Leadership: The Rhetoric, the Sarcasm, and the Untouchable Thieves
By Alfred Gitau Mwaura
Leadership, in its truest sense, is service. Yet across Africa—and painfully so within the coffee sector—the word leadership has been reduced to rhetoric, sarcasm, and empty performance. It has become a convenient cloak for untouchable thieves: individuals who occupy positions of authority while perfecting the art of funds embezzlement and moral distance.
Whether seated as chairpersons of coffee cooperatives, directors on influential boards, leaders of community-based organizations, holders of political office, or even self-declared presidents of movements “meant to help,” the pattern is familiar. Power is acquired in the name of the people, then exercised against their interests. Development language is weaponized. Poverty is narrated theatrically. Meanwhile, the community itself remains unseen, unheard, and untouched.
This is a corruption deeper than stolen money. It is the corruption of proximity. A certain elitist class asserts that it understands the challenges of communities it has never set foot in. Boardrooms replace villages. Policy papers replace lived reality. The suffering of farmers becomes a talking point, not a responsibility.
Nowhere is this hypocrisy more evident than in coffee.
In coffee, terms are cooked in pillows and polished boardrooms, then sold to unsuspecting farmers as progress. Sophisticated language—sustainability, resilience, empowerment, inclusive growth—is packaged and exported back to Africa as ideology. Innocent farmers are expected to believe in systems designed without them, for markets they will never control, governed by rules they did not write.
Africa is labeled “third world” when it comes to labor, pricing, and dignity. But the same Africa magically transforms when it comes to leisure and pleasure. When the elite land in Maasai Mara, suddenly it is not third world—it is pristine nature, luxury, and wonder. Our land is valuable. Our wildlife must be protected. Our coffee landscapes are photogenic. But our people? They remain cheap, replaceable, and perpetually “in need of aid.”
This is the society of hypocrisy.
It is empowered by dirty money moving through the channels of the so-called new world order—money that funds conferences about poverty while insulating the powerful from ever experiencing it. Money that builds narratives, not solutions. Money that rewards distance from the soil, from the farmer, from the truth.
In coffee cooperatives, funds disappear while farmers are lectured about patience. In movements, donations flow while impact remains theoretical. In institutions, leadership speaks fluently about reform while defending the very systems that extract from the poor. Accountability is demanded downward, never upward.
True leadership does not hide behind terminology. It does not romanticize suffering or monetize empathy. It walks the farms. It listens before it speaks. It is uncomfortable in luxury when its people are uncomfortable in survival.
Kenya’s coffee does not need more saviors. It needs honest leadership. Leadership rooted in the farm, accountable to the farmer, and brave enough to dismantle elitist systems that benefit a few while enslaving many.
Until then, we must call things by their names. Theft dressed as leadership is still theft. Distance disguised as expertise is still ignorance. And development spoken without presence is still exploitation.
Africa is not poor. Africa is misled.
And coffee—African coffee—will only be liberated when leadership stops pretending and starts serving.
© Kenya Coffee School | African Coffee Education (ACE™)