International Journal for Tourism and Technology (IJTT)
In human relationship and conversation in the African continent, virtue is one of the most fundamental components in the building and nourishing of African life and governance. Ironically, virtue has been sentenced to “death”, while vice (reproach of virtue) has been resurrected to take centre stage in the production of life experiences, making the continent to descend into avoidable pain, misery, illiteracy, poverty, diseases, death and leadership crises. This discourse is a unique scholarly effort to resurrect the treasures of virtue and set a trajectory of purity of life and leadership transformation in the continent. This work has seven (7) components, with the introduction highlighting the notable challenges and the value of setting a pathway for redemption. The twin concepts of virtue and vice (reproach of virtue) are given conceptual treatment, and a catalogue of the condemnable effects of the reproach of virtue is given a noticeable focus. Underlining the undeniable love of virtue as a mystery in the leadership transformation of Africa, while offering a synopsis of the discourse with noble and essential prescriptions as guardians in the development of Africa.
Incidentally, the reproach of virtue is the dramatization of vice and the reproach of vice is the display of virtue. But African leaders and African leadership appear to embrace vice as a virtue and crave its notoriety, in the progressive, exciting and entertaining development and nourishment of life in the African continent regardless of the degree of shape, pattern or quality of living experiences of Africans in their daily transactions of lives in words, speeches, conversations, relationships, conduct, choices, decisions, actions, etc. Interestingly, in the community of thoughts or ideas, virtue is senior and superior to the other ideas in their interactive, intriguing and intertwining interplay to engender beauty and dynamism of quality living experiences in the continent of Africa, but African leadership in their pleasure and luxury of curiosity of vice or state of disdain for honour of virtue have subjected the African community unto avoidable perils or misfortune. It is needful to assert that the destructive rage
of the mental attitudes and conduct of Africans, and importantly, African leadership is due to the contestation between virtue and vice for supremacy and dominance in the sacred chambers of the hearts of Africans, but the consequence and disaster is not more to the fierceness of the contest as in the abandonment of virtue. There are no schools and curricular for vice, but in an ironical twist, vice or dishonour for virtue is developing in an astronomical speed and raising a loud alarm over virtue in the
African space, as it were, to compel us to agree with Mikhail Bakunin who wrote in 1917 in Russia to mobilize for the Bolshevik revolution that “in this revolution we will have to awaken the devil in the people, stir up their basest passions” (Ogan, 2004). African leadership and followership appear to have set aflame their basest passions in the demonstration of outrageous wickedness in leadership on the part of the leaders, and the acceptance of deadly wickedness in leadership by the African populace, which appears as an establishment of a grand conspiracy of the reproach of virtue, and a credit to the honour of vice in the continent. This discourse is a scholarly reengineering of mental reorientation to reposition virtue in the thoughts and sensibilities of Africans on the pathway to development.
Virtue, Vice, Transformation, Leadership