PEOPLE

PEOPLE & POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Media Trust 1^st Annual Dialogue : The vindication of Achebe?

Over twenty years ago, Chinua Achebe, easily Nigeria’s best contribution to the world of literature, published his now famous collections of essays titled The Trouble with Nigeria, in which he concluded that the lack of good leadership was the bane of Nigeria’s progress.

“The trouble with Nigeria”, he said in the first of the six essays in the little book, “is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.” (Emphasis mine)

These immortal words of Achebe re-echoed through much of the proceedings of the 1^st Annual Dialogue organised last Thursday in Abuja by Media Trust Nigeria Limited, publishers of Daily Trust and Weekly Trust. The theme of the Dialogue was The Nigerian Question – The Way Forward. Six eminent Nigerian intellectuals and professionals – Professors Bolaji Akinyemi, Isawa Elaigwu and M. Ikejiani-Clark, Drs. Mahmud Tukur, Usman Bugaje and Mr. Kanu Agabi – presented papers on the topic. The papers were then discussed by the fairly large audience which consisted several prominent Nigerians including governors, legislators and leading politicians. The proceedings were chaired and moderated by the Most Reverend John Onaiyekan, the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja whose eloquence and wonderful sense of humour seem lately to attract organizers of such talk shows to him.

President Olusegun Obasanjo was absent as the Special Guest of Honour. Instead he sent his Minister of Information and National Orientation, the youthful and articulate Chief Chukwuemeka Chikelu to read his speech. Nigerians, said the president, in his speech, are an impatient lot. Soon enough, however, he showed he too was altogether not above this vice.

“The experience of our young democracy so far, he said, shows that we are still too impatient as a people and still too eager for quick results on matters that require long gestation periods”. Nigerians, he went on, want economic reforms, but distrust their leaders for embarking on same. They want the rule of law, he said, but find it difficult to accept the necessarily slow pace of justice. A little later on, however, the president betrayed his own impatience when he said, in effect, that Nigeria has remained a question for too long. “For how long”, he asked, “will Nigeria remain a question? When shall we move from the Nigerian question to the Nigerian answer?”

The consensus of the Media Trust Dialogue was that until we have a just and responsive leadership, we will never move from the Nigerian question to the Nigerian answer. The country, the Dialogue concluded, has not had such a just and responsive leadership for much of its existence.

Naturally, not all the paper presenters nor all the members of the audience looked at the day’s theme from this perspective of leadership. Professor Akinyemi argued that the answer to the Nigerian question lied in convening a Constitutional Conference a.k.a. the Sovereign National Conference. Akinyemi deployed his immense intellectual skills to debunk the various arguments made against convening such a conference, including the fears that the conference could lead to secession at worst or a divisive North/South dichotomy, at best.

Without prejudice to the merit or otherwise of Akinyemi’s advocacy of Constitutional Conference, one can state, without any fear of contradiction, that Nigeria’s basic problem is more attitudal than structural. No doubt Nigeria does have structural problems. For example, our Federation, if indeed it is a federation, is too top heavy – Professor Elaigwu called it a federation with a “suffocating centre” – and, with 36 states and 774 local government – and still counting – it has too many units – most of them arbitrary creations – consuming too much of our resources as administrative over-heads.

These and other structural problems can be addressed by Constitutional reforms. Akinyemi argued that the process of normal constitutional amendment is too incremental and inadequate to deal with many of these problems. Not so, said Chief Kanu Agabi who vehemently disagreed. “We shouldn’t waste time talking about the National Sovereign Conference. We don’t need it” he said.

Whatever the merits of these two opposite views, no one can deny that even the best of all constitutions cannot work without good faith among the people a constitution is meant for, in particular, good faith among its leadership.

This is why some of us have argued consistently that a Sovereign National Conference is a solution looking for problems. Since colonial times we have had some nine odd constitutional conferences. If we still do not seem to have got it right, it is reasonable to conclude that the problem is less with the outcomes of those conferences than with the bad faith with which we have implemented them.

When President Obasanjo wondered whether we will ever move from the Nigerian question to the Nigerian answer after over 43 years of asking that question, his impatient was not completely without justification. Forty-three years may be too early in the life of any nation to find the answers to all its key problems. Over two hundred years after America’s founding fathers established their union, questions are still being asked about equity and justice among the union’s classes, races, religions, regions and ethnic groups. Similar questions are also being asked in even much older unions like Britain, France, Germany, etc.

However, if 43 years is too early to find answers to all the fundamental questions facing a nation, it is not too early to find some of the answers to some of the questions, especially the more basic ones like national unity.

In this respect, possibly the happiest outcome of the Media Trust Dialogue was the unanimity among the paper presenters, lead by Akinyemi, that it is now safe to take Nigeria’s unity for granted. To use Akinyemi’s words, “Unless push comes to shove, secession is unactualizable in the present set-up”. This, as he rightly observed, is because it is, in the first place, wrong, historically speaking, to dismiss Nigeria as an arbitrary creation since its people have interacted with each other through trade and wars long before the advent of colonialists and, second, because since independence we have come to depend on each other so much that it is much more painful to break-up than to stick it out among ourselves.

Again 43 years is not too early for us to begin to find the right direction toward solving most, if not all, of our basic problems like those of security of life and property and of reliable and efficient infrastructure. That there is so much impatience among Nigerians for answers to these problems, is not really because Nigerians believe the problems are easy to fix, even though they will not be wrong to believe so. Afterall, at the time of their own independence, countries like Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan were no better off than we were 40 years ago. They shot past us into prosperity precisely because they had purposeful and committed leaders.

Anyway, if Nigerians seem impatient with their leaders it is not so much because they believe our problems are easily fixed. Rather it is because they see their leaders as worsening the decay in the system instead of arresting it as the first and necessary step of turning things around. Worse, they also see their leaders as preaching one thing but practicing the exact opposite.

It was Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, the governor of Kano State, who first put his finger on this question of leadership in his reaction to the day’s papers. Nigeria’s central problem, he said, as if echoing Achebe, is lack of a “responsible leadership”. Before him, all the other paper presenters, especially Drs. Mahmud Tukur, Usman Bugaje and Chief Kanu Agabi, had adverted to this problem, but it was Shekarau, who first shifted the focus of the day’s theme to it..

The most telling remark in this respect, however, was made by Chief Sunday Awoniyi, the new Chairman of Arewa Consultative Forum. Quoting the works of Shehu Usman Dan Fodio, the 19^th century Islamic reformer who founded Sokoto Caliphate, Awoniyi said (1), it was worse for a nation to be saddled with the wrong leadership than for 1,000 people to be killed, and (2), while a nation can endure without religion, it cannot do so without justice. Nigeria’s problem, he said, was that for a long while now it has lacked the right leadership that is capable of establishing a just and equitable rule.

However, while one agrees with the popular diagnosis of Nigeria’s basic ailment, as that of poor leadership, one must enter a very important caveat. Achebe’s conclusion that “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership”, may reflect the popular sentiment about our problems, but I don’t think those sentiments are 100% correct. True, when the head is sick the body cannot be healthy, but we do also have a serious problem of a proper definition of the head, or the leadership, if you will.

We all like to blame leadership for the problems of our society, but most, if not all, of us we often fail to realize that each and everyone of us is a leader in his own right. Certainly, anyone who is looked up to by even one other person has leadership responsibilities. All too often, however, we think of leaders as only those on top of the big and not-so-big heaps, especially those whom we elect or select to lead us.

To illustrate this point, I found it amusing that Chief Agabi, who now advises President Obasanjo on ethics, and who until recently, was our minister of justice, would pontificate over the problem of lack of leadership in our country. Leaders, he said, “must be like the doctor who tells his patience the truth”. When he was minister of justice he had the opportunity to practice what he preached when the National Assembly under Anyim Pius Anyim (Senate) and Umar Ghali Na’abba (House of Representative) overrode Obasanjo’s veto of the last electoral bill by insisting, albeit unreasonably, that all 2003 elections must be held in one day. Instead of Agabi advising Obasanjo that a “bad” law remains the law of the land all the same, unless overturned by the courts, he issued a statement saying his government would defy the law. I that heard from the grapevine that when a fellow lawyer reminded him that this was wrong, he replied that, well, that was what “Baba”, i.e. the boss, would like to hear.

Whether or not he said so, Agabi’s defiance of the National Assembly was clearly meant to please the boss even though he knew, more so as a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, that was not the right thing to do as a leader in his own right.

This is the crux of the problem of leadership in Nigeria : we all think everyone else but ourselves should carry the responsibilities of leadership. Our “leaders” in turn blame their followers for bad advice when things fail. And both the “leaders” and followers alike seem to forget that no one can change society or even his immediate environment, if he does not begin with himself. That is if he does not do his own bit for the unity and progress of his society or country, no matter how inconvenient the bit is.

No doubt the Nigerian question cannot be properly answered without addressing the structural problems facing the country, but by far the greater problem is that of attitude, especially the attitude of our leaders, whether they are political, business, religious, academic, or whatever.

Over 13 years ago when Bill Clinton first bid for office as president of the United States, he coined the now famous slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid”, to counter the attempt by his rival, President George Bush, the elder, to make his 1990 war on Iraq as an alleged threat to world peace the main campaign issue. After 43 years of phrasing and rephrasing the Nigerian question, we can safely rephrase Clinton as the answer to the question. We can, in other words, simply say that “It’s the attitude, stupid”.