Leadership and poor governance

Today we return to an old issue: the question of ineffective leadership and poor governance culture plaguing our country. It is not an entirely new matter and in fact it has been an issue even before our dear country got independence on October 1, 1960.

Discord, disorder and conflicts came from the malaise of leadership deficit and dysfunction. We have severally praised our founding fathers for supposed sacrifices they made, but many who have  undertaken critical reviews of our  development trajectory from the point of statehood have refrained from saying one truth that possesses the capacity to propel our development in the right direction and at a quick pace. The hidden truth is that the main members of that leadership class weren’t equipped for the roles they put themselves forward to play. More than two thirds of the class were ethnic bigots with stunted vision. Even now at a time leadership in other parts of the world are driving their countries on frontiers beyond nation building and provision of basic necessities of life, we are still grappling with the foundational task of founding a country. We must get this very clear: countries are “founded”

This is the foundation our forebears failed to lay and for those who don’t know it is the albatross that is making life and development very difficult. When the foundation of an edifice isn’t strong the danger hangs over the head of every occupant like the sword of Damocles. This is what is happening to us.

The lack of patriotism, unity and sense of ownership are traceable to the omission identified earlier. The foundation is the sickness and the symptoms are the visible challenges we see in the form of high level of induced insecurity, absence of sound organization, lack of vision, unemployment, food insecurity, huge debt profile, virtually no efforts to step into the industrial age, epileptic electricity supply and large numbers of citizens buffeted by diseases and stress.

It was American literary scholar James Baldwin who said, “Those who shut their eyes to reality invite their own destruction.” Baldwin may have had our country in mind when he spoke his words of great wisdom. Our country’s leadership hasn’t in any era met our expectations. If at any time they did perhaps there would have been some standards established but unfortunately there isn’t any and the failure has kept us running on the long discredited path of religion and tribalism leaving us with procedures and processes anchored on mediocrity.

Nigerians have come to a point so many of us agree things have gone real bad. The truth is as you are reading this, there’s this palpable fear that except urgent steps are taken, the country might once again move from bad to worse and that has prompted so many analyses around the question: what really is the trouble with Nigeria? Could it be we are too large to stand as one entity or it could be the finances we had weren’t enough to push development in the right direction? It has nothing to do with money. It is more about the human element.

The truth is the leadership class has questionable pedigree. A controversial position yet very true. As already observed, the majority of those that beat our sifting net to get it don’t have what it takes to lead a country in search of development in the 21st century. Professor Chinua Achebe puts the issue in very clear terms. He said: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.”

We agree and insist this is beyond arguments. Come to think of it, no system of human governance is so bad that  if operated by noblemen it won’t work. At a time in history the western countries led the rest of the world to make so much issue out of dictatorship and tyranny. It got to a point where the world equated the system with all that is evil; but today the same world has good examples where dictatorship assisted countries to overcome backwardness. China is a good example. This is not to justify tyranny in any form but to bring the place of the human element in progressive organization of society.

Many blame the adoption of democracy and tell us it is alien to our culture. Recently, we have heard very eminent personalities like General Olusegun Obasanjo who himself ruled this country for all of twenty years demand we change the system for something near our experience. Some say the presidential system is responsible.

  The question then would be: is there a democratic principle which requires the powerful to hinder massive participation of the citizens in the governance process and in particular the electoral system? Any such provision? Key political players in our case form the political parties, choose the leadership and dictate what happens, who gets what, when and under what conditions. Internal democracy in the political parties is dead and the remains that no democratic ethics prescribes should be. None. Except for the 1992  general election no election conducted in the country has received acknowledgement as free and fair, yet leaders emerged.

Few days ago a major political player, Buba Galadima speaking on national television had this to say about the country’s leadership recruitment process. “Some of us who recruited Buhari had a mission. And I will reveal that mission today. General Buhari came into politics. It was not his province. He never liked the politicians because he believed we are fake and that we do not mean what we say.

But there was an incident that made some of us recruit him, convince him, and use other people to convince him to join politics, even though we had our own agenda.

In 1999 and 2000, the Odua People’s Congress (OPC) was on a rampage in some parts of the country, especially the South West, and had inconvenienced a lot of people from this part of the country to the extent that they mobilized over 500 vehicles to come and invade Ilorin with the sole aim of uprooting what they called Fulani structures in Ilorin.

We felt that was too much, and President Obasanjo was doing nothing. President Bola Tinubu, then Governor of Lagos, was doing nothing. And some of us felt that those groups of people were being encouraged by their leaders in positions of authority. So how do we stop that?

I called a meeting in Kaduna, about 34 of us, and we sat down to reason. How do we save our people from this OPC menace?

I suggested that we have to, because you remove a government through only two ways. The barrel of the gun and through the ballot box. And they said it was impossible to challenge General Obasanjo. That was how Buhari came to our mind.

And when he was approached, he had very unkind words for politicians. But since he did not say he was not doing it, we still persuaded him.

To cut a long story short, we achieved our first purpose of putting a brake on what the OPC was doing. Immediately Buhari joined partisan politics, we had a very big outing to initiate him into politics. The Obasanjo government became restive and was shaken to its bone marrow. Obasanjo had to really checkmate the OPC. So, for that reason, we achieved our first purpose of bringing General Buhari into partisan politics. The remaining now is history.”

The objective is clear and the motive disclosed. Where is the national interest in all of what Galadima disclosed? What are the big visions and thoughts that drive modern development? Does anyone still wonder why the reign of bad governance still remains very solid and appealing?

As we conclude, the culture of poor leadership qualities has brought us harm, that much we can see for ourselves. It has brought indignity and turned us into a butt for jokes across the world. President Robert Mugabe before left us with an instructive jab which some of us think should make us ponder.

He described our country as a paradox: “Nigeria is a nation of 190 million people with roughly 30,000 professors, 150,000 PHD holders, 1 million Masters degree holders,70 million primary and secondary school certificate holders, proudly led into the digital era by a leader who can’t find his primary and secondary school certificates.” Some insist you don’t undergo tutorship to lead, this kind of thinking has no place in the modern world and that’s the truth.

The world is waiting for Nigeria to set the entire Africa on a new positive path of transformation. Nelson Mandela before he died told us this much. Professor Patrice Lumumba, a very political lecturer in Kenya has said this truth to our face. We don’t even need outsiders to tell us finding new leadership models is what we require most. How would it come? Is it by trial and error as is the case or by deliberate resolve and relevant exertions? 

Martin Luther King told us:  “Freedom is not freely given by the oppressor class. It is demanded by the people.” Are you ready? The choice is ours to make.