Remember former President Jacob Zuma’s 2013 blooper about the state of roads in Malawi, uttered when explaining why his government was introducing urban tolling on Gauteng freeways? His exact words were: “We can’t think like Africans in Africa generally. We are in Johannesburg. This is Johannesburg. It is not some national road in Malawi. No.”

Understandably, this put many Malawian – and other African – noses out of joint. Many across the continent lambasted Zuma and, by extension, South Africa, for what they perceived to be a misplaced superiority complex.

But our Msholozi – that’s Zuma’s clan name, those of you who have just landed from Mars – is not the only senior politician in recent times prone to putting his foot in his mouth. Who will forget, several years ago, during a visit to Germany, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s response to a question about his wife’s criticism of his government? He said First Lady Aisha Buhari’s comments should be ignored because he did not know what party she belonged to, adding: “But she belongs to my kitchen, and my living room and the other room.”

As he delivered this faux pas, he had a very straight face, leaving then German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was standing beside him, to carry the weight of the shame. I’m told it is due to fear of what Buhari might say in public – or how he would say it – that his aides manage access to him quite tightly, which explains why he has given very few media interviews since assuming power in 2015.

Even on Twitter Buhari is a disaster. Last year, when elements in south-east Nigeria appeared to be reviving their agitation for secession, he did not think it untoward to tweet: “Those of us [who were] in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand.” He was referring to the Biafran war, which raged from 1967 to 1970 and in which an estimated one-million mostly ethnic Igbos perished. As a senior figure in the Nigeria military at the time, Buhari helped thwart the secession attempt.

That war is captured in a moving way in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s excellent novel, Half of a Yellow Sun

Across the continent, in the East African nation of Kenya, wannabe President William Ruto is proving to be someone who shares the affliction of the Zumas and Buharis of this world. In remarks he made while on the campaign trail this month that sparked a good deal of beef, he said: “We have a market in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). These people . . . are just singers. There is a population of about 90-million, but they don’t own a single cow.”

His description of the Congolese as musicians, and as high-waist trouser wearers, did not go down well with many in the DRC, and both Ruto and the Kenyan ambassador in Kinshasa were forced to issue public apologies.

The point Ruto was trying to drive home was that, should he be elected President in elections due in August, his government would invest heavily in livestock, enabling farmers to export beef to markets as far afield as the DRC. But the packaging of that message left a lot to be desired.

Ruto currently serves as Vice President of Kenya.

African political leaders don’t have a monopoly on delivering howlers that send their compatriots blushing. This happens even in the developed countries in the West. Former US President Donald Trump was a past master at that. I could write column centimetre upon column centimetre about him. Across the border, in Canada, the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, infamously handled a female reporter inappropriately years back and reportedly told her a few days later: “I’m sorry; if I had known that you were reporting for a national newspaper, I would never have been so forward.”