and as its political and other elites seemed hell bent on continuing to pursue courses of action from which none of them stood to gain anything worth destabilising their country for.

There is no doubt that their seeming determination to fight wars of attrition, whether political or of the shooting type, is guaranteed to force yet thousands more of their compatriots into involuntary exile from which some returned only a few years ago.

Burundi’s elites could draw valuable lessons from countries where similarly divided elites facing a similarly pressing imperative to leave ugly histories behind and chart new beginnings have been reasonably successful.

The details of what happened in each case are, of course, very specifically attuned to each local context. However, there are common threads running through their collective experiences.

First, all reasonably successful cases of post-war reconstruction and reconciliation have, for some years, shunned the zero-sum politics implied in the conventional models of democratisation, which international actors and experts market so dogmatically.

These entail do-or-die competition among multiple, antagonistic political parties, each seeking to win power, usually at all costs.

Instead they have prioritised inclusion of as many potential adversaries as possible, so that even when defections occur, firm foundations for durable stability are in place. All it takes is brave, creative, inspirational and capable leadership.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]