How Leadership Fails Nigeria
Hope for good governance and good leadership in Nigeria seems to be an increasingly distant confidence. What happens if the leadership does not take the citizenry forward, along the paths of development? Growth and flourishing in the country will either stagnate or regress backwards, both in time and in comparison, to other societies. Moving backwards in this sense is indeed “decivilisation.” Nigeria is becoming a largely de-civilised nation; sliding backwards in both modern and traditional senses because its decay and dysfunction are profitable to the leaders. We have all factors of production of world-class development bar management.
AS IT IS
Leadership from the federal to local government levels in Nigeria appears to have attained a well-buffered and stable equilibrium fixed on corruption. This unfortunate equilibrium breeds two tragedies in the Nigerian polity that is ever-underestimated and creates the foundations for the continuous social castration of the nation and its citizens.
The first is that of “having a good leader surrounded by self-serving evil men”. May I call this resignation of expectation the “first curse of Nigeria”. Nigeria is due time for a leader who, without effort, surrounds himself with able and conscientious persons. People who can, with success and vision, coordinate and implement governance responsibilities the leader bestows upon them.
The second curse is the public perception held by supporters and followers that the leader is “trying”. “Do or do not, there is no trying” is a quote of wisdom from Yoda in Empire Strikes Back. We hail derisory and showy attempts by leaders at implementing policies and projects as outstanding achievements, not their completion – there are too few completed things to hail. This is a key reason we tolerate governance failure and mediocrity as Nigerians with ease. And is reason why the country’s political terrain is host to countless abandoned projects and failed policies.
When a society has a leadership crisis, it also has a governance crisis; leadership and governance are inseparable conjugates.
The present government under President Muhammadu Buhari has plagues and various governance crises despite his lofty promises of “change.” The worst crisis is the feeble handling of corruption that so decivilises Nigeria. Food shortages, runaway inflation, multiple insurgencies, decimated livelihoods. And high crime rates, extra-judicial killing, increasing pollution and ecocide. Or growing unemployment and worsening corruption. These problems the President manages with ineptitude and without an enforceable brand of leadership. There is too much cacamuvence in the land. Nigeria’s institutions are undergoing deactivation.
Many have claimed that change and anti-corruption, as Buhari promised it, takes times to attain success. However, when a government undertakes institutional change with success, it must comprise short-, medium- and long-term goals and expectations on the back of a thorough timetable of actions and outcomes.
How change works in a practical sense is that if the government achieves its short-term goals, citizens will believe that it will also achieve its medium-term goals. And if this too succeeds, then they believe in the government’s long-term goals. This is how governments foster patience and endurance for their governance among citizens. It is how leaders carry their citizens along.
Change is incremental in not only the impact but the confidence citizens have in it. Nevertheless, it appears the government has no schedule or structure for its goals. Nor its own belief in change enough to attempt, communicate or fulfil it in the present government. And how does Buhari’s administration respond to or solve these problems? “Blamocracy”.
Blamocracy is “governance by rulers blaming others for their own government’s failures”. As a onetime UK Prime Minister, Lord Balfour, once declared, “Democracy is government by persuasion.” When the current Nigerian government cannot persuade, it blames. The government is supposedly on its terms not to blame for anything happening under its watch at all. They blamed every governance failure or crisis on the preceding government of Goodluck Jonathan and virtually everyone else it can. The government even blames its own security agents at the borders whom they employ for the high prices of goods in the country. From another perspective, blamocracy is a well-orchestrated public relations approach to attacking and destroying any credible voices that are critical of the ever-blundering government.
WHAT SHOULD BE
In research, I undertook on institutional failure in Nigeria since the return to democracy. The results are robust in indicating that two institutions dominate, (a) the Presidency and (b) the public relations arm of the government. These are the most enforceable and least obstructed institutions in the governance of Nigeria. Their existence is where the potency of governance lies. What is the president doing with his unobstructed powers? And why is he blaming the powerless out-of-power predecessors for his government failures? Blamocracy as the de facto mode of governance is a highly misplaced practice. It is a disaster.
We have a government that loses the trust of the polity with a routine plethora of blame casts on others. At the same time, it pleads for sympathy from that same polity? It shamelessly takes credit for the work of predecessors? Is this governance folly or governance incapacity?
Notwithstanding, in my conception of leadership, I encourage people to ask what leadership is and what we expect it to produce? From an institutional perspective, leadership in a visible sense is the capacity (a) to with savvy and success resolve an existing crisis when one assumes power over a domain. Or one the leader encounters after winning power. (b) Maintain the desirable standards of governance and government success in existence before the person assumes power. (c) Create (if one does not exist) or better an existing good governance apparatus, by enforcing the strength of institutions!
On the less visible side, leadership is about the successful coordination and delegation of governance duties to the relevant agent. Such never happens in any consistent or constant form in Nigerian governance. Flagrant nepotism, co-option, logrolling undermines such a virtue. It is good to see civil society groups encouraging voters to hold elected officials to account, but it may be just another approach to rent-seeking.
I also frame three kinds of leaders in public governance, the leadership triad. Namely, foundational leaders, delegated leaders, and terminal leaders. The foundation leader is a founder, pioneer or creator of a jurisdiction, e.g. independent Nigeria. In post-colonial Nigeria, the most prominent founding leaders are Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello. The colonial government convicted all three of them for financial corruption at some stage in their public service careers. Consequently, what should we expect of leaders that came after them? The founding leaders had vast influence in their respective regions, even to this day. We cannot underestimate the influence of “leadership by example” or “leadership by precedence”.
Nigeria’s decivilisation, thus, began before independence.
Successive leaders with rare exceptions have never in sincerity attempted to correct the corruption explicit in the Nigeria government since the Founding Fathers. Those who attempt to do it never could last long in office.
The terminal leader is the chief executive of a political jurisdiction that is well-established. Such a person is the culmination of the outcomes of the adventures of foundational leaders. In the political structure of Nigeria, these terminal leaders are the president of the federal republic, the governors of states and the chairpersons of local government authorities. Nigeria is the bakery which makes the “national cake.” The cake that public servants and politicians steal or share as the terminal leader pleases. The typical challenges of modern or traditional political leadership are not their mission, it is beyond the remit of their path-dependent aspirations.The acquisition of power for the stomach’s sake is their principal mission.
Terminal leadership is an ultimate prize for the “ambitious”. This is best exemplified in the emergence of Gubernatocrats in Nigeria. Gubernatocracy, is the rule of Nigeria at the federal level by ex-governors who have stolen vast amounts of money from their states’ treasuries. Therefore, they can buy lots of political power at the national level.
Gubernatocrats-turned-Senators now partly rule Nigeria with impunity. The senators make obvious how they invert the Rule of Law to decivilise Nigeria. The senators do such by manipulating legislation to protect corrupt practices for self-interest’s sake. Former military leaders were just the same, but did it without collective bargaining set by rule books. So where does the “call to serve” the public interest come into play? Nowhere. Responding to the call to serve is often an acceptance of a call to steal.
Next are the delegated leaders, who are those heads and executives of public organisations and institutions. They implement policies, programs, and projects that terminal leaders determine, fund, or expect. A delegated leader is not an actual follower. The person is but a leader in his or her own right because of their governance, responsibility, authority, and position. Even if the person is not at the top of the national leadership hierarchy.
Accordingly, the delegated leader is the permanent secretary, minister of state, commissioner, medical director of a general hospital, principal of a secondary school. Or the director-general of a parastatal, the general manager of a state-owned farm, the judge of a court, a commanding officer in the military or the police force. And ambassador, vice chancellor, head of department, or director. I also include the deputies of delegated leaders. These delegated leaders have duties to deliver adequate education, security, healthcare, food, law and order, infrastructure, etc. to citizen on behalf of terminal leaders.
Unfortunately, delegated leadership positions of the so-called “civil servants” are often sinecures offered as rents and favours. The basis of the sinecures can be rewards for ethnic, territorial, religious, familial, school ties, and work ties relationships. They may bring outsiders in as compromise candidates when conflicts arise over favourites for the job. Therefore, delegated leaders serve the interest of the patrons who put them in office over those of the government or public interests. Theft, not administration, becomes the goal of the delegated leader.
The delegated leader is just as guilty of the misgovernance in Nigeria as the terminal leader. They both castrate Nigeria’s economic, social, and political life by sacrificing the public good.
Amazingly, it is a truism that most Nigerians worry little about leaders taking care of their self-interests in so far as they meet the demands of the public interest. This is where the popular saying in Nigeria emerges, “You can eat government money while in office but do not eat too much”. What a national delusion! The question then arises, what is too much? Yet, this pertains more to the delegated leader than terminal leaders. Such is not an anomaly.
It is worthy to note only General Murtala Mohammed (1975-1976) as head of state has ever attempted to correct the crisis of delegated leadership and institutions present in the Nigerian government. Olusegun Obasanjo (1999-2007) as a civilian president tried to systematically disempower the delegated leader in the civil service mainly by exclusion, but it did not work and required excessive micromanagement to achieve minor results. Without delegated leaders no political system can work; government failure abounds. This delegated leadership problem should be the focus of the terminal leaders, assuming they have the political will to do things right. The evidence always shows that they do not and this they cannot be blame away.
We will have to wait for the post-Buhari-era for the possibility of the kind of leadership and institutions most hope will make Nigeria what we and the outside world expect it to be.
Grimot Nane