By Jide Osuntokun

Some years ago some of my friends and I ruefully bemoaned the situation of what we perceived as poor political leadership all over the world. We asked where are the leaders comparable to  Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Mao Zedong and Chou en Lai of China, Ahmed Surkano of Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Broz Joseph Tito of Yugoslavia, Nikita Khrushchev of Union of Socialist Soviet Republic, Charles de Gaulle of France, Konrad Adenauer of the Federal Republic of Germany, Harold Macmillan and his Labour counterpart Harold Wilson of Great Britain, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon  of the United States of America, Juan Peron  of Argentina, Fidel Castro  of Cuba, and nearer home, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sekou Toure of  Guinea, Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boummediene of Algeria, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Nwalimu  Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and our own Nnamdi Azikiwe, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Obafemi Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello?

Both Azikiwe and Awolowo were intellectuals judging by the profundity of their ideas of politics. Ahmadu Bello made up for whatever his intellectual lacuna in book knowledge by his sheer determination and sense of sacrifice.  Abubakar Tafawa Balewa’s elocution and quiet dignity remains unequaled when compared with the present puny characters we have as leaders in this country. He remains the first and last African statesman to be invited to address the joint session of the United States Congress until 1994 when Nelson Mandela broke the record.

Many of these past leaders were so important in the lives of their people that their countries were almost synonymous with their names.  Most of them were not interested in the monetary perquisites of office which seem to be the obsession of our current rulers. They had this sense which the French call noblesse oblige, meaning the desire of a great man to take care of the less privileged and fortunate in society. Any student of state power knows that political leadership of a country is a very important element of power.

A charismatic leader of a people can make the people exert themselves beyond their ordinary power just to build the state and satisfy the leader. Important are such factors like the size and quality of the population, the geographical location and configuration of the country including water and potential hydropower resources of the country. Other elements of power include possession of natural resources particularly strategic resources such as hydrocarbons i.e. coal and petroleum, uranium, copper, iron as well as other factors such as vast agricultural land because a country that is hungry country like India used to be until it solved its food problem, cannot be adjudged potentially strong. From these elements of power will flow quality of education, industrialized economy, health service, education, the level and sophistication of its finance and commerce, the state of aviation, communication and transportation. This will determine the kinetic energy within the state because a state that is not perpetually in motion in today’s world is a dead state.

Of course the level of military preparedness and the development of what General Dwight David Eisenhower called the military industrial complex is very important in the delivery of power to target objects. To move all these elements into force to reckon requires political leadership. This does not have to be democratic leadership but democratic leadership is more enduring and preferable. But there are instances of strong monarchies or totalitarian and authoritarian leadership, a Caesar, for example providing a state the rallying point necessary for it to make an impact in the world and to strike a blow in the defence of its national interest. It may be that one is being nostalgic and living in the past and that is why one can easily notice the Lilliputian stature of the present day political leadership in the world. But this alone does not account for the stark decline in political and moral civic leadership around the world. There seems an agreement among scholars about the pervasive nature of corruption among political leaders in the world today. How does one account for the rise and performance of a man like Donald Trump in the most powerful and politically dominant country in the world, a country that commands hegemonic power in global trade, finance and military power. This is due to moral decadence and decline in the democratic world where womanizing, sexual perversion, and unusual sexual orientation seem to be the game in town. This decline is everywhere and how does one explain the emergence of a political non-conformist like Boris Johnson heading Her Majesty’s government in Great Britain?

Many of the present political players on global chessboard do not inspire much confidence in the world and even in the countries over whose government they sit. The present crop of political neophytes in power in many countries has shown that standard has definitely fallen all over the world.

It is this global picture and perspective that give us a better understanding of the failure of leadership in Africa and right now in Nigeria where political leadership does not seem to appreciate the awesomeness of the task at hand but rather sees the assignment as one in which to indulge in political jobbery and dishing out appointments to family members and ethnic and religious cohorts unmindful of the harm being done to national harmony and concord. This is very dangerous in post-colonial Africa where states are very fragile. We need in Africa leaders who can rally and mobilize the people for states defence and development.  Where those temporarily  in position of power through acts of omission or commission so undermines the deep state through acts of partiality and inequity in the treatment of citizens in an ethnically and religiously diverse states, such rulers create potential fifth columnists who will not help to defend the state and may even support external aggression. In other words, a wise ruler will create broad support for the state by making all citizens particularly the critical mass of the people to be joint stakeholders with whoever wields political power for the moment.

No matter the resources that inhere in a state, if the political leadership is poor, that state will remain perpetually poor. Government is about people. Even though a leader may not be able to satisfy all the people every time but a leader’s action must be seen in terms of wide acceptability and utility value for the state. It is just sad for a country’s leader not to have a sense of history and what had made predecessors successful. Many of the present leaders have no sense of history. Broz Joseph Tito was able to hold the old disparate Yugoslavia together because of his exemplary leadership and his ability to balance and manage the interests of Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Herzegovinians, Slovenians, Macedonians, and Kosovo within an overarching Yugoslavian interest. The moment he died, all hell broke loose. He did not do it by force of arms but force of character and charisma. The situation in the former Soviet Union where Vladimir Putin is trying to use force in so-called Russian satellites has led to a shooting war against Ukraine. No force of arms can hold a people down forever. This is the evidence of history. It is weak leaders who resort to force to knit people together against the spirit of universally accepted self-determination. Even the Almighty Soviet Union had to grudgingly concede and accept independence of its different peoples.

Nearer home in Africa, Ethiopia was compelled by force of arms to let Eritrea go its separate ways and miserable Sudan did the same to Southern Sudan. One however hopes the situation in the Horn of Africa will not be like the  paramecium that keeps breaking apart periodically because the ethnic question there has not been solved in spite of the political divisions of those countries including their sister country of Somalia that has ceased functioning as a state. Experience is a better teacher. Even the less than exemplary and sterling current political leaders in Africa should learn a lesson about the fragile and weak nature of their countries and try to stabilise them through wise, fair and equitable measures and structures that will outlive current leaders in their states. Since they neither have  the political wisdom and charisma of their predecessors, they should leave legacies of enduring structures and governmental systems that they would be remembered  for or else history will be very severe on them for the ramshackle states they leave behind after they would not only have been gone from office but from this world as well.

Jide Osuntokun

The average life span of a Nigerian, we are told, is about 50 to 55 years. This means since Nigeria is still standing at 60, it has at least lived longer than the life span of the average Nigerian. But still standing is not enough. Countries like South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia that were at par with us in our journey of development have since left us behind while we remain hewers of wood and drawers of water. Nigeria has of course been in existence since 1914 when the British protectorates of Northern and Southern Nigeria were forced together to save the British Exchequer the headache of funding the economically-challenged northern Nigeria. Northern Nigeria was then subsidized by her southern neighbor which had surpluses from her customs duties on “trade gin” and exports of vegetable oils of palm oil and palm kernels. These vegetable oils were in huge demand for making margarine as a replacement for butter for the masses and soap in the dirty homes and environment of industrialized Europe. The interesting thing is that the source of this economic strength of Southern Nigeria was concentrated in  the palm oil belt of the Niger Delta just as the hydrocarbons that sustain the economy of Nigeria  today is concentrated in the same Niger Delta. Not much has changed in over a century economy wise.

Nigeria since independence has had ups and downs as can be expected of 60-year old country but none has been so devastating as to destroy it. I am old enough to say how exciting the future of our country looked like in 1960. We had three thriving regions that depended on cocoa in the West; palm produce in the East, crude oil was only discovered in Oloibiri in 1956 and groundnuts in the North although some mining of tin and columbite was done on the Jos plateau. Each region enjoyed large political and economic autonomy until 1962 when the federal government declared a state of emergency in the Western Region following an intra-party crisis in the governing party, the Action Group. At independence, each of the regions had its own constitution and flags and became self-governing at different times; the West and the East in 1957 while the North came in, in 1959 a year before the federation. Each of the regions had its development plans separate from that of the federation. Ultimate power resided in the regions while enumerated powers on aviation, currency, defence, immigration and customs, foreign affairs, railways, interstate highways, sea ports and airports, electric power generation and distribution, communications and telegraphs lay with the federal government. The federal government also shared concurrent powers on policing, and higher education. All other residual jurisdictions belonged to the regions.  All lands belonged to the regions which meant there was no question of the federal government having ministries of agriculture, water resources and housing. Each region had its own police and control of whatever minerals it had with the exception of hydrocarbons. Each state had control of its local government and higher institutions. In fact the regions used to maintain diplomatic representation in a key trading partner like the United Kingdom. Political power lay in the regions and this was why the premier of northern Nigeria remained in the North after independence and allowed his deputy, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa to be prime minister at the centre. The federal government and the regions operated the parliamentary system of cabinet government with very strong nonpolitical professional civil service. Members of the various legislative bodies were on part-time basis. There were no career politicians as we have now and only ministers and their parliamentary secretaries were on full-time appointments. The regional Houses of Assembly were bi -cameral in the West and the North while it was unicameral in the East. Each region operated its system of government as it deemed fit and as was culturally relevant.  There was a federal senate whose members were chosen by the regional Houses of Assembly. This was the constitutional order and it worked reasonably well until politics drove the federal government to upset this apple cart by its declaration of a state of emergency in the West in 1962. This was followed by a decision of the coalition government in the centre to use its power to destroy the Action Group governing party in western Nigeria which also led the federal opposition. The leaders of the Action Group party were also incarcerated in prison after trial for treasonable felony. What followed was the botched federal elections of 1964 and the flagrantly rigged regional election in Western Region in 1965 and the breakdown of law and order in the West and the Middle Belt area of the North which provided an excuse for the under 10,000 strong Nigerian Army to carry out the first coup d’état in the country on January 15, 1966.

This opened the Pandora box about access to government  and wealth by a few determined  armed group in the country. It also opened up the inadequacy of the federal constitution as a means of governing a vast country like Nigeria. Inability to resolve this constitutional conundrum led to a bitterly fought civil war which led to more deaths on top of the pogroms committed against the Ibos in northern Nigeria after the counter coup d’état of July by northern troops to balance what they felt was the  lopsided killings of northern military and civilian leaders in January 1966.

The disastrous civil war, in retrospect, has not solved the problem of political and economic power distribution in the country; rather it has exacerbated it. The long stay of the military in power, a military that was increasingly dominated by Northern Nigerians after the civil war has created a Nigeria in which one part of the country wields almost untrammeled power over the rest of the country. This is manifested in manipulation of census, creation of states and local governments, revenue allocation based on spurious census figures and abandonment of the principle of fiscal federalism and the undermining of the Professor K. C. Wheare’s principle of federalism as a mode of political organization that unites separate states or other polities within an overarching political system in a way that allows each to maintain its own integrity.

The result of all this is the country now runs a unitary system of government. This is the only federation in the world where the tail wags the dog and where the centre creates states whereas it is the coming together of states that should normally shape the centre. This is the case in all federations all over the world, be it the United States, Canada, Australia, India, Malaysia, South Africa and even small federations like Switzerland and Belgium. There is nowhere in the world where political stability and development can be maintained where a substantial part of a country is dissatisfied with the constitutional grundnorm binding the country together. In other words there has to be fundamental and profound constitutional changes that have to be made to rebalance the country in favor of our federal system based on our lived experience not necessarily copied from the United States with a totally  different culture and history. This has been our undoing in recent times. We must return power and financial resources to the people at the regions and political periphery.

This will require a sense of purpose and determination to save our country threatened by serious fissiparous tendencies which if not responded to with wisdom and sagacity can lead to disintegration and separation as happened in the almighty Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and nearer home in Africa, Sudan, Ethiopia and the various failed attempts at federation in Francophone West Africa. We must identify what ails us in Nigeria. These are structure of government, sharing of political power, creation of wealth and sharing of it, religious and ethnic division, sharing of federal appointments and distribution of federal institutions. We must so design our new federal paradigm to avoid and minimize areas of conflict. This we can do by so whittling the power at the centre that there will be little pork to share and transferring resources to constituent states or regions where our people live. We can also transfer police to the constituent states while the federal police will take care of interstate crimes. The defence forces can be organized as territorials on regional basis. Locating the police and defense forces in territories familiar to them will ensure intelligence collection and enhance security. States will have to keep the revenues generated in their territories while paying agreed percentages to maintain the federal government and to guarantee that all states will be supported so as to maintain an irreducible minimal development in all the regions. Regions or states will create and fund their local governments unlike the ridiculous current practice of so-called three-tier government of local, state and federal government – the first of its type in the world and not an innovation we should be proud of. It is going to be a win-win situation. Nobody likes the present situation where a distant Poohbah lords it over people in distant places in the states and remote towns and villages as was done under colonial rule. We want to be governed and protected by our own kind that we can hold responsible for insecurity and underdevelopment.

As at now, it appears to us no one is responsible for the current underdevelopment and insecurity. Our hope is that the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 years will usher in grand occasions for celebration. Happy birthday Nigeria.