I find it hard to reconcile the
megalomania that abounds in Nigeria with the abundant evidence of the
unpredictability of human existence.
I’ll explain.
Earlier this year, I spotted an
ex-governor at the Abuja airport. We had come off the same flight and he
was walking towards the car park, unaccompanied. I walked up to him to
say hello, trying to imagine what might be going through Mr.
ex-governor’s mind. Did he ever recall his days as governor, the
entourage that’d have been waiting for him at the airport in Abuja, the
ride to town in a siren-laden convoy designed to run everyone else off
the road? Did he ever think to himself what things he’d have done
differently as governor?
There’s, of course, an even more striking
example of life’s unpredictability: That of a man called Goodluck
Jonathan. If there had been a list of powerful deputy governors in
Nigeria at the start of 2005, he wouldn’t have been on it.
But hey, human existence thrives on
mischievous levels of unpredictability. Without seeking promotion, by
the end of that year, Mr. Jonathan was Governor! It didn’t end there.
Barely two years later, he was a Vice-President, again without seeking
it. It still didn’t end there. In 2008, the United States compiled a
confidential list of the most influential Nigerians. Even as
Vice-President, Jonathan failed to make that list. In the scheme of all
things Nigerian, he really didn’t count much. Yet it didn’t end there
either. Fast-forward four years, and that same man makes it onto Time
Magazine’s list of most influential persons in the world.
And that story is not over, it’s still being written. Such is life. Dramatic reversals, intriguing unpredictability.
Now, you’d expect that, faced with this
sort of unpredictability, people would go into public office firmly
aware of the responsibility they have to make the best use of the
opportunity granted them: By acting as fairly and wisely as they can,
utilising public funds as wisely and judiciously as possible; treating
the people they rule with dignity.
But no. That’s not how things typically
play out. Nigerians in political offices too easily assume themselves
gods – possessing all wisdom, deserving of all worship and adulation,
undeserving of any criticism, entitled to sacrifice public funds in
self-worship.
It leaves me puzzled. What is it that
makes us as Nigerians so liable to viewing power solely through prisms
of egotism and self-enrichment and self-aggrandisement?
I was at an event a few days ago, where
Ekiti Governor Kayode Fayemi lamented how Nigerians have come to
“associate power and authority with intimidation and harassment”, and
highlighted the need to urgently “demystify” political office.
Perhaps, Fayemi’s stance is based on an
understanding of the unpredictability I referred to at the beginning of
this piece. At that event he also recounted how, until Sani Abacha’s
death in 1998, he (Fayemi) was deemed a “persona non grata” by the
Nigerian government, because of his involvement with the National
Democratic Coalition and Radio Kudirat. Today, things have
changed; the man hounded by yesterday’s government is a now prominent
member of today’s. I have a copy of Fayemi’s account of the Nigerian
pro-democracy struggle, and always find myself fascinated by the
pictures of his life in London in the early nineties, when he was a
placard-carrying activist and struggling PhD student. It leaves me
wondering to what extent his views on the need to demystify political
office in Nigeria are fed by his recollections of those inauspicious
beginnings in London two decades ago, and by his realisation that no one
is a governor forever.
There are important questions we all need to answer about this Big-Manism thing:
Is it the nature of political power to remake people? How does that
work – is it by disconnecting people from the realities of past and
present life? Does it fill people up with a sense of their own
importance, and of the absolute insignificance of everybody else, to
such an extent that commonsense is crowded out?
We’ve all seen Nigerians who got into
political power and mutated into strange creatures, acting like the
power they wielded would always be their birthright, defended the
indefensible, picked needless battles against the people on whose side
they once appeared to be. We’ve all seen supposedly ‘humble’ people get
into office and turned into walking advertisements for megalomania; and
once sensible people acquired reputations for spouting nonsense.
How, for example, does a President
Goodluck Jonathan who stoically bore the brunt of the turmoil
surrounding the late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s illness would go ahead
to put Nigeria through the same style of deception over the health of
his wife? Did Nigerians resist one oppressive state of affairs only to
have the beneficiaries of that resistance replace the oppressors?
Worsening the state of affairs is the
shocking acquiescence by the majority of the governed, especially the
middle class. Let’s for a second leave Nigeria’s bottom-millions out of
this – let’s assume they don’t know any better, that they’re so
hamstrung by poverty to realise that they’re incapable of realising that
the people who should be empowering them to fish have perfected the art
of swindling them with meagre handouts of fish. What excuse does
Nigeria’s educated, enlightened middle class have for tolerating all the
nonsense we do? Do we underestimate the ability we have to influence
governance, to ‘terrify’ elected representatives into sensible-ness?
Every day, hundreds of Nigerians pass
through the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Ikeja, Lagos and are
subjected to the myriad humiliations cultivated within that space.
Without fail, we all complain and moan; shake our heads at how Nigeria
never fails to humiliate us. Sometimes, you get a raised voice or two.
But nothing really happens next. We’ve grown used to it – to the
dysfunction, and the complaining it triggers. And life goes on.
Perhaps, in tolerating, and sometimes aiding and abetting megalomania and vision-less Big-Manism
(which, by the way, always come Siamese-twinned with mediocrity), we
truly deserve our leaders. That’s definitely worth thinking about. Also
worth thinking about is this: the strong possibility that things will
never change for the better in Nigeria. In 2020, maybe, I will still be
here rehashing my columns from seven years before, wondering why Nigeria
is the way it is.
One more thing. I don’t want to sound
like I’m saying Nigeria requires saints in the corridors of power. There
are no saints anywhere. All of us, as human beings, are driven by some
level of self-interest, by a quest for personal significance. But there
is a clear difference between the kind of self-interest that can allow
itself to be subordinated to a clear vision of leadership and service,
and the one that merely seeks to self-satisfy.
The Action Group that did wonders with
the proceeds from cocoa in the defunct Western Region all those decades
ago wasn’t an assemblage of saints. I’ve read about panels of enquiry
set up to probe corrupt acts in those days – those men didn’t always
emerge with clean hands. But when it came to the larger picture –
matters of visionary goal-setting and a burning desire to bring real and
lasting improvement to the lives of citizens – they almost never failed
those tests. Obviously, the sinners of yesteryears will be saints to
those currently running the affairs of the nations.
Source (http://goo.gl/Jds2F)
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