2025 Tutu Fellow Christopher Pappas reflects on how diversity and ethnicity shape leadership in Africa in his essay for the Tutu Leadership Fellowship Programme.  In it, he draws on lessons from his experience as Mayor of uMngeni Municipality.

He argues that leading a diverse community means building trust, listening genuinely, respecting cultures, and delivering services fairly. He says that in his role, he faces “wicked problems” that require inclusive, adaptive solutions.  Leadership for him is about personal accountability, resisting identity politics, fighting corruption, and ensuring decisions have real impact. By designing fair institutions, governing transparently, and telling a story that unites people, he has sought to turn diversity into a strength.

The core principles, proximity, responsiveness, and delivering on promises, guide me in building shared progress and stability.

His full essay follows - Harnessing Diversity and Ethnicity in African Leadership: Lessons from Local Government.

When I became mayor of uMngeni Municipality, I stepped into a community as diverse as the continent itself. Our residents live in bustling towns, leafy suburbs, rural villages, and informal settlements. They speak different languages, belong to different faiths, and carry histories shaped by both opportunity and dispossession. Like Africa as a whole, uMngeni’s diversity is a source of vibrancy and potential, but also a source of tension when trust in leadership is low.

The question the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellowship poses - "what role does diversity and ethnicity play in African leadership, and how can these divides be positively harnessed" - is not an abstract one for me. It is the daily reality of local government. Every decision we make, from where to build a road to how to structure a budget, is seen through the lens of identity. If diversity is not handled deliberately and fairly, it can fuel mistrust. But if it is engaged with openly and respectfully, it can be the very thing that strengthens the bond between citizens and their leaders.

One of the first lessons I learned in office is that leading a small municipality, a province, a country, or even a continent, is based on similar principles and frameworks. The scale changes, but the fundamentals do not. Whether you are managing a budget of millions or billions, whether your constituency is a rural village or an entire nation, you need to understand the people you serve, build trust, and deliver results.

Keith Grint’s idea of “wicked problems” captures the nature of this challenge perfectly. Wicked problems are complex, hard to define, and without obvious solutions. In uMngeni, ensuring equitable service delivery across such a varied population is a wicked problem. It is not something a mayor can solve once and move on from, it requires what Grint calls “clumsy solutions”, inclusive, adaptive, and often imperfect responses that evolve over time. For example, expanding refuse collection into remote farming areas was not simply a technical exercise. It required careful engagement with farming communities, consideration of environmental impacts, and communication in multiple languages to build understanding and support.

There must be a genuine drive to hear people and respond to them. Listening is not a courtesy, it is a strategic necessity. Understanding the complexities and diversities of society is impossible from a desk alone. Proximity builds trust, visiting a village to discuss water supply issues carries more weight than sending a formal letter. People remember who showed up, and showing up allows leaders to hear the nuance that does not make it into formal reports.

Making assumptions about how people feel or think is dangerous, especially in diverse communities where histories, priorities, and values differ widely. In my first year, I was reminded of this when we began a new streetlight installation project. What seemed like a universally positive initiative was met with resistance in one rural area, where residents feared the lights would encourage night-time gatherings they associated with crime. Only by engaging directly did we understand their concern and find a compromise.

Ali Mufuruki’s challenge in No More Excuses for Africa is a reminder that leadership in such a context requires personal accountability. It is easy in South African local government to blame historical inequality, unresponsive higher spheres of government, or a lack of funding. But Mufuruki is right, leadership means taking ownership of problems, even those you did not create. In uMngeni, we inherited a municipality with a poor audit record, neglected infrastructure, and low public trust. We could have explained these as legacies of the past, but instead we set out to change the trajectory, improving our audit outcomes, tripling our roads maintenance budget, and paying our electricity account in full to model financial discipline.

Otto Scharmer’s “blind spot” of institutional leadership is also highly relevant to local government. Municipal leaders can be so focused on the advice of technocrats that they forget their own responsibility to understand the issues deeply. Relying entirely on technocrats to inform political decisions is dangerous. Technocrats tend to be performance-driven or outcome-driven, their role is to meet targets, deliver reports, and optimise systems. Politicians, however, must be impact-driven. It is not enough for a service to be delivered on paper, it must make a meaningful difference in people’s lives. In uMngeni, this means questioning whether a road upgrade truly improves access to markets for farmers, or whether a new waste collection point is actually being used by the community it was intended to serve.

Institutional design plays a central role in whether diversity becomes a strength or a weakness. In uMngeni, our public participation framework combines formal mechanisms like ward committees with informal community engagement. This hybrid approach ensures that voices from rural villages, urban neighbourhoods, and informal settlements all feed into decision-making. We have also worked to make municipal procurement more transparent and accessible, so that businesses from all parts of our municipality have a fair chance to compete for work. Delivering on commitments and promises is essential, every completed project becomes a visible sign that the municipality’s word can be trusted.

Narrative leadership is equally important. Machiavelli noted that perception and symbolism are critical in holding a state together, and this is no less true in a municipality. People need to see themselves reflected in the story their leaders tell. That is why we support events that cut across cultural and geographic divides, from the Hilton Arts Festival to rural agricultural shows, to create shared spaces where residents can celebrate together. Archbishop Tutu’s ubuntu, “I am because we are”, is not just a moral idea but a practical guide, our progress as a municipality depends on recognising that each community’s well-being is tied to the others. Language and culture are not obstacles to progress but tools for connection. Speaking to a community in their home language and respecting cultural protocols builds rapport and shows respect, which in turn makes it easier to navigate difficult conversations.

William Duggan’s “strategic intuition” describes the way leaders can navigate complexity by combining analysis with experience and insight. In practice, this means adjusting strategy in response to community feedback rather than sticking rigidly to a pre-set plan. For instance, when residents in a historically marginalised area expressed frustration about the slow pace of road upgrades, we re-prioritised the budget to fast-track work there. This was not simply an act of appeasement, it was a calculated decision to build trust where it had been eroded for decades. Responsiveness builds trust, and trust makes it possible to do harder, longer-term work later.

Scharmer’s lessons from the COVID-19 crisis also apply at the local level. One of his insights is that crises can be moments of transformation if leaders are willing to listen and co-create solutions. In uMngeni, when a severe snowstorm disrupted power and water supply, we worked with community organisations, local businesses, and volunteers to coordinate relief. The crisis could easily have deepened divisions, but by involving residents in the response, it became a moment of shared purpose.

Corruption, as Patrick Lumumba warns, is the bane of Africa. It corrodes trust and turns diversity into a weapon, as leaders funnel resources to “their people” in the name of loyalty. Fighting it is not just a matter of compliance but of demonstrating fairness in every decision. Publishing tender results, enforcing performance contracts, and acting on misconduct are not abstract governance measures, they are trust-building tools.

Syed’s warning in Warring Tribes Can Doom Whole Nations is that identity politics can tear societies apart if left unchecked. At the municipal level, this means resisting pressure to favour areas that supported you politically and ensuring that budget allocations are based on need, not voting patterns. In uMngeni, we have deliberately invested in infrastructure and services in wards that did not vote for us, because inclusive development is the surest path to long-term stability.

There are lessons from beyond Africa as well. McKenzie’s (McKinsey Global Institute) analysis of the Asian Tigers shows how rapid development rests on strong institutions, long-term planning, and social cohesion. While Africa’s diversity and history mean the path will be different, the principle that shared purpose accelerates development is highly relevant. Zachariah Mampilly’s writing on Africa’s youth bulge is also instructive, if young people from all communities are brought into leadership and economic opportunity, they can be a unifying force. If they are excluded, they can become a destabilising one.
Finally, The New Scramble for Africa reminds us that external powers will seek to exploit internal divisions. A municipality that builds unity across diversity is not just improving local governance, it is contributing to national resilience.

Diversity and ethnicity are not peripheral to African leadership, they are at its core. In local government, they shape every interaction, policy, and decision. The role of a leader is not to wish these differences away but to engage with them honestly, design systems that respect them, and tell a story that binds them together. In uMngeni, we have tried to do this through fair service delivery, transparent governance, inclusive participation, and shared celebration. Leading a municipality may seem far removed from leading a country or continent, but the principles are the same, listen genuinely, be present, deliver on your word, and ensure that every community can see itself in the vision you are building.

As Archbishop Tutu said, “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.” For African leaders, especially in local government, the challenge is to turn that truth into daily practice, in the budget decisions, the public meetings, the service plans, so that diversity is not just tolerated but becomes the foundation for a shared future.

Essay by Christopher Pappas for the 2025 Tutu Leadership Fellowship Programme.