Paper short abstract:

Despite the increase in international economic integration amongst countries which has propelled many countries towards achieving sustainable development goals, institutional issues such as leadership and governance have continued to play a great role in the underdevelopment of the African continent

Paper long abstract:

Many African states are endowed with natural resources, yet the economic realities of African states show stagnating economic growth, weak institutional infrastructures and poor governance structures. These realities can be attributed to the role institutional factors such as governance and leadership play especially. The governance and leadership issues in Africa are brimming with disappointment when measured against the backdrop of their resource endowments. A number of empirical evidences point towards corruption as a major root cause of leadership and governance challenges (Carril-Caccia, Milgram-Baleix, & Paniagua, 2019; Rodríguez-Pose & Cols, 2017) which not only impede growth and development of the African states but also contribute to other social crises such as poverty, unemployment, political instability and violence, insecurity and terrorism. This paper focuses on a selected African country, Nigeria, to investigate the perceived parallelism of a nation's underdevelopment and leadership and governance challenges. This study's findings extend the importance of strong governance systems and strong leadership in the growth and development of nations. Therefore, since the actualisation of the UN's sustainable development goals depend on the continents' leadership and governance quality, the paper advocates for an adoption of servant-leadership by actors as the way forward towards progressive advancement of Africa.