The Attitude Lounge with Kodwo Brumpon: The Log and the Splinter

“It is easy to pull a thorn out of someone else’s skin.” – African proverb

Imagine you are in class. Your friend Kwesi is chewing gum and you raise your hand and tell the teacher. But guess what, you also have gum in your mouth right now, hidden under your tongue. You are complaining about Kwesi’s gum while you are doing the exact same thing. That is funny when it happens in class. But when it happens with grown-ups who run countries and companies and institutions, it stops being funny, because it costs everyone a better life.

Africa is one of the most beautiful and richest places on earth. We have the most young people, the most sunshine, the most farmland, the most minerals. We have everything we need to be great. But instead of using all that to build something wonderful for ourselves, too many of us, and our leaders spend our time days pointing fingers at each other.

In our nation, a man on the radio will talk for hours every single morning about how a politician is stealing money. But that same radio station has not paid its own taxes for months. That man is seeing the gum in Kwesi’s mouth and forgetting the gum under his own tongue.

And it is not just people on the radio. Look around. Someone gives a big speech about honesty at church on Sunday, then goes home and cheats his business partner on Monday. A teacher punishes students for coming late but is always the last one to arrive. A leader shouts about corruption on TV, then quietly takes a bribe on Tuesday.

This is what Jesus meant when he talked about the log and the splinter. He said why are you trying to remove the tiny splinter from your friend’s eye when you have a huge log stuck in your own? You cannot see clearly enough to help anyone until you have sorted out your own problem first.

The attitudinal tendency to direct scrutiny outward with theatrical precision while insulating one’s own structures from the same standard can be labelled as performative accountability. In business, it is what kills productive and effective cultures slowly. And in nations, it is what prevents development from compounding.

In environments where external criticism is loud and cheap, internal reform becomes psychologically expensive. Citizens and leaders alike find it cognitively easier to participate in pointing fingers than in the slow, difficult work of bringing about positive change. The culture of blame does not merely fail to produce reform, it actively crowds it out.

The lesson is simple. Before you talk about what others are doing wrong, look in the mirror. Fix your own home first. Pay your own taxes first. Be honest in your own business first.

Tell the truth in your own house first. When we do that, when each one of us becomes the person we are asking others to be, then together we become unstoppable. Africa does not need to wait for the world to save it. Africa needs a mirror. And the courage to look into it honestly.

That is why we know that Africa does not have a resources problem. It does not even have a colonial hangover problem. We have a mirror problem. We and our leaders in politics, business, civil society, and media have become virtuoso critics of everyone except ourselves. And in the gap between what we demand of others and what we practice personally lies the single most expensive inefficiency on the continent.

Jesus Christ, was not offering a devotional sentiment when He said “Why do you see the splinter in your brother’s eye but fail to notice the log in your own?” He was articulating the precondition for effective intervention. You cannot help someone see clearly while your own vision is obscured. You cannot build institutions of trust while practising institutional hypocrisy.

When the world proclaims that the current century is Africa’s, it is not a shouting a slogan. It is a structural possibility, confirmed by demographics, resource endowments, and the extraordinary ambition of its young population. But we know possibilities do not self-execute.

They require the particular moral courage of leaders who are willing to be, first and most visibly, accountable to themselves. All in all, self-accountability is not weakness. Rather, it is the only form of authority that compounds. An individual or institution that audits itself publicly earns the moral standing to audit others credibly.

Therefore, let us all strive to remove the splinter in our eyes, not because it is the humble thing to do. Because it is the only way to see clearly enough to build what this nation and the continent are fully capable of becoming…

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