Opinion
Post-2023, Leadership Function And The Lessons Of History For Nigeria
Published
2 years agoon
By Tunji Olaopa
In this piece, I want to further explore deeper issues relating to the lessons that political history of the world around us offers in focusing on the leadership challenges that Nigeria needs to urgently engage with, as we approach the change of leadership baton in 2023. The worry for me still revolve around the concern, that we are focusing more on the dynamics of electing another administration; rather than the far weightier issue of outlining the critical elements of success for such an administration; etched against the various landmines which explain why previous administrations since independence have failed. Leadership success hinges around the capacity to elaborate and implement a change space that harnesses vision and strategy to the managerial capacity to deploy capabilities. That is the key factor that the new administration will and shall be judged by. Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut, once remarked: “Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It’s about keeping your team focused on a goal, and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high, and the consequences really matter.” And he is absolutely right.
It is not really difficult, except a country has become really immune to transformation, to learn specific leadership lessons from the many country-specific transformations that history outline for us globally. There are several countries that have faced down the odds of progress and development to achieve transformative metamorphosis through the deployment of change management with unstinting focus and political will. These are the various lessons that I hope to bring to light in this piece. And I want to start with America’s vision of landing a man on the moon.
In 1962, at the Rice University stadium, President John F. Kennedy gave the now famous “Moon Speech” that gave political will to what is now the series of Apollo Mission to the moon. In his attempting at persuading the American people to sign on to the Apollo program and own it, JFK noted that it was “an hour of change and challenge,” and in a “decade of hope and fear”; and yet he insisted that
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We shall send to the moon 240,000 miles away, a giant rocket, more than 300 feet tall on an untried mission to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth. But why some say the moon? Why choose this as our goal? …. We chose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept. One we are unwilling to postpone. And therefore, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure that man has ever gone.
Behind the Apollo missions was a marvelous feat of scientific and engineering organization that speaks to the capability of the United States. But beyond the attempt at pioneering what has been called the “greatest adventure in the history of mankind, there is the singular leadership frame that mapped the vision of space travels to national goals and objectives and capabilities. How could mining the space enable a better service delivery for the American people? That is a question that came out of a genuine desire to make democratic governance a template for servicing the social contract. And JFK was committed to that leadership responsibility.
It was also the same leadership commitment that led to the stretch of visionary focus that transformed the United Arab Emirate from a wasteland to an industrialized territory. The Al-Maktoum royal family saw clearly what needed to be done, and they put together a change management framework, backstopped by a stringent political commitment, to push it through. And again, the question is similar to that which got the United States to the moon: what could be done to transform this desert and its entire crude oil resource into a fertile industrial and creative hub that will draw millions of people every year round?
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It is this same leadership thrust that runs through the transformational experiences of Japan, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the Asian Tigers. Thus, for example, the leadership dynamics of post-1945 Japan and the Asian Tigers—Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea—latched onto the developmental state paradigm as the framework for national economic recovery and transformation. With the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), Japan in 1945 forced itself into economic transformation through policies that favored economic development. And in the same sense in which post-war Japan managed the intrusion of external forces in the rehabilitation of its economic growth trajectory, the Asian Tigers also crafted specific policies that undermined the limitations of neoliberal economic agenda and its dependency ideology.
Now I return to the powerful leadership lessons the Apollo missions in the United States can teach a postcolonial Nigerian state yearning for transformation. The secret lies in the change management elements that make the change space a context of institutional reform and transformation. The first lesson is that, in leadership terms, visions and ideas matter as the fundamental conditions, in development planning, for undermining difficulties. JFK recognized the hard times, but insisted the moon landing must be done in spite of the challenges of the time. Ideation is courage to dare difficulties. And sometimes, these ideas come from the most unlikely of places. The idea for the machinery that transported the Saturn V from the assembly line to the launch pad came from a mere operation team member. A leader who lacks foresight would have ignored such a mere individual. In the change space the incoming administration must create, post-2023, ideas must be sought everywhere.
The second lesson is that leadership in the change space is concerted and collaborative. It is a function of a seamless synergy that ensures that members—government officials, functionaries, politicians, professionals, all work together efficiently even if they are not on speaking terms! The three fundamental astronauts that made the first Apollo mission successful—Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin Aldrin—all had different personalities and temperaments. And yet the Apollo landed on the moon. In Nigeria, ethnic and religious affiliations need not constitute barriers to efficiency. In Nigeria, there are so many ideas that have died in the furnace of ethnic rivalries. How can an Igbo person have any idea? What can an Ijaw person ever hope to achieve? A Hausa politician is cunning. Stereotypes that kill ideational initiatives and possibilities.
The third corollary lesson is straight forward: not everyone in the change space can be the leader but everyone matters. The truth about the change space is actually that everyone is a leader, even if not everyone makes the commanding decision. Michael Collins was just satisfied with orbiting the moon while waiting for Armstrong and Aldrin to return. And in turn, those in the commanding seats, like Armstrong, must possess the confidence to go through with the most difficult decision, no matter the circumstances. Within Nigeria’s dysfunctional political and developmental space, Collins would have rebelled against such a “demeaning” responsibility. Collins did not. A vice president can be content with being the vice president as long as he or she sees the significance of that position in the larger picture of things.
The fourth lesson is enormous. The change space that made the Apollo project possible and successful was made up of over 300,000 people. This speaks to the inevitable element of partnership. Governance is no longer the sole preserve of the government in the twenty-first century. If the Apollo mission required the collaboration between the government and the private sector, as well as the American public, Nigeria’s post-2023 governance frame does not require less. The public-private partnership model must become a fundamental template for making governance work, and the Nigerian state genuinely developmental. Governance is too fundamental to be left to the government all alone! The fifth lesson is close to the fourth: the workforce strength of the Apollo mission did not just rely on motivation. That motivation was incentivized. Those involved in the eventual success of the mission were motivated by job satisfaction. This is even more critical in the context of the public service institutional reform that the incoming administration needs to urgently factor into the transformation agenda. Workforce culture change and professional satisfaction play significant role in performance and productivity achievement. This is simply axiomatic.
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The last lesson is the willingness to learn from mistakes. Apollo 11 was successful because of the lessons learnt from the failure of Apollo 1. In governance, successes and failures are opportunities to learn institutional lessons. And that is even more so for the Nigerian state whose reform measures often lack evaluative components. We have approximately sixty-three years of trial and error to learn from in making post-2023 Nigeria an opportunity to eventually get it right. When the Apollo mission eventually became a success, America was the better for it. The UAE is now unrivaled in terms of governance vision. So also are those places, from the UK to New Zealand where the leadership made things happen, despite and in spite of difficulties and terrible circumstances. Nigeria is not peculiarly different in this sense. If we have to mine the sea-beds to get the materials that make the highways solid and motorable, then we have to do it. If we have to import foreigners to make our healthcare system super-efficient, that is the right way to go!
.Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, and Professor, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies
(NIPSS), Kuru, Jos .
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By Hope O’Rukevbe Eghagha
One of the interesting proverbs I picked up in our General African Studies (GAS 201) course with the late Professor Jabez Olowo Ojoade in the University of Jos in 1979 was ‘it is a bastard child that points at his homestead with his left hand! The Akan people of Ghana put it this way: a bastard child points to his father’s house with his left hand’. The Yoruba say that ‘a person who points to their homestead with the left hand is not a good person’, while the Luhya of Kenya say that ‘when pointing to your village, use your right hand’. It is in the Swahili language that a sort of generalised use of the left hand is concretised when it says ‘the left hand is for personal hygiene, not for pointing!
Bastard child! Homestead! Pointing with the left hand! These three constituents and functional parts of the proverb tickled my teenage imagination to no end. What is it about the left had that it should not be used to refer to one’s family? Why is this metaphor common across the continent? Indeed, there must be something about the family, about the homestead, about one’s origins that deserves respect no matter the circumstances.
By the way, some Nigerians in the diaspora also point to Nigeria with their left hand. ‘That country’, is often used to describe the place where some spent eighteen or thirty of their lives as they tried to find their feet. So, in a sense, Kemi is simply doing what some full-blooded Nigerians do in reaction to the anomie which currently rules the land. Kemi stands out because of her delicate and prominent position in the world. We all took offence when Bully Donald Trump referred to ours as ‘shithole countries! At that level, who said what becomes very important, that is, the message is given prominence because of the stature and calibre of the messenger.
The proverb, according to Wikipedia, is ‘often used to convey that someone who is not respectful or grateful to their roots or heritage will eventually be rejected or ostracised by their community! The left hand, we are told, is for personal hygiene. We don’t use it to give or receive gifts; we don’t use it to serve drinks or for traditionally important functions.
In the African context, a bastard child is not one who was born out of wedlock or whose father is not known to the family. Bastard child represents a person who is disconnected from their family. Pointing to the family house with the left hand is indicative of disrespect.
These thoughts flooded my mind when I read recently elected leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, Kemi Badenoch, gave some hard and bad knocks to Nigeria, the Nigeria Police, and governance in her Nigeria, her ancestral home. To be sure, nobody who has encountered some men of the Nigeria Police in action can fault Kemi. Her chemistry of being brutally frank is what has taken Kemi to the heights in Conservative Party politics. Whether she can indeed lead the Party to victory in an election is a different kettle of fish. As the potential leader of the British government, all cards will count when push gets to shove. Which is why Kemi should remember that no well-trained child points to the family house with the left hand.
Nigeria is in process. It is a building site. And we started this project of disparate and different cultures fused together when the British pounced on our ancestors to create Nigeria. We look back to the years when a British monarch, King Henry VIII (1491 to 1547), who ate two of his six wives for breakfast and dinner. Wives Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were executed by beheading. Jane Seymour died under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps if Diana had emerged in the 15th century as wife to a British monarch, the reigning king would have sent her to the guillotine instead of the tunnel in Paris! Some British monarchs actively participated, supported, and profited from the transatlantic slave trade. British monarchs oversaw the colonisation of indigenous lands in Africa, North America, and Australia sometimes through genocide! No where in Africa, our dear left-handed and grandly insolent Kemi, would a Prime Minister allow his wife to remain in an adulterous relationship for decades as Harold Macmillan did with wife Lady Dorothy Macmillan did with the bisexual Bob Boothby in the 20th Britain!
We may need to remind Kemi that racism still dominated policing in Britain as it does in much of the Western world. Yet, we have not painted the entire police system as being racist. Indeed, Kemi, without officialdom around her can still be profiled by a police officer if she were found driving alone in some areas of London! Her skin colour, is not typically British, I dare say. Yet, we have not said that Britain is racist. The ‘how dark’ racist discussions which precipitated Harry and Meghan fleeing the British monarchy is still very fresh and raw in our consciousness; yet, Nigeria’s Vice President has not called the British monarchy a racist institution.
Time will fail me to discuss the Damilola Taylor case in year 2000 when the Metropolitan Police handling of Taylor’s murder was seen as slow and inadequate due to racial bias. By the way, Damilola was both British and Yoruba like our illustrious and petulant Kemi who believes in giving hard knocks! What about the Stephen Lawrence 1993 murder case which the Metropolitan Police badly handled owing to racial bias? In 1999, Roger Sylvester, a Black man, died in police custody and an inquest showed that the police used excessive force. In 2009, newspaper vendor Ian Tom died after being struck by a police officer during the G20 protests in London. The 1999 Macpherson Report, which investigated the Stephen Lawrence case, concluded that ‘the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist! As late as 2017, the Lammy Review which was led David Lammy (MP) concluded that “black and minority ethnic individuals were more likely to be stopped and searched, arrested, and imprisoned than their white counterparts! Need I say more?
So, our dear daughter and bright star Kemi in the British firmament, we shall not point to you with our left hand, because in spite of you, you are our daughter. We can only say that the Nigeria Police is in good company of the Empire of the Police system which was created in 1820 by your progenitors from the other side! Colonial vestiges are not easy to shake off!
Opinion
Afe Babalola And Dele Farotimi: On Justice, A Just Society And The Nigerian State
Published
18 hours agoon
December 22, 2024By Tunji Olaopa
The feud between elder statesman, Chief Afe Babalola and civil rights activist, Mr. Dele Farotimi, is perhaps the most significant discourse that postcolonial Nigerian state has thrown up for the moment, one in a class of those grand defining disputations that surely will gather dust which will take some time to abate. And it is one case that is fraught with all sorts of legal, jurisprudential, moral and political traps and complexities that speak to more than the trivial interventions—leveraged around the David and Goliath motif—that are attending the matter. Those who have been able to go beyond the surface of the case will agree that it goes to the very foundation and founding of the Nigerian society, and the fundamental objective of crafting a good and just society for Nigerians. That the issue revolves around the dispensation of justice immediately alerts us to the deep insinuation about the idea of social justice itself, and how the conception of fairness could be written into the very fabric of the Nigerian society. And yet, the complexity of the case is what makes it a case that is too critical for a public servant like me to dabble in.
(Un)fortunately, my intellectual maturation, my political science education and my professional endeavor in institutional reform advocacy have prepared me to intervene in this critical matter. I have always been involved with Nigeria, and with reflective thoughts about how to reconstitute her greatness. Three learning encounters with three world-historic icons configured my passion for wanting to see that Nigeria becomes a state we all can be proud of. The first came from my reading of Plato’s Republic. There is a reason that the entire treatise commenced with the question, what is justice? Justice was a fundamental issue in the decline of the ancient Athenian democracy that allowed Socrates to be judicially murdered. The second learning derived from Wole Soyinka’s dense prison memoir, The Man Died. And like most who have read it, Soyinka was troubled by the idea of justice: “For me, justice is the first condition of humanity.” By the time I would be coming to Thomas More’s Utopia, I was already apprised of the connections between my political science education, my professional endeavor as a public servant, and the key elements of institutional reform as a cogent framework for transforming Nigeria.
From Plato to Soyinka, we have a trajectory of political reflection that takes justice seriously as the basis for organizing a just society. This is part of the intellectual frameworks for my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. In one of those explosive seminar classes that played some fundamental role in my intellectual maturation in the graduate school, I had proposed an argument through a seminar paper titled: “Is a revolution an option to fix Nigeria?” The topic was meant to titillate the collective yearning for revolution that would serve as the ultimate mechanism for social change that would flush off all traces of corruption and degeneration in postcolonial Nigeria. Revolutions seem to possess some allure for the masses because they constitute a framework of justice that the constitutional justice mechanism might not be able to handle.
However, as Wole Soyinka, Thomas More, Martin Luther and even Galileo Galilei would realize, the need for radicalism is balanced by the force of establishment orthodoxy. The Nigerian predicament has, as a fundamental foundation, a lot to do with the connection between governance failure and injustice in terms of the persistent and protracted class strife between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich and the poor, indeed, in the final analysis between the government and the governed. And in the case between Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi, the issues boil down to the administration of justice and the entire edifices and institutions of social justice and the rule of law in Nigeria. And so, in outlining the key issues involved in the matter, we must be careful enough to read between the lines and the noises of analysts who are eager to queue behind their favored protagonists.
First things first. Let us remove the surface debris. Indeed, and in this case, the debris points us in the direction to look for the rot within the matter. First, there is the matter of civil defamation and its legal ramifications. And second, there is the issue of the legal and moral protocols involved in dealing with the pursuit of redress by someone who knows and understands the law. Barrister Farotimi has a legal right to seek redress in court. Chief Babalola has a legal right to defend his reputation in court. In raising the specter of legal prosecution against defamation, I see Chief Babalola as being at the forefront of gatekeeping the legal establishment in terms of what is and is not permissible or possible under the law and its conservative tenets. If you are hurt or an injustice has been done to your person, then the best place to seek redress is not the court of public opinion but the constitutional legal establishment.
Unfortunately for him, Barrister Farotimi’s book, Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System, impugns the entire legal and judicial establishment up to its apex institution, the Nigerian Supreme Court. However, does radicalism preclude moral decency? A book could be written and allegations made without the complement of atrocious language. Or maybe the rot in the judicial system, and the need for a revolution preclude any niceties, especially with those who are allegedly at the forefront of perpetuating and protecting the rot. But then, how to prove what we all consider to be the norm in terms of legal prosecution of judicial corruption remains a hanging question.
No matter how we look at what we are calling the surface debris, we are redirected deeper and deeper into what lies beneath the surface. The ultimate question is that between Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi, what we are asked to contend with is the state of the Nigerian judiciary and the corrupt impediment of social justice, especially for an average Nigerian. What Barrister Dele Farotimi said about the Nigerian judicial system is not new. We are all familiar with the rot within the system. Indeed, this is not the first time an alarm would be raised about what we are all familiar with. Indeed, as far back as 1999, The News magazine carried a most unsalutary headline, “Crooks on the Bench: An Expose on the Rot in the Judiciary.” The magazine headlined the names of 47 judges indicted for judicial corruption. What is new is that Dele Farotimi dared to go so far as to mention specific names, and to confront the big players in the legal establishment. And he did this in a most scurrilous manner targeted at getting maximum traction and attention. It is as if Mr Farotimi, through the public sphere, is throwing the gauntlet to every Nigerian and challenging us on our collective responsibility to clean the Augean stable.
If Barrister Farotimi cannot prove his allegations in court, it would not mean that his charges are false. It might only imply that the system which is supposed to guarantee justice has become too corruptly dense to achieve its mandate. But there is also the chance that since the entire judicial system cannot be tarred so broadly with the same brush, Farotimi’s allegation might receive a dispassionate hearing that might deliver justice as we expect it. This might be a tall expectation. Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament has inevitable consequences on the capacity of the judicial system to facilitate the delivery of justice. And this failure also complicates the capacity of the Nigerian state to deliver on its social contract to Nigerians. This is what makes the Babalola-Farotimi case too complex to be decided either in the constitutional court or the court of public opinion. The burdens of postcolonial disruptions that the Nigerian judiciary system carries are enormous: judicial corruption, miscarriage of judgments, executive lawlessness, delayed trial due to insufficient infrastructure, financial dependence on the executive arm of government.
To outline the fundamental challenges of the judicial system in Nigeria this way is not to give in to cynicism and a deterministic mindset that we might be caught in a vice that is inescapable. It is simply to say that the ongoing uproar between the two dramatis personae demonstrates that the court has been given a chance to reflect on the role that (in)justice plays in the fundamental understanding of the Nigerian postcolonial predicament and the capacity of a democratic system to correct itself. When Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi are given their day in court, we will have no choice but to trust that same judicial system to deliver unbiased judgment no matter our misgivings about how objective and untainted that judgment could be. This is just a way of saying that though our judicial system is not perfect; it is still the best that we have.
The last words on this reflection on the connection between the ongoing feud between Babalola and Farotimi and Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament must be given to Haile Sellasie, former emperor of Ethiopia: “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”
Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission,Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com
By Leo Igwe
The Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) is concerned over the reported arrest of two men accused of being ‘witchdoctors’ in Zambia. The arrest underscores the potency of witchcraft fears and the connection between occult anxieties and the country’s politics. These individuals were accused of trying to bewitch the Zambian president, Hakainde Hichilema. The police claimed that they had charms. They planned to use the charms to harm the president. The report says the two persons have been charged under Zambia’s Witchcraft Act. The Act criminalizes “possession of charms”, “professing knowledge of witchcraft”, and “cruelty to wild animals”. The police found the two with assorted charms, including a live chameleon.
This development is utterly embarrassing and shows that the Zambian government is slowly losing its focus and bearing.The country has many socio-economic challenges. Suspicion of bewitchment or possession of charms should be the least of its worries at this time. There should be no place for witchcraft and possession of charms in modern politics because there is no evidence for these beliefs and practices. Zambian authorities should not weaponize the Witchcraft Act or use it to justify this incident. Zambian law does not recognize witchcraft. Zambia’s Witchcraft Act criminalizes naming or imputing witchcraft. It prohibits accusing or threatening to accuse any person of being a witch or a wizard. In this case, it is the police who are breaking the law.
Otherwise, how did they know the two individuals were ‘witchdoctors’? Did these persons identify as witch doctors? If not, the police are liable because they named and imputed witchcraft and have to prove that these individuals have witch-doctoring powers. The police claimed to have charged these individuals for possessing “assorted charms”, including a chameleon. Really?
The police in Zambia have questions to answer: What are charms? How did they know that what was in their possession were charms, not pets? Is a chameleon a form of charm? What makes possession of a chameleon possession of a charm? When and how does a chameleon become a charm? The police need to answer these questions and more before one takes them seriously.
Again, did the individuals describe what was in possession as ‘charms’? If they did, does confessing or designating something as a charm make it a charm? And if they did not, the police are liable because they need to prove how those possessions translated into charms.
In addition, the police claimed that the duo wanted to bewitch the president. What does that mean? How did they know? Are the police not contravening a provision under the Witchcraft Act by professing knowledge of witchcraft? Can one harm another person using a chameleon? They claimed that the two persons wanted to use the charms in their possession, including the chameleon to harm the president. How did they know that? What is the evidence for that?
The Advocacy for Alleged Witches calls for an end to this state-sponsored witch hunt. There is no evidence of harm through witchcraft or charms. The Zambian government should desist from witchcraft- related infractions and violations including arbitrary arrest, and detention of innocent citizens. These allegations are baseless and absurd. The arrest was politically motivated. This development demonstrates that Zambian authorities are out of sync with their duty and obligation to uphold the rule of law and protect accused persons.
Zambian authorities need to act in compliance with the 2021 UN resolution, which urged states to take measures to combat abuses linked to witchcraft beliefs and ritual attacks. End witchcraft allegations in Zambia. End witch hunts in Africa now!
Dr Igwe directs the Advocacy for Alleged Witches.
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