US President Barack Obama's condemnation of Africa's "big men" resonated across the continent, creating a chorus of calls yesterday for better governance in countries from Nigeria to Zimbabwe.
Mr Obama received an ecstatic welcome during his one-day visit on Saturday with huge crowds lining the streets of Ghana's capital Accra, where he urged Africans to demand stronger government in order to seize control of their own future.
"It resonates as a real declaration of war against the disfunctions that have paralysed Africa for five centuries," said Guy Parfait Songue, a political science professor at the University of Douala in Cameroon.
"This is a man bound and determined to upend the continent's realities, notably on corruption, lack of democracy and disrespect of human rights," he said.
Mr Obama's decision to make his first visit south of the Sahara to Ghana again drew attention to last year's post-election violence in Kenya, his father's homeland once seen as a development success story.
"The general feeling is that Obama is 'punishing' the Kenya government for its slow pace of reforms and its unwillingness to deal with corruption," read a Daily Nation opinion piece in Nairobi.
Mr Obama called for redefining donors' aid relationship with Africa, but insisted that broader investment and trade would require nations across the continent to build more solid institutions.
"He made an important and unprecedented pronouncement for the whole of Africa of partnership based on mutual respect in which Africans take their destiny into their own hands," said Emmanuel Akwetey, director of Ghana's Institute for Democratic Governance.
"By asking Africa to own up to its under-development instead of shifting the blame to colonialism, Mr Obama has thrown a challenge to Africa which we should take seriously."
US policy on Africa already made significant changes under former president George W Bush, who last year tripled US spending to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria - mainly in Africa - to $48 billion.
A Bush-era trade law helped Africa triple its exports to the United States since 2000, rising to $51.1 billion in 2007, mostly due to rising oil exports from Angola and Nigeria.