When Uganda got debt relief in 1999, the first item President Museveni bought was a presidential jacket for himself.

In the West, the basic economic and social unit is the individual; in Africa, it is the extended family or the collective.

To be sure, dictators are crafty, evil geniuses with awesome firepower at their disposal. They are also brutally efficient at intimidation, terrorism, and mass slaughter. However, a force is able to dominate because the counterforce is either nonexistent or weak.

Across Africa there is what I call a colonialist mentality or orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in the sense that a lot of things have gone wrong in Africa in the post-colonial period. And time and time again, any time something went wrong, the leadership claims that it was never their fault.

Getting rid of the dictator is only a first step in establishing a free society. The dictatorship must also be disassembled.

Western-style multi-party democracy is possible but not suitable for Africa.

African history is filled with experiences of people shooting their way to power and then splintering into factions, like in Somalia and Liberia.