By Dan Onwukwe
THERE is something quite disturbing about leadership recruitment and succession in Nigerian politics that should engage the attention of any keen observer of our politics. Undoubtedly, many things do not sit right. They can be summed up in one simple question: Why have our political leaders, become such a poor fit for the highest job in the land?
This is a question any student of power and leadership will grapple to find answer to. It also revolves around the nature of power, the complexity of ambition, and the role that the greater good can play in the making of a leader. The crass incompetence that we have seen in the present democratic dispensation is the worst it has been Nigeria’s misfortune to have in our political history.
Recently, respected Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Kukah provided a thought-provoking insight and a new interpretation of our present day cash-and-carry politics. He calls it “a cycle of accidental leaders”. Simply put, we currently have political leaders who never prepared for the job, but were forced upon us by accident of history.
Accidental leaders have no incisive intellect, no political insights that can lead to a prosperous modern society. They also lack the ability, the talent to renew hope that will bring about positive change. They have no success story to sell. Propaganda is their only unique selling point. As a result of their lack of vision, they don’t know exactly what to do with power they have ruthlessly accumulated.
Truth is, without a vision beyond a leader’s own personal advancement, that leader is most likely to run aground or paralyzed in the office once the goal had been achieved. Last year, Bishop Kukah, always not afraid to speak truth to power, reflected deeply on this leadership incompetence at the 4th Memorial Lecture of late Amaka Ndoma-Egba, wife of Sen.Ndoma-Egba(SAN), in Abuja.
According to him , accidental leadership has robbed Nigeria of its greatness. You can count the list of such accidental leaders. From late Chief Ernest Shonekan to Gen. Sani Abacha, Abdulsalami Abubakar, ex-presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari, and now, Bola Tinubu.
Kukah had argued that even Tinubu who claimed he was prepared and fit for the job has been “struggling to get off the ground”. Remember the Tinubu famous quote “it’s my turn”(’emilokan’). Accidental leaders end up as ‘do-nothing’ Presidents. Their record in governance is deficient . If you are still looking for the collateral risk that accidental leaders pose to their country, Lyndon B.Johnson(36th U.S. President) gave an apt description of the burden on both the leader and his country. LBJ (as he was fondly called), like our own Goodluck Jonathan, was the Vice President of United States until John F Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.
Thereafter, LBJ became president. This is what he said when he assumed office :”I took the oath, I became President. But for millions of Americans, I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper”. While Obasanjo was ‘begged’ to come contest for the presidency in 1999, Jonathan became president by accident, consummated by “doctrine of necessity”.
Almost all the aforementioned leaders didn’t know how to aggregate the citizens’ capabilities to achieve a single purpose. Despite, or perhaps because of their own fears of unpreparedness, practically none of them since 1999 had any real agenda to accomplish any significant thing that has positively impacted people’s lives. Their drive for power is inseparable from what they sought power for. It’s all style and no substance.
For Buhari and Tinubu in particular, the quest for the presidency was primarily pursued as a prize to be won, to use power to pursue parochial agenda, not a duty to be done. Again, to paraphrase Kukah, current Nigerian leaders behave like ‘drunken sailors’. For instance, Obasanjo as President, attempted, but failed to use the incumbency factor to give himself a Third-Term, contrary to the provisions of the constitution, though he denied it.
Jonathan as President felt insecure when what the country needed at the time was a leader of strong character and inner strength. Throughout his tenure, Jonathan was stodgy and undecided on exactly what to do to move the country forward. His successor, Buhari was perhaps the most unimaginative. He gave up very early. That’s why the country remains at the crossroads. Every successive government has become worse than the one it succeeded.
If in doubt, check their records. The picture that emerges from the above description is that of leaders for whom all human contacts had no purpose. That’s why Nigeria has had the misfortune of having presidents who define friendship in terms of a willingness to accommodate their ends. It’s the failure to first train the mind to understand and concentrate on what the job entails, and discard the frivolous and unimportant. That’s what ‘servant leadership’ entails. The presidency, it must be said, is not the office of ‘Baba Iyabo’ or Daddy ‘Seyi. It’s the most demanding job any one can give his or her brain. It’s not a family business.
Unfortunately, that’s what Nigerian leaders are making the office to look like. But governance is a human enterprise. It was Alexis de Tocqueville, an accomplished author on liberties of democratic nations who said, “democratic men are more apt to complete a number of undertakings in rapidity than to raise monuments of their achievements, they should care much more for success than for fame”.
That’s is not the case with our political leaders. None has come close to the true sense of the word, leader, that is, using great power for great purposes. As one writer said, some of “Nigerian leaders are driven by demons and those demons are real”. How true this is, I don’t know. What I know is that history has demonstrated that even the most shrewd President who fails to pay adequate attention to the needs of his country and its citizens might end up as a mere footnote in history. It is so because only accidental leaders look upon the acquisition of power and position as an end in itself.
Great leaders understand that the reality and scale of power are defined by the extent to which political power influences or dominate behaviour and conditions external to the man of authority. It’s likely that Nigeria’s leadership crisis will persist or even get worse. Bad leadership in Nigeria will continue as long as our political leaders continue eating crow, failing to admit that their lack of preparation for high offices is the reason for their abysmal performance.
Going forward, certain things must be done right. The first step, according to Robert A. Caro, American presidential historian, is to recognise that no leader can be great who does not know how to use power. Party structures which allow absolute loyalty must be dismantled because no opportunistic, manipulative and devious leader can make any desired impact in the absence of using power for the greater good.
All said, our political leaders need new tools and techniques to succeed in the present fast-changing domestic and external environment. The bottom line is: common purpose first, self-interest last.
