When you are President, be wary of those who hang around you and amplify the beauty and perfection in every word you say and every action you contemplate. They are subtle and deliberate and their antics are hard to detect.
At first you are full of humility and fired-up with the determination to give a good account of the opportunity to occupy such an exalted position, especially if you got to it through barely nothing more than luck. And to help you accomplish that is a team of advisers and foot soldiers whose job is to protect your office and guide your policy direction. They are always lovely people whose first duty is to make you feel good.
Many of these people have spent a long time in the corridors of power. They have worked with people who have been there before you and you need their experience and expertise. I call them the angels and demons of power. Like a knife that either cuts you or serves you if you grab it by the blade or by the handle, these people are angels and demons rolled into one and the side they offer to you depends on that which your personality activates. I will however, focus on the demons.
While you are settling down to the duties of your office and trying to adjust to the reality of sudden power, they are studying you. They are soft and cautious at this stage and so are your decisions and policies which give you a semblance of a humble and listening President. They encourage you to celebrate the success of your starting off on a sparkling note and as you click glasses with them, they drop little praises on you which endear them to your heart and builds your trust in them. The little achievements continue for a short while and the praises double with each milestone. The praises are an intoxicant whose effect is slow but insidious, especially on a little mind and a heart that is more sympathetic to its vanities than its virtue.
If you are not prepared to be president and you do not have the natural wisdom to keep up with the heavy responsibilities, at least a strong character will save your mind. If you lack on both fronts, you surely lose it to the intoxicant of these demons of power. They make you feel so good about yourself that the vanities of your heart are fully activated. They fuel them with more praise and give you the courage to tread daring routes that they manufacture and lead you through. Soon your entire psyche is overtaken by delusion and an exaggerated opinion of yourself. You become so large that you feel immortal, infallible and strong enough to challenge even God the Almighty. They convince you that all that should preoccupy your mind is how to retain your power and such considerations as integrity, selfless-service and good governance are trivialities which will interrupt the tasty feel of your precious power.
At this point, the ride with power becomes bumpy and charged as your decisions are hasty and nasty. You are in a hurry to amass personal wealth and expand the frontiers of your control as President and commander-in-chief. Everything moves so fast and you’re too excited to slow down. Your tactics of exploiting the people become crude and daring. The demons enjoy the adventure and they clap and urge you on, intoxicated as you too are, by their own ingenuity. Reality fades away from your mind and you take on a courage that amazes and excites you. Your initial cowardly humility is gone and the people begin to wonder what has happened to their President. They feel shortchanged by your pretense to be a humble man with the humblest of beginnings and begin to revolt. But you see and feel nothing other than your power to subdue them. You are God, how dare they challenge your authority? How dare they say you have made mistakes? How dare they accuse you or your angels of corruption when all the wealth and resources are yours and you give only to whom you have mercy on? Don’t their bibles tell them that the Lord shows mercy on whom he wills to show mercy on? You determine to make them pay for it.
The reality though is that you have been successfully programmed to self-destruct and your most dominant emotion is desperation and it attracts conditions that make you the more desperate with each day that passes. You take a desperate step and it leads you to a humiliating outcome. Out of desperate anger, you try to remedy it and the outcome is worse. The signs become visible to everyone, including those very people around you, that you have lost it and everybody sees it but you. You have been possessed and your eyes see only what your possessors want you to see. Those folks have seen many Presidents come like you did and gone in pieces and you will be no different. You will leave with the shame and they will remain and lie in wait for the next man.
There are not many leaders in the entire history of humanity who got this low and were able to rise. It is a point of no return and the lucky few who reached it and survived were those whose character was strong enough to rise to their rescue at the last stroke and urge them to repentance. Even at that, they were buoyed by a strong system that was apart from the leader and in itself, offered a lot that they could draw from and be saved. In the case of Nigeria, the President is the system and once he looses it, there is nothing to hold him from sinking. He has only one way to go, which is down.
This fate has befallen many leaders in history, including those that were genuinely men of immense character, integrity and of good conscience. Some because they recorded so much success and failed to realise the moment to walk away. They held on for too long until their grace ran out of supply. Others because they became too confident in themselves and careless in the decisions they made. Their ultimate failure however, was that they allowed the demons of power to take possession of their hearts.
The lesson from it all is that power is extremely delicate and no matter the quantity and nature of it, its qualities are the same, with all the opportunities and attendant risks. Be it political power, financial capability or celebrity status, eternal vigilance is the price one must pay to ensure the end of their reign is as glorious as the beginning and brighter than their best moments.
A President who in the first instance is incompetent and then lacking in the character of a truly great leader does not need the demons of power to corrupt him because he is one himself, he only invites them to a party and you see that through the kind of people he courts and invites to come and work with him.
When you are President, it is important to understand that there are demons of power who could corrupt you and it is also important to know that if you are a demon of power yourself, your inevitable end is on the roll where men like Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Sani Abacha etc have their names scribbled in bold letters of shame; it is in no way going to be glorious. However long it takes to come, it is tragic, it is soon and it is now.
Iyorngurum is a writer, poet, editor, commentator on public issues and the secretary of the Abuja Writers’ Forum. He writes from Abuja.
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