The South African state electricity enterprise, Eskom, is promoting independence of mind and creative thinking among the new generation of African leaders, using the concept of ubuntu, the traditional sense of the common humanity that unites Africans across the continent.

The Eskom chairperson, Reuel Khoza, says the corporation has identified good leadership as the key to building cooperation and teamwork that will be good for the company, its stakeholders, and society in general.

He believes that authentic African practices should replace Eurocentric business practises, according to a Sunday Times article, “Time for continent’s leaders to take their rightful place”.

Eskom undertook a study of leadership styles in Africa and elsewhere, in response to President Thabo Mbeki’s challenge of, “Where are the African intellectuals?”

The Eskom Foundation Study of African Leadership said Africans generally lack confidence in their own cultural traditions and must work to restore their heritage so they can rejoin the international community in full dignity.

The study suggests a campaign to revive interest in traditional leadership practices because so many Africans in business and politics have forgotten, or never learnt, where they came from.

Khoza says that ubuntu promotes identity, trust, motivation and teamwork. These are the qualities that most concern business in an age where sustainability depends on human capital.

“The communal values of old Africa are much closer to the spirit of modern business than the authoritarian values we associate with scientific management,” says the article.

“African leadership is about caring for and serving others, while scientific management was the result of mass production techniques in which workers became adjuncts of conveyer belts, doing repetitive, uncreative work.”

Eskom is among African businesses, governments, officials and intellectuals who actively defy Afro-pessimism and insist that the continent has solutions, ideas and values that could change the face of global commerce.