As you all know, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the former president of the Central African Republic was an idiotic maniac.
Like many things everybody knows, this isn't
necessarily true. Brian Titley
has argued that there was method to Bokassa's madness and that his coronation and other grandiose gestures were an attempt to forge a national political identity in an area where such identities were historically ethnic and village-focused. I'm skeptical of Titley's thesis - among other things, Nyerere showed that it's possible to create a national identity in ways that
don't bankrupt one's country or involve mass murder - but it's always best to consider what Bokassa might have thought he was doing rather than dismissing it as bizarre.
Anyway, to improve Bokassa, you'd have to start with his grandfather, and I mean that literally. Bokassa was shaped by the conditions in what was then the colony of Ubangi-Shari during the 1920s, which was a horrific concessionaire colony along the lines of the Congo Free State. His father was killed by colonial authorities in an exceptionally brutal manner and his mother then committed suicide, after which he was educated by French clergymen, leading to his schizophrenic view of France as abusive parent that characterized his presidency and reign. Had his family not been brutalized, he might have grown up with a more balanced moral center and more belief in nonviolent methods of government and nation-building.
Also, even if a "better Bokassa" had sincerely wanted to improve the CAR, it would have been hard for him to succeed. The CAR was politically atomized even by regional standards - unlike many other parts of Africa, most of the CAR lacked precolonial state-level societies, its social structures had been disrupted by slave raids during the 19th century to the point where parts of the country were virtually depopulated, and its colonial experience was exceptionally brutal. Attempts to build infrastructure would run up against poverty and difficult terrain, and the fact that the CAR was a landlocked country meant that building an export economy (other than highly portable and expensive luxury goods such as diamonds) would have been virtually impossible. There are ways to develop a country like the CAR but those strategies weren't well understood in the 70s; at best, Better Bokassa would likely have run an "orthodox" IMF-financed import-substitution regime which would have rebounded on the country later as similar strategies did elsewhere.