Dr Ken Lipenga | Who Gets to Speak for Power?
True leadership is not measured by polished words or borrowed credentials, but by presence, action, and the courage to tell your own story. In Blantyre, Jomo Osman shows Africa that language is power only when it is owned, and that leaders who speak plainly can reclaim authority, defy stereotypes, and lead with substance. WRITES DR KEN LIPENGA
Power does not always arrive wearing boots. Sometimes it arrives as a sentence.
And sometimes, it arrives as a man deciding to tell his own story before others finish telling it for him.
In Malawi, when one Jomo Osman was elected Mayor of Blantyre, a familiar African script was quickly dusted off. He was discussed less in terms of policy and more in terms of pedigree. Commentators asked, not even quietly, whether he was educated enough, polished enough, credentialed enough to hold the office. The subtext was unmistakable: leadership must sound a certain way to count.
What followed has been more interesting than the criticism.
Instead of retreating into silence or defensiveness, Osman began narrating himself. Through short videos, photographs, and everyday updates on social media, he has been quietly assembling an alternative account of leadership: present, practical, untheatrical. No inflated rhetoric. No borrowed grandiosity. Just work shown as work.
And in doing so, he has demonstrated something Africa understands deeply but often forgets to assert: language is power not because it is ornate, but because it is owned.
Education, Accent, and Authority
In much of postcolonial Africa, authority still speaks with inherited accents. Fluency in certain registers—bureaucratic English, French or Portuguese, technocratic jargon, donor-friendly phrasing—has come to substitute for competence itself. Education, narrowly defined, becomes a proxy for legitimacy.
This is not accidental. Colonial administration trained us to equate intelligence with distance: distance from the village, from the vernacular, from the body. The more abstract the language, the more “serious” it sounds. The closer speech comes to lived experience, the more it risks being dismissed as unsophisticated.
Against this background, Osman’s storytelling is quietly subversive. He does not argue his credentials. He performs responsibility. He does not translate himself upward; he speaks outward.
Narrative as a Site of Struggle
What we are witnessing in Blantyre is not merely a communications strategy. It is a struggle over narrative authority. In Africa, the most damaging stories are often told about people rather than by them. Once a label settles—“uneducated,” “populist,” “lightweight”—it begins to do political work. It narrows imagination. It disciplines expectation.
By narrating his days, his meetings, his interactions with ordinary residents, Osman interrupts this process. He denies caricature its oxygen. He replaces speculation with presence.
This matters because narrative always precedes judgment. Before policies are evaluated, people decide whether a leader “sounds right.” Before reforms are considered, they ask whether the messenger fits an inherited image of seriousness.
To control narrative is therefore to reclaim time, the time usually wasted correcting distortions after they have already hardened.
Africa’s Long Argument with Language
This episode touches a deeper African question: who gets to define intelligence, leadership, and progress? African societies have always valued multiple forms of knowledge. Oral reasoning, social intelligence, memory, mediation skills—these were once sufficient to govern communities. Modern Africa, however, often behaves as if only one kind of intelligence is legitimate: the kind that arrives wrapped in certificates and foreign syntax.
Yet the continent’s most enduring failures have often been authored in flawless English. What Osman’s self-narration suggests is not anti-intellectualism, but anti-monopoly. A refusal to allow one linguistic register to claim exclusive rights over authority.
Why This Moment Matters
This is a small story, but a telling one.
Africa is entering an era where power is increasingly mediated through platforms, images, and micro-narratives. The old gatekeepers—editors, commentators, credential-police—no longer control the entire conversation. Leaders who understand this can either perform borrowed roles or speak themselves into being.
The danger, of course, is that performance replaces substance. But the greater danger is that we mistake polish for depth and silence for wisdom.
The lesson from Blantyre is not that education does not matter. It does. The lesson is that language must serve leadership, not substitute for it.
Africa does not need leaders who merely sound correct. It needs leaders who sound true, and whose work can withstand being spoken plainly.
Sometimes, reclaiming power begins with something deceptively simple: refusing to let others finish your sentence for you.
This article first appeared on https://kenlipenga.substack.com
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