09 Feb 2008 |
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Two of Nigeria’s greatest literary luminaries passed significant verdicts on the fate of their country during the eighties. First came Chinua Achebe’s seminal work, The Trouble with Nigeria, published in 1983, in which he declared that “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a problem of leadership” and of the inability or unwillingness of leaders to rise to “the challenge of personal example.” Achebe’s diagnosis subsequently became doctrine for Nigerian social critics who have not stopped their tirades against “bad leadership” ever since. The following year, the playwright, activist and later Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka penned a scathing essay in The Punch entitled ‘The Wasted Generation’. Soyinka examined the historical travails of the country and passed a damning sentence upon his generation: “After a quarter of a century of witnessing and occasionally participating in varied aspects of social struggle in all their shifting tempi, dimensions, pragmatic and sometimes even ideologically oriented goals, I feel at this moment that I can only describe my generation as the wasted generation, frustrated by forces which are readily recognizable, which can be understood and analyzed but which nevertheless have succeeded in defying whatever weapons such ‘understanding’ has been able to muster towards their defeat.” More than thirty years have passed since these two verdicts were passed. Much has happened to these two thinkers and to Nigeria. Within those years, Achebe was involved in a ghastly car crash that left him wheelchair-bound. He now resides in the US and is one of the multitudes of Nigerian thinkers on what is best described as intellectual exile. In the same space of time, Soyinka won the Nobel prize for literature, was awarded a national honour, became the pioneer head of a government agency set up to promote road safety and fled into exile to avoid termination by Abacha’s death squads. He has remained consistent as a voice of social protest and is one of the leading lights of Nigeria’s civil society. Both men, now septuagenarians, remain entrenched in their resistance to their country’s despoliation. Soyinka disavowed the national honour he had received from Babangida in protest. Achebe similarly rejected an award by the Obasanjo government. After more than three decades, the verdicts pronounced by Achebe and Soyinka remain require re-reading and reflection today. Achebe situated the Nigerian problem in bad leadership while Soyinka pilloried his generation for squandering Nigeria’s opportunities for greatness. In a profound sense both men were saying the same thing. Put together, their views could be summarized in one sentence: the trouble with Nigeria is the wasted generation’s bad leadership. While Soyinka spoke of his generation’s failure to overcome the forces of social decay, Achebe criticized Nigeria’s big three political patriarchs – Awo, Zik and Sardauna – for their lack of imagination. He harped on “the seminal absence of intellectual rigour” and the “poverty of thought” exhibited by that generation. After three decades, perhaps the grand children of the wasted generation can take stock and offer their own assessment of the leadership situation. Around 1999, as the transition to civil rule loomed large, the curious phrase, ‘generational power-shift’ crept into the national lexicon. Politicians defined it as the transfer of power from the old brigade power elite to a new dynamic young brigade – a bunch of politicians under 50 years old that were now ready to bear the mantle of leadership. The concept wasn’t new. Babangida had famously divided the political class into what he called the old breed and the new breed during his failed transition program. At the time both camps failed, and distinguished themselves only by their betrayal of democracy when Babangida annulled the results of what was arguably Nigeria’s freest and fairest election. By 1999, the advocates of a generational power-shift were casting themselves as the new “new breed” democrats. Like their predecessors, they laid claim to a political innocence and purity, which set them apart from the old brigade power elite. A lot of people bought into the campaign. Much of the media joined in the chorus heralding the emergence of “young Turks.” But after eight years of civilian rule, the same leadership dynamic that has prevailed for most of our history remains in evidence. The wasted generation did not die and disappear from the scene; their legacy of warped values and ideals remain – sustained by the so-called new breed elite that have no new ideas to boast of. In truth, the new breed is in a race to surpass the excesses of their forebears. Achebe was very critical of the first generation patriarchs because in his view they failed the nation. But what would any of those leaders say of the current breed? Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Sardauna Ahmadu Bello may have been challenged by bigotries and sectarian attitudes. They may have been irredentists, geo-political gladiators or tribal champions, but by God, they had some ideas. Awo and Zik wrote books and articulated their dreams for their country as they saw it. No one can read Awo and fail to be impressed by the breadth and painstaking detail in his outline of Fabian socialist thought transplanted onto the Nigerian terrain. No one can read Zik and not be impressed by his belief in pan-africanism. No one can study the Sardauna, Ahmadu Bello and not at least respect however grudgingly, his leadership and his foresight in building northern Nigeria. To be sure, these men had their flaws. The consequences of some of their actions haunt us to this day, but they had leadership; they had a profound sense of their historical destinies and they inspired their people not with cash or bags of rice but the raw, intangible essence of leadership. The booming economies of the regions they led in the First Republic attests to the quality of their leadership. Yet they ultimately belonged to a wasted generation, unable to convert the heady promise of their times into fulfilment. The came, they saw but failed to conquer. Comparisons between today’s political elite and the gladiators of yester-years are inescapable. Nigeria is mired in an unprecedented leadership crisis. When Achebe penned his diagnosis in 1983, leadership failure referred to the under-performance of a class of public servants. Today, leadership crisis refers to the disturbingly apparent absence of good men and women in the public square. The problem is no longer strictly bad leadership or the poor performance of public officers; it is the glaringly seeming lack of alternatives to a bankrupt political class. There are still politicians who describe themselves as disciples of the patriarchs like Awo, Zik, Sardauna or Aminu Kano. These self-styled disciples have distinguished themselves only by their ready abandonment of their mentors’ principles. Assuredly, northern Nigeria would not be recording astronomic rates of poverty and illiteracy if the Sardauna’s disciples had actually built on his foundation. Aminu Kano’s disciples, had they stayed true to their patriarch’s ideals, would have transformed the north and liberated the wretched long-suffering masses of the Talakawa for whom Aminu Kano lived and died. The sons and daughters of Awo and Zik would have changed the course of this country if they had exhibited greater fidelity to their fathers’ principles. In each case, these patriarchs were betrayed by their disciples. As soon as they died, most of their followers resorted to political necromancy – invoking the names of the dead patriarchs for the purpose of gaining political power. Consequently the Sardauna’s protégés in the armed forces and in the political establishment were the very ones who destroyed the Sardauna’s legacies while purporting to protect them. The impoverishment of the north took place while those northern military and civilian power-brokers who had benefited from the Sardauna’s foresight were preoccupied with orgies of obscene self-enrichment. The so-called Awoists in particular have been practitioners par excellence of the dark art of political necromancy. They won elections by dropping Awo’s name and preaching awoism but mostly had a far from stellar performance in office. Their purported proximity to Awo while he was alive didn’t seem to have imparted with any of his intellect. In the same vein, most of Aminu Kano’s heirs seem virtually indistinguishable from the corrupt feudal aristocracy against which Kano fought all his life. In short, there is a world of difference between the leaders of yore and their descendants and it is not a positive difference. Certainly the patriarchs had their flaws but those flaws pale in the face of the brazen arch-criminality of the current generation of politicians. When Achebe lamented “a tendency to pious materialistic wooliness and self-centred pedestrianism,” he could well have been prophesying about the current breed of politicians. Nigeria has been so traumatized by a procession of vampire regimes that it has lost understanding of what heroes or statesmen are. Only a country reeling from the torment of self-obsessed despots could have declared the late Chief MKO Abiola a symbol of democracy despite his long intimate links with the military elite. But this happened because Nigerians, then as now, were hungry for a hero. A bizarre alignment of circumstances produced one for them, however flawed, in the person of Abiola. His apparent martyrdom at the hands of the military seems to have redeemed his name from the opprobrium merited by his earlier sins. The urge to cheaply festoon all kinds of politicians with undeserved garlands of heroism is one of the main reasons for the devaluation of leadership and politics in Nigeria. When Sunday Awoniyi passed away in November 2007, the Nigerian press was strangely effusive with their eulogies. He was described in glowing terms as a national hero, a champion of democracy and a statesman. It is one thing to eulogize a dead politician; it is quite another to ignite a halo of undeserved sainthood around his head. Awoniyi’s most recent claim to fame apart from his closeness to the late Sardauna was his celebrated spat with Obasanjo over the latter’s opposition to his bid to become the chair of the Peoples Democratic Party. It wasn’t an ideological conflict or some grand battle for the soul of Nigerian democracy; it was a political quarrel between two politicians struggling for power. It was a far from selfless endeavour and there was nothing to justify the lofty talk of statesmanship and courage which gushed forth from various quarters upon the chieftain’s demise. The truth is that public officers like Awoniyi who served in government between the sixties and the eighties belong for the most part, to the breed that bankrupted future generations of Nigerians. Their passing calls for quiet note and reflection rather than clichéd and jaded celebrations of “a life well spent.” Nigeria deserves a break from such hypocrisy. Thirty years after The Trouble with Nigeria and ‘The Wasted Generation,’ we live in a “republic of mediocrity” – a realm in which the best is possible but never achieved; where common criminals attain power and are serenaded for their villainy by a dysfunctional society and a bankrupt state; where politics is about the distribution of the spoils of office and defined by the absence of ideas or principles. It is difficult to be optimistic about the country’s future even when optimism is a natural resource in Nigeria. There is neither the leadership to galvanize the public or the big idea to capture the public imagination. The state distanced from the society by self-obsessed politicians has left Nigerians to struggle for survival on their own. In short all that Soyinka and Achebe wrote one generation ago are as valid as if written today. Achebe posed a question of profound significance in 1983: “Does it ever worry us that history which neither personal wealth nor power can pre-empt will pass terrible judgment on us, pronounce anathema on our names when we have passed on? We have lost the twentieth century; are we bent on seeing that our children also lose the twenty-first?” Considering the high crimes and misdemeanours of the Nigerian elite since independence, the answer to that question may well be an unqualified “Yes.” President Umar Yar’Adua identified three key areas of reform at the onset of his administration: the electoral process, the energy sector and the police. Mohammed Lawal Uwais, a former Chief Justice of the Federation heads the electoral reform committee. Mohammed Dikko Yusuf, a former Inspector-General of Police and a former presidential aspirant heads the police reform effort. Rilwan Lukman, a veteran of the oil industry and an experienced player in the circles of international oil wheeling and dealing is a key adviser on the energy reform initiative. These three men are experienced and highly respected veterans. They are also septuagenarians who have been key players in the Nigerian power establishment for decades. It is not their biological ages that are in question, but the age and currency of their ideas. There is a certain logical incongruence in hiring those who operated in government during the years of its breakdown to fix it. It appears that the president has opted for experience rather than innovation in driving his reform efforts. Whether members of the generation credited with bringing about the institutional collapse of the state can produce any “reform” is doubtful. The wasted generation is challenged by its dreadful track record as well as the inexorable flux of history. In an age defined by the swift pace of change and global uncertainty, it would not be wrong to suggest that time has passed these respected veterans by. That we keep turning to them to bail us out of a crisis that they instigated (which has been compounded subsequently by their children) implies an unwillingness to jettison geriatric survivalism and gerontocratic tendencies from governance and implement a renewal of leadership. It suggests that Nigeria cannot find a new generation of mechanics to fix her broken engines. Where are the new ideas to come from if we still have to recycle septuagenarian power-brokers to deal with our challenges today? Ideally, these veterans ought to retire and become living ancestors in the political continuum. There is a dangerous vacuum of leadership and ideas in our society. There is also a sense of drift. These are dangerous times. Under the circumstances, political and religious charlatans will step in to fill the vacuum of thought and leadership. Nigeria’s impoverished and rudderless millions could fall under the thrall of ethnic warlords, sectarian politicians and religious extremists. Already, politicians have a steady supply of able bodied youth to mobilize as religious terrorists, political thugs or ethnic militants. In effect, the possibility of further fragmentation of our society along ethnic or religious lines remains disturbingly high. All this will go on while politicians across Nigeria are preoccupied with plundering the public treasury propagating the ruinous legacy of the wasted generation further into Nigeria’s future. The situation calls for unprecedented demonstrations of leadership in high and in low places. The ideas put forth by Achebe and Soyinka in The Trouble with Nigeria and ‘The Wasted Generation’ remain distressingly cogent. Nigeria has endured the prophetic accuracy of their words for one generation. It cannot do so for another.
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