What does It Take to Build a Strong Nation? Africa’s Senior Leaders Are Here to Find Out.

Thirty senior public sector leaders from across ten African countries are gathered in Kigali  for Day 1 of the Strong Nations for Africa Programme (SNFAP). The five-day residential intensive program is being co-delivered with the Chandler Governance Group and the African Association for Public Administration and Management (AAPAM).

This programme exists because of an uncomfortable truth. The gap between Africa’s institutional potential and its institutional performance is not, at its core, a resource problem. It is a leadership and governance design problem. SNFAP was built to address that gap, targeting senior leaders who already hold significant authority, but who need structured space to reflect, challenge their assumptions, and leave with actionable strategies for reform.

ASG President, Francis Gatare opened the day by reminding the participants that no one owns their role in public service. They are all stewards of it. “You are a steward of that responsibility,” he said. “If we don’t use the moment we have for the service of our people, those are opportunities lost.” He challenged participants with four questions he believes strong nations ask on repeat: If not me, who? If not here, where? If not this, what? And if not now, when?

He didn’t stop there. Strong nations succeed, he argued, because their leaders have the audacity to question themselves regularly. When leaders stop asking those questions, nations falter. But when a critical mass of leaders asks them daily and mobilises to act, that is the bedrock upon which national strength is built. Success, he reminded the participants, is not technical. It starts in the mind.

Then Dr. Antoine Rutayisire, ASG Associate Professor of Practice, kicked off his session on Principles and Foundations of Governance by teaching the room to dance to the Rwandan beat. Five volunteers from different African nations  were clapping off-beat, moving differently, laughing at themselves – all with the same goal of dancing to the music. He then derived a lesson from there. Leadership, he said, is exactly like that. Everyone does it their own way. But it must fit the rhythm of the institution, the people, and the moment.

He introduced the CASE framework — Character, Attitude, Skills, and Experience — as the true architecture of transformative leadership, and warned against the habit of placing the wrong talent in the wrong roles for the wrong reasons. Good practice, he said plainly, comes from good foundation.

He challenged the room: what are we actually doing with our leadership degrees? And how do we lead in an increasingly volatile world? His answer included replacing VUCA — Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity — with its inverse: Vision, Understanding, Clarity, and Agility.

Also taking the floor was Ngoboka, Chief Skills Officer at Rwanda’s Ministry of Public Service and Labour, who grounded the conversation in practice. Rwanda’s governance transformation, he argued, was not accidental. It was built on technology, accountability, and a relentless results-based culture. He pointed to Irembo as a living example of what happens when public institutions commit to optimising service delivery through digital tools, reducing costs, enabling e-recruitment, and putting citizens first.

But beyond systems, he made a case for the human side of institutional performance: the motivation and wellbeing of public servants as a direct driver of quality work. African leaders, he said, must be equipped with resilience and emotional intelligence, and institutions must become more agile and inclusive.

Rwanda’s story, inspired by President Kagame’s vision of togetherness and shared accountability, offers a model and a proof of concept that transformation is possible.

Over the next four days, participants will work through sessions on institutional accountability, citizen engagement, digital governance, and anticipatory policy thinking, including field visits to the Rwanda Governance Board and Irembo, Rwanda’s award-winning digital services platform, as live case studies in what effective public institutions look like in practice.

The programme closes with each participant delivering a Leadership Commitment Pitch – a concrete, accountable answer to the question: what will you change when you go home?

Strong nations are not built by accident. They are built by leaders who dare to ask the right questions, and then refuse to wait for someone else to answer them.