To lead or not to lead is really not the question

I have been reading a lot lately on African leadership.  I have followed debates on social media on this subject but felt I needed to delve deeper; I needed to go beyond the news, beyond the various opinions and actually look back to our history and find out if I will get any answers there. Well below is part of my feeble attempt to do just that.  

I do recognize, of course, that there are broadly three components to the equation for national development: system, leader, and followers. In an ideal world, each would mesh nicely and efficiently with the others. But quite clearly Nigeria is not in such a world, not even on the road to it. She seems in fact to be going in the opposite direction, towards a world of bad systems, bad leadership, and bad followership. The question then is, How do we redirect our steps in a hurry? In other words, where do we begin and have the best chance of success? To change the Nigerian system; to change the Nigerian leadership style; or to change the hearts of one hundred and twenty million Nigerians?

Proponents of the supremacy of system would argue that unless you have the right political-economic arrangement no good leader can emerge or survive and certainly no good followership can develop.

In my view the basic problem with efforts to bestow preeminence on systems is, however, their inability to explain how an abstract system can bring itself into being autonomously. Would it drop from the sky and operate itself? 

We need not spend too long on the argument for the preeminence of followers. It is enough to say that no known human enterprise has flourished on the basis of followers leading their leaders. The cliché that people get the leader they deserve is a useful exaggeration—useful because it reminds the general populace of the need for vigilance in selecting their leaders (where they have a chance to do so) and for keeping them under constant surveillance.

But to go beyond that and suggest, as one has often heard people do in this country, that when a leader misleads or fails to offer any leadership at all it is because Nigerians are unpatriotic and impossible to govern, or that when a leader accepts a bribe he is no more to blame than the man who offered the bribe, is completely to misunderstand the meaning of leadership.

Leadership is a sacred trust, like the priesthood in civilized, humane religions. No one gets into it lightly or unadvisedly, because it demands qualities of mind and discipline of body and will far beyond the need of the ordinary citizen. Anybody who offers himself or herself or is offered to society for leadership must be aware of the unusually high demands of the role and should, if in any doubt whatsoever, firmly refuse the prompting.

Sometimes one hears apologists of poor leadership ask critics whether they would do better if they were in the shoes of the leader. It is a particularly silly question, the answer to which is that the critic is not in or running for the leader’s shoes, and therefore how he might walk in them does not arise. An editorial writer can surely condemn a pilot who crashes an airplane through carelessness or incompetence, or a doctor who kills his patient by negligent administration of drugs, without having to show that he can pilot a plane or write prescriptions himself.

So the real problem posed by leadership is that of recruitment. Political philosophers from Socrates and Plato to the present time have wrestled with it. Every human society, including our own traditional and contemporary societies, has also battled with it. How do we secure the services of a good leader?

If we cannot compel greatness in our leaders, we can at least demand basic competence. We can insist on good, educated leaders while we wait and pray for great ones. Even divine leaders have needed precursors to make straight their way.

Chinua Achebe, The Education of  a British Protected Child

Laughter

Laughter is like changing a baby's diaper-it doesnt permanently solve any problems, but it makes things acceptable for a while : ) ~ John Maxwell, Sometimes You win, Sometimes You learn

Whats wrong with being African? Errrr.... Nothing really ....

For the past two weeks, my facebook newsfeed has been filled with affirmations made by my Sierra Leonean friends who are upset over the West's discrimination of Africans from Ebola hit nations such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. I see slogans like 'My name is David. I'm a human being. I'm Sierra Leonean; I'm not a virus'. 

I dont know if these affirmations will reduce stigmatization of nationals from these nations ; I really do not think so. I believe that rather than focus our pressure outwards, we need to focus inwards. A post I read on one of my favourite blogs, 'Africa is a Country' was able to put this Ebola crisis into perspective and perhaps even highlight why this crisis is not just a health problem. 

I learned that 73% of Liberia's income comes from foreign aid. A nation that dependent on foreign aid with scores of international NGOs in its capital, would have been able to deal with the crisis effectively if only foreign aid was the answer to all of Africa's problems; it obviously isnt. The problem with Africa can not and should not be blamed on Western countries; it's with us. We have failed to build institutions and where we have , we have simply copied and pasted a model that is alien to us and therefore can not work.  

Foreign aid has made our leaders lazy. They have not bothered to take advantage of foreign assistance to create systems that will ensure that their countries remain stable, long after they've gone.  Instead, our leaders feel entitled to  aid; they view it as a form of compensation for the damage caused by the former colonial masters. What our leaders dont realise is that we could have easily repaired that damage if we had wanted to. We could have dismantled the very structures left by the colonialists and created those peculiar to our context. Instead we inherited these structures and started practicing politics of exclusion just like our former colonial masters and we are where we are because of it. Just like when governments are overthrown, the structures remain the same even when the people dont; basically same script different cast. 

The African Union which apparently is meant to evolve into the United States of Africa (not sure this will happen in my lifetime) seems to have lost its relevance. The Union has failed to provide support to countries that need it; we have not seen the AU mobilise resources to curb the spread of Ebola or even stop wars on the continent, so I guess 'African solutions to African problems' remains distant in sight. 

Like Professor George Ayitteh says, 

' The statement that a people deserve the leader that they get is NOT true in most African countries. The statement would be true if and only if the people participate in the process of choosing the leader. But that requirement is often vitiated by two common mal-practices. The first is when a military officer stages a coup and imposes himself on the people. The second is, though the people participate in choosing the leader, the selection process (voting) is rigged and their votes nullified. Under those two circumstances, one cannot say the people deserve the leaders that they get.

The cause of bad leadership is systemic, not cultural. Bad leadership is the product of alien political systems and ideologies blindly copied from abroad with no cultural underpinnings; for example, one-party state systems, Marxist-Leninism, Confucius Institutes, etc.

Any political system that concentrates a great of power in the hands of a buffoon degenerates into dictatorship and tyranny. To fix the problem, reform the political system, not just change the leader through elections.'

Spoken word

I love the spoken word. I love to see how people perform their poems; using gestures and various expressions on their faces as they use the inflections in their voices to demonstrate how they feel. The beauty of the art of expression. I just cant get over it. Well, while I have been away, I decided to take a walk down memory lane, I must say a really long walk back to the year 1970 when Gil Scott Heron first released his famous poem 'This Revolution will not be Televised'.

The title was actually a slogan in the 1960s used by Black Power Movements and I guess this is what made the poem so popular when it was released as a song on his 1970 album. It basically mentions commercials, tv series and icons as examples of what the revolution would not be. If you're familiar with American history and the civil rights movement, you'll understand how art was used as an expression of defiance.

Now I wasn't born till a few years after its release, but during my childhood, I became familiar with the slogan. I didn't understand what it meant but I knew deep down inside of me, that it must have been significant to the African American population who had over the decades fought against racial discrimination. In the late 80s,  I heard extracts of this poem being used in a popular hip hop song by Public Enemy. The slogan was often repeated in the song but as a teenager, I was a lot more interested in the rhythm; when you were clubbing in the 80s and 90s , it was all about the dance steps, you had to show that you had game, that's what was important : ).

Today, I cant help but feel disillusioned with the art forms that are being used to promote greed and degrade women. The world isnt any better than what it was in the 1970s, we may not have the same problems but we still have problems, really big problems. Where are our artists and artistes? What's happened to the spoken word? Where are the slogans? What's happened to our music?

This is why I took that journey down memory lane, trying to recollect what art was and how we can use it today to give succor to the poor and oppressed, to give strength to those on the battle lines and hope to our brothers and sisters fighting Ebola in West Africa. We must not forget the men and women who never feature in the news or even the soft sell magazines but who continually make a difference in the lives of others; we salute you.

Here's some inspiration:


The hells we have lived through and live through still,
Have sharpened our senses and toughened our will.
The night has been long.
This morning I look through your anguish
Right down to your soul.
I know that with each other we can make ourselves whole.
I look through the posture and past your disguise,
And see your love for family in your big brown eyes.

I say, clap hands and let's come together in this meeting ground,
I say, clap hands and let's deal with each other with love,
I say, clap hands and let us get from the low road of indifference,
Clap hands, let us come together and reveal our hearts,
Let us come together and revise our spirits,
Let us come together and cleanse our souls,
Clap hands, let's leave the preening
And stop impostering our own history.
Clap hands, call the spirits back from the ledge,
Clap hands, let us invite joy into our conversation,
Courtesy into our bedrooms,
Gentleness into our kitchen,
Care into our nursery.

The ancestors remind us, despite the history of pain
We are a going-on people who will rise again

Maya Angelou, The Million Man March

Oppression Can Only Survive Through Silence

     




Unfortunately, oppression does not automatically produce only meaningful struggle. It has the ability to call into being a wide range of responses between partial acceptance and violent rebellion. In between you can have, for instance, a vague, unfocused dissatisfaction; or, worst of all, savage infighting among the oppressed, a fierce love-hate entanglement with one another like crabs inside the fisherman's bucket, which ensures that no crab gets away. This is a serious issue for African-American deliberation.

To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor's real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!

Chinua Achebe -The Education of a British Protected Child

A word is enough for the wise

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation ~ Thomas Alva Edison

'The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical'

When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. 

One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” 

Charity wins awards and applause but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.” ~ Shane Clairborne

Accountability

 











Photo Credit; Foreign Policy Magazine

For the last 5 months, the Ebola virus has infected more than 2000 people according to statistics from the World Health Organisation, the majority of whom are from the West African countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. I have been following the debates online since the first cases were reported in June, I believe. Citizens from these countries particularly from Sierra Leone had expressed concern over their government's reluctance to share information about the true nature of the situation. The government at the time declared that the situation had been contained and there was no need to declare an emergency. Of course the reverse was true as evidenced by the current situation. I will not delve into what should have been done by these governments and why they didnt do it at the time. Instead, I will focus on the big picture. I have been inspired by an article that appeared in the Foreign Policy Magazine on August 14th, 2014 which clearly showed that the problem with Africa's Ebola crisis is not really about a poor health care system but also a crisis in governance. I'm hesitant to use the term 'social contract' so I will keep this rather simple.

Truth is we have no idea what our governments do, how they do it and when they'll do it. Oh yes we hear all the promises no doubt, but we dont hold them to account. The government on the other hand believe that what they do, how they do it and when they'll do it is their own prerogative. They don't need to consult the people.
Let me break it down even further. How many of us have actually attended a budget hearing for our constituency, be it a local government, district, province or even state? If we did attend, did we make any contributions? Most of our governments don't even hold public hearings during the budgetary process so we dont even have a say in what we believe the government should consider as a priority in the next fiscal year, yet we are supposedly the intended beneficiaries. It's revenue derived from or taxes that actually forms a part of that budget.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a situation.

Until we learn to ask our leaders questions, until we learn to persist till we get answers, until we learn to hold them to their word, nothing will change. Our leaders are famous for building structures but not for providing the required services for which the structures were built.

Clearly, we are in a crisis, not just a health crisis but a crisis of leadership. The government is our employee, not our boss. It's time we start to ask some very important questions. Remember the government  can't provide all the solutions; governance is only effective when it's a two way street.

So 4 years later........

I'm ashamed to say that after more than 5 years, I have finally revived this blog. I must confess that when I joined Facebook, I got really distracted and shifted my focus there. I created and joined groups and often engaged in online debate but after all these years, I think I'm becoming bored. *Sighs*. My news feed has become saturated with the same old stories and opinions about what's right or wrong about Africa while others just tell us everything about what's going on in their life. Frankly, it is boring.  So today, I decided to come back home; I actually feel like the prodigal daughter. Thank you Blogger for having me back...I hope I will not run away again. I'm just grateful you aren't a jealous lover... otherwise you would have deleted this blog a long time ago.

Anyways, a lot of things have happened in my life since I stopped blogging. I remember my last post was on the election of the first African American President, Barack Obama...oh the fuss. I must admit that I too became a victim of the Obama mania but that was short lived : ). Thank God.

Well that's not what I want to write about today. I think Obama gets enough attention as it is...I don't need to add to it. I'm not a statistic.

I have semi-retired from the media about two years ago after more than a decade in the field; I say this because I haven't reached retirement age yet : ). I now work in the development sector full time and I must admit, it's been a rather interesting journey of self discovery. I think my world view has even changed...yap...as you will see my posts will be rather different this time.

Stay tuned : )