By Alex Otti “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything” Albert Einstein One of the imperatives of democracy is that the citizens must always be able to engage their representatives in government, asking them questions and holding them to account at all times. In fact, leadership should report to its true employers, the people. Where this is the case, leadership is beholden to the people, knowing fully well that it can be ‘fired’ by its employers. Unfortunately, the scenario painted above is hardly the case in many African countries. What we find here is that in many cases, leadership turns itself into sit tight despots, threatening, insulting and bullying anyone who dares to ask questions and wants to hold it to any form of accountability. In the course of doing so, it believes that it would silence the people and plunder the patrimony without responsibility and with no consequence. It is, however, instructive that once the people keep quiet, they wittingly or unwittingly consent to the plundering of its resources and therefore are vicariously culpable, like Albert Einstein aptly stated above. The reason why leadership seems not to care about the people is because it can perpetuate itself in power by hook or crook irrespective of what the people do. One of the ways to do this is through a compromised electoral process using compromised members of the society. But that is a story for another day.