Leadership is all about taking decisions and accepting responsibility for their consequences both expected and unexpected. Brave leaders own up to their actions and inactions as the case may be and move on with the grave task of leadership, which in most circumstances is a lonely job in which at times, a bad decision is better than none, on some weighty and important issues. Making apologies for decisions taken earlier is an acceptance of responsibility for such decisions and it is a mark of what we may call mature and responsive leadership. A leader who does not accept responsibility for errors when obviously palpable and clear, cannot be a good leader. Even though some leaders believe fervently that as at the time they took some decisions they weighed all the options and the context and could not be liable for any failure. It is in the light of what the inputs into leadership decision could be and how weighty and relevant or even important to the outcome of such decisions, that we look at the topic of today.
We therefore look at events in Nigeria and Peru where two apologies by political leaders surfaced this week. In Nigeria where there is an ongoing and biting fuel scarcity which has turned the normally joyful Xmas Yuletide celebrations into a nightmare for the average Nigerian family,the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari apologized to Nigerians for the seasonal hardship which he said would end in a few days time. In Peru a former Head of State Roberto Fujimori apologized from his sick bed after he was given a pardon by the incumbent President Pedro Kusczinsky who just escaped being impeached for corruption, allegedly because of the support given to him against impeachment by the Fujimori’s supporters in Parliament. Thirdly we look at events in Russia where Alexei Navalny, the leading but disqualified opposition leader seeking to replace President Vladmir Putin asked the Russian President who is seeking another term as an Independent presidential candidate to apologise for misleading the Russian people instead of seeking a new presidential tenure of office.
In both Nigeria and Peru the two leaders were clearly accepting responsibility for present and past lapses. In the Russian scenario it is obvious that the call for apology was like a dog barking at the moon and clearly an exercise in futility. We now look at the context of the three in terms of leadership accountability and what motivated the apologies and the import of this for the three political systems in terms of human and societal progress in these nations.
In the case of President Muammadu Buhari’s apology to Nigerians on the fuel shortage and the attendant household hardship, it is obvious that the Nigerian president is accepting responsibility for the fuel shortage. This is an informed apology because the president was a former Head of State as well as Oil Minister and knows where the shoe pinches Nigerians on the shortage, as well as the problems that have made the shortage an annual event which in the life of this Administartion led to fuel price increase from 86 naira to 145 naira sometime. Some skeptical Nigerians are predicting that the present shortage will culminate in a fuel price increase but I beg to differ on that possibility and my ammunition and defence is the presidential apology to Nigerians on the hardship by their presiden. That apology is at once responsive and full of empathy. It therefore cannot be shattered by the greed of Independent Marketers , fuel price manipulators , professional supply disrupters and all those powerful interests who have turned our oil discovery and ownership into the ultimate resource curse that has made Nigeria laughing stock in the world as an oil producing nation, whose citizens queue up annually at Xmas to look for oil to power their vehicles and generators and even to cook their meals even as their nation is famously awash with the black gold.
In Peru the scenario is different from our situation. The apology is being made by a fallen president who is serving a 20 year jail term for human rights abuses that led to the death and disappearance of opposition leaders during his presidency. But Fujimori to a large extent was a successful leader. He defeated the Shining Path, a terrorist group similar to our own Boko Haram, and created political stability in Peru but made powerful enemies in the process. The defeat of Shining Path made him the envy of his political opponents who invoked human rights abuses massively to dent his image prosecute him and have him jailed. This strategy is not dissimilar to that of some Nigerian leaders playing politics with the defeat of Boko Haram and insisting that no more funds should be used to annihilate the notorious terrorist group. Powerful vested interests similar to those that incarcerated Fujimori are actively at work too on Boko Haram. Anyway I have no doubt that Fujimori’s apology will be accepted as he is dying man and even though his party helped the incumbent Fuji president to avert impeachment in Parliament, no one stands to gain from the Fujimori grace to grass predicament, which is a lesson for any real or budding political dictator in any political clime. The scene from Russia is also interesting and instructive. The opposition leader Alexei Navalny admitted on CNN recently that he could be killed anytime and I admire his bravery on that score. But he is a political lightweight and Russia, like China is a sham democracy in terms of political leadership participation and elections. Putin as leader in Russia has played the game of political self – succession very well and quite brilliantly and has outlived two US presidents. Now, he is being accused by the US political system of imposing a third through election hacking, which Putin denies. Putin was in office from 2001 to 2008, the two term tenure of President George Bush. He served a four year term as PM thereafter and put a surrogate in place as president who returned as PM when Putin was elected president again in 2012. It was the role of Hillary Clinton in making that 2011 presidential election campaign difficult for Putin that earned Hillary, who was Secretary of State then, the eternal hatred of Putin together with her boss Barak Obama. And that was responsible for the massive even though denied Russian interest in the 2016 US presidential won by Donald Trump. Putin does not need to apologise in any way to the Russian people whose elites this week gathered enough signatures to make him stand for president as an Independent candidate. Russians are proud of Putin for standing up to the world and the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 which Putin described as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. A leader who invaded Crimea, Ukraine and took a military base in Syria to help oust the dreaded ISIS in the Middle East does not offer apologies to his people for fuelling their national pride, sovereignty and patriotism. Putin may have flouted international law and may be a culprit at the comity of nations including the UN, but he is at ease and at home with his primary constituency, which is the Russian people. That to me is a mark of strong leadership that offers no apologies as charity should always begin at home in any political system. Once again, long live the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
