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
No comments:
Post a Comment