“My own definition of leadership is this: The capacity and the will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence.” — General Montgomery.
There hardly can be a more apt definition of leadership than the one proffered above, and when you think of leadership in the above context, you realize just how desperately our country needs to be led in the wake of its growing challenges.
It is a common perception that Nigeria’s key problem is corruption and the current administration of President Muhammadu Buhari had rode to power on the high horse of anti-corruption. Indeed, he is now fighting corruption. Although we could argue with his approach, which for many is nothing short of witch-hunt, but we will agree that there is an anti-corruption war going on.
Yet, the irony of it all is that things are getting more difficult for the average Nigerian. Indeed, while Buhari is beating his chest and gloating over the amount of loot he had recovered, and how those who participated in the loot were now living in regret, the reality on ground is that kwashiorkor is making a triumphant return, the poor masses have not had it so bad in recent years.
My submission is that we have been through this road before; it led to nowhere and will not lead to anywhere even today. Nigeria’s key challenge is not corruption, it is lack of leadership. It is this leadership that Buhari is failing to provide… and this failure is rather woeful.
The average supporter of the administration hopes that once corruption is killed, Nigeria will get better, hence the popular assertion: ‘We must kill corruption before corruption kills us’. For a fact, you cannot kill corruption; you can only checkmate it by building strong institutions. I will come back to this later, for now, let me dwell on the president’s poor leadership skills and how it is hurting the country.
The 2015 general election was the most bitterly, divisive and tensely contested election in the nation’s recent history. It exposed more than ever before, the country’s fault lines of ethnicity and religion. It was indeed a miracle that we emerged from that election without sliding into a major crisis.
Having overcome the worst, the only sane thing a government that emerged in that circumstance could have done was to begin a healing process. To strive to bring a divided nation together, to have us all singing in unison – a condition that was required for any progress to be made going forward.
Sadly, the new president became the exact opposite of what the country needed. A country that needs unity got a president who is hell bent on dividing it; a country whose economy was on red alert got a president who believes that hounding people to prison and ‘recovering loot’ was the best way to grow the economy.
Come with me; Buhari had, in his inaugural speech, declared that he belongs to nobody, and at the same time, he belongs to everybody. This was what everyone wanted to hear. Indeed, it was pleasing to the ear. But it did not take long for Nigerians to realize that Buhari was only reading a prepared speech, and not his own mind.
The president would eventually declare, when he had no speech to read, and from the bottom of his heart, that those who gave him 5 percent of votes should not expect to be treated in the same manner as those who gave him 95 percent. This, to him, was only “politically fair”.
This was when it would have dawned on any reasonable person that Nigeria was in trouble. The president had failed in his first real test of leadership. He effectively declared that he would favour his own people to the detriment of others. He has not looked back since then. Presently, Northerners are in charge of virtually all the security apparatus in the country, Northerners are heads of almost all parastatals and are indeed the bulk of his kitchen cabinet.
But that’s not the worst case scenario; the president also seems to think that non-Fulani lives matter less. This explains the massacre of hundreds of unarmed pro-Biafra protesters in the South East, the murder and mass burial of Shi’ites in Kaduna as well as the continued confrontational stance on Niger Delta crises while the Fulani Herdsmen are free to kill, maim and butcher other Nigerians across the country. Till today, no one has been held to account while the mass killings have continued. The president didn’t even make mention of it in his Democracy Day speech. Truly, this is unfortunate.
But to his core supporters, Buhari can do no wrong. One way or another, his action must be justified, no matter how unreasonable the reasons adduced as justification is. For instance, when the president virtually excluded the South East and South South from his kitchen cabinet, his defenders said he was right to work with people he could trust. These people failed to see, however, either out of myopia or utter mischief, that people like Ogbonnaya Onu had been with Buhari all along, in fact longer than most of “his own people”; Rotimi Amaechi snubbed Goodluck Jonathan who is from the same zone as himself and heavily sponsored Buhari. There were many others like that, yet Buhari couldn’t trust them enough for his kitchen cabinet. They are only good enough as ministers, which you could argue was because he was constitutionally compelled to name ministers from every state.
Not minding the level of criticisms that has continued to greet his apparent neglect of the South, Buhari capped it all by removing Ibe Kachikwu as the GMD of NNPC and replacing him with yet another Northerner. Again, he had to retire over 20 senior officers from the police force to enable him appoint a Northerner as IG of police, thus setting a dangerous precedence in that regard.
The above is, to say the least, insensitive. This is the same Kachikwu who, more than any government official, was working hard to appease the restive youths in the Niger Delta.
In reality though, one must admit that these appointments have little or no effect on the life of an average person in the street, but it sends the wrong message. It portrays the president as overly clannish, and it is dangerous for a polarised country like ours.
Somehow, one has to say that a country gets the kind of leadership it deserves. This is so of Nigeria. A country of civilized citizenry gets civilized leadership and vise versa.
It was in the build up to the last election that respected Kaduna based cleric, Sheikh Ahmed Gumi penned two scathing letters to both the then incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan and Buhari, advising both men to shelve their presidential ambitions in the interest of peace and stability of the nation. You could say he incurred the wrath of the nation, ‘privilileged experts’ who knew better wrote rejoinders on the pages of newspapers. Others even attempted to kill him, but as it turns out, the Sheikh was right about Buhari.
Let me reproduce a few lines from that noble letter.
“The prophet -peace be upon him- told one of the most honest and truthful of his companions Abu Zar Algafary: ‘oh Abu Zar, I truly love for you what I love for myself. I indeed see that you are weak so never accept to lead even two people and never accept safekeeping of the orphans wealth’ An honest and candid advice from the prophet that is still valid today for any leader who’s weakness borders on leadership qualities.
The reason for Abu Zar’s weakness has nothing to do with his credibility or truthfulness. Never! The prophet was narrated as saying: “there is nobody under the shadows of trees or bare sun that is more honest in speech than Abu Zar’ Abu Zar – May Allah be pleased with him- is ascetic and inmaterialistic. Abu Zar is incorruptible. And yet he is not suitable for leadership.
‘Your obsession and philosophy of fighting corruption is not the priority of Nigeria today. What Nigeria needs utmost now is peace and stability. This can only be achieved when the religious ethnic and regional divide is tamed. What Nigeria needs utmost now is peace and stability. This can only be achieved when the religious ethnic and regional divide is tamed. And you can only tame it with people without much precedence. People without much following; Yet people, that are constructive and have the ability to control men.
‘My Brother in Islam (Buhari), please listen to the words of wisdom. And don’t follow the whims of the riff raff. Before they used you the first time to disrupt the second republic, my father advised you against it. Today I am also advising you against contesting in the 2015 presidential elections because you will be used to ignite the nation –a dream well orchestrated several years ago- and also be used by bad people as a ladder to grab regional and local powers.”
You couldn’t say that the Sheikh by this submission was not a man who saw today yesterday. But President Buhari to his supporters is a god… that way, reason is relegated to the backyard, and faith and fanatism takes front seat. A god, whatever he does is right. There is no room for corrective criticisms. I recall Professor Charles Soludo writing an interesting piece titled ‘Can the New Buharinomics Save Nigeria?’; at the very beginning of the ongoing economic quagmire. He had noted among other things, that pegging the Naira was not healthy for the economy, and that the prevailing economic challenges then could not be entirely attributed to fall in oil price.
But Soludo committed the same offence as the Sheikh…daring to challenge a god. He has since realized that mistake and consequently disappeared into thin air. Sadly, these are people whose ideas the government desperately needs.
Of a truth, the country cannot make progress this way. First, no leader can lead successfully by alienating some of the lead. A leader must be able to make everyone of the led to feel loved, wanted and special.
To achieve this is not difficult; it simply requires emotional intelligence, flexibility and creativity. There is hunger in the land, but there is difference between a hungry child who believe that his father is working hard to find food for him and a hungry child who believe that his father doesn’t care or hates him altogether. Nigerians are Buhari’s children, while things are tough, he must treat everyone with love, he must shun confrontational stance against any group, he must be fair to all, but most importantly, he must lead.
When a nation rallies around its leadership, things happen. They jump when the leader jumps. Adolf Hitler, as bad as he was able to rally the German nation around him, not by coercion, but by convincing them that they were better than everyone else. He made Germans feel proud by the power of the tongue. However, when you begin to create disaffection, it is dangerous. When you begin to give a feeling of insensitivity, things go wrong. It took only a casual response by Queen Marie Antoinette, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” (let them eat cake) when there were complaints that bread had become too expensive to trigger the French Revolution.
I must commend the president, however, for having consistently admitted knowledge of people’s suffering hardships today, but he must do well to caution his spokespersons who nonchalantly say that only few Nigerians are complaining, or who attribute every complaint to “the wailing wailers.” There is a lesson or two to be learned here.
In conclusion, let me say that wise people read critics and take corrections, unwise ones hound critics to prison thinking that problems will disappear when there are no longer people who point out that they exist.
Ezugwu, a graduate of Mass Communication, can be reached through: ezugupatricko@gmail.com
Comments