High quality leadership everywhere, but especially in Africa, creates good governance. In turn, good governance enables positive outcomes for citizens: enhanced security and safety, economic growth, solid infrastructures, access to speedy broadband, educational opportunities, the availability of clean water, advanced public health treatments and capable care, elevated standards of living, freedoms of speech and assembly, respect for human rights, and a variety of other political and social attainments that are only possible when the governed benefit from accomplished and responsive government. Governance is performance, the delivery of quantities and qualities of essential services by a constituted authority that controls territory, whether at the municipal, the provincial, or the national level. Centuries ago governments—constituted bodies of authority—replaced sovereigns. Citizens subsequently expected, sometimes demanded, that their new governing bodies provide ever better and broader kinds of services. Constituents at various points refused merely to be organized by, dictated to, and taxed from above, by a governing authority. Their expectations grew as taxation became more of a transaction and less of an imposition. Ultimately, a sense of social contract took hold: the modern state could govern only if it won the consent of the governed and, in return, if it met the needs and desires of the inhabitants within its governmental orbit.
Water is Life
