When Winston Churchill died in 1965, some 112 world leaders or their representatives from around the globe attended his funeral. When Charles de Gaulle died in 1969, and in spite of leaving instruction his burial should be a private ceremony, some 63 leaders brushed aside his request to honour him. By universal acclaim, Nelson Mandela was one of the world’s greatest leaders. About 100 world leaders were at his memorial service last Tuesday. The announcements of their deaths were as equally prosaic and memorable as the great number of dignitaries that attended their burials. Queen Elizabeth II described Sir Winston in the following words: “The whole world is the poorer by the loss of his many-sided genius while the survival of this country and the sister nations of the Commonwealth, in the face of the greatest danger that has ever threatened them, will be a perpetual memorial to his leadership, his vision, and his indomitable courage.” The then prime minister, Harold Wilson, was even more vigorous: “Sir Winston will be mourned all over the world by all who owe so much to him. He is now at peace after a life in which he created history and which will be remembered as long as history is read.”
But nothing exceeds French President Georges Pompidou’s description of De Gaulle’s death in succinctness and brevity. “General de Gaulle is dead. France is a widow.” And while President Jacob Zuma was also apt on Mandela, saying, “Our nation has lost its greatest son. Our people have lost a father,” perhaps the most memorable would be the US President Barack Obama’s pithy though hardly original tribute to Mandela. “He belongs to the ages,” said the US president. Both in the offer of tributes and the delivery of tributes at the memorial service itself, few could have matched Mr Obama, who by his mere appearance, which the crowd at the stadium looked forward to, and his oratory, simply shone like a gem.
By universal acclaim, Mr Mandela was one of the world’s greatest leaders. As gleaned from the tributes to the great icon, he showed the way to peace, unity, forgiveness and reconciliation in a world riven by wars and hatred. In the words of Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, “Nelson Mandela was more than one of the greatest leaders of our time. He was one of our greatest teachers. He taught by example, he sacrificed so much, and was willing to give up everything for freedom, equality and justice. His compassion stands out most.” Mr Obama ended his tribute to Mandela last Tuesday asserting that “We will never see his likes again.”
Most commentators agree on the qualities that made Mr Mandela to number among the greatest world leaders. They are not wrong. Having stayed in prison for 27 years and refused to compromise on the ideals he lived for and was prepared to die for, as he said during the 1964 Rivonia Trial, and having saved his country from disintegration and reconciled them and moulded them into one of the world’s leading multicultural societies, his greatness appeared complete and unquestionable. While I think his greatness indeed encompassed these facts and many more, as declared by many world leaders, I believe there are other more pertinent reasons for his greatness.
The most elementary proof that shows that Mr Mandela numbers among the world’s greatest leaders is provided, not by the tributes of world leaders, but by former President Richard Nixon’s observations in his book, Leaders. According to him, “When the curtain goes down on a play, members of the audience file out of the theatre and go home to resume their normal lives. When the curtain comes down on a leader’s career, the very lives of the audience have been changed, and the course of history may have been profoundly altered.” No one doubts that because of Mr Mandela, the lives of his people have been changed and South African history has been altered perhaps for ever. Indeed, every analyst and historian agrees on this. However, I want to focus on three unusual and overlooked factors that explain Mr Mandela’s greatness, for all the fine things said about him merely indicate other deeper, more profound things lying within him.
First, Mr Mandela, like any other great leader, was specifically equipped for leadership by forces beyond himself, and with a healthy measure of attributes that conduce to great leadership which neither he nor anyone else could fully explain. Thabo Mbeki, Mr Mandela’s successor, is firm, brilliant and blessed with administrative acumen, but he lacks Mandela’s judgement, instinctive love for people bordering on populism, and what some writers have described as the intuitive iconoclasm a liberator needs to challenge the authorities of his day irrespective of the threat to his own life, future and well-being. Mandela had it in abundance, and so did Martin Luther, George Washington, and several others. We can identify these unusual qualities when great leaders exhibit them; but we are unable to account for why one leader has it and another does not. To suggest these attributes are simply idiosyncratic is to beg the question.
The lofty principles displayed by Mr Mandela, his strength of character, his almost unerring judgement, his implacable will, and his supreme inner confidence are evident. But how did he get to that point? I once suggested in this place that the books a great leader reads might trigger some of these attributes, but even this explanation does not fully account for the presence of leadership attributes in a person. Nor is Shakespeare of any help in Twelfth Night when he said that “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” In fact, for a leader to be listed among great leaders, he must not only be born with it, he must work (achieve) for it, and then circumstances must conspire to make (thrust upon) him great.
One of Mr Mandela’s daughters recently made an oblique reference to the second factor accounting for a leader’s greatness. A leader must either cultivate aloofness or be naturally detached from people and circumstances around him, even seeming to be cruel. Makaziwe Mandela, the icon’s oldest surviving child once told the press she was not sure that their father loved them, a feeling she said was shared by the children. According to Dr Makiziwe, politics had fully taken their father’s time, and his letters to them, even while he was in prison, were cold and distant. Even the considerably uxorious letters to Winnie appeared in retrospect to be a means of escape from the harshness and drudgery of prison life.
De Gaulle was not a romantic, but he showed emotions for his handicapped daughter, Anne who had Down syndrome. Churchill put politics first before his wife, Clementine, but was fond of his children only as a reaction to his own father’s indifference to him. Suleiman the Magnificent thought nothing of the wholesale murder of most of his children to pave way for his successor, Selim II, in 1556, and Stalin, apart from his well-known cruelty to millions of Russians, virtually exterminated his relatives, not to talk of the harsh treatment he meted out to his wives and children. Napoleon virtually abjured the tender things of life, notwithstanding his clumsy on and off relationship with the unfaithful Josephine, his long-term wife and mistress, and Julius Caesar was almost cursory in the way he threw out his wife Pompeia for her indiscrete, not adulterous, relationship with a young patrician, Publius Clodius Pulcher, gifting us the expression “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.” Space will not permit mention of Lincoln whom many parents accused of being insensitive to the slaughter of thousands of their children who served as soldiers during the American civil war. Or of Alexander the Great (356 BC – 323 BC) and Genghis Khan (1162-1227) who pushed their armies to the limit in their quest for glory and amid unexampled human slaughter. Or of Peter the Great (1672-1725) who, as I once indicated here, tortured his son, Alexis, to death for plotting his overthrow.
But whether detachment or aloofness, these great world leaders brought the two attributes to the service of either empire building or statecraft, or both. Mr Mandela sometimes reflected on his own aloofness, wondering guiltily whether he was not to blame for the troubles and deprivations his wife and children endured. But it was clear his family life was sacrificed for the higher good of liberating South Africa from apartheid. His sacrifices came full circle when he surrendered completely to the struggle, when he declared his preparedness to die, when he gave up his family and attendant pleasures, when he gave up power in 1999 after judging it was the right thing to do, and when he even gave up his own black people in their unstated quest for either some form of revenge or at least some form of reckoning, preferring instead, reconciliation and the establishment of a multicultural society.
The third reason for Mandela’s greatness must be the historical conjuncture President Nixon wrote about in one of his books. No matter how brilliant and equipped a leader is, the time and place must be right to propel him to great heights. In short, history must conspire in his favour by producing the local and international circumstances to make the liberator or agitator a great man. What if Mr Mandela had been killed a few years into his incarceration? What if his white jailors had behaved with the lack of humaneness Nigerian jailors are accustomed to? Not only would Mr Mandela be dead and stone dead, South Africa itself might probably never have the chance to enjoy the peace and reconciliation only a Mandela could have nurtured after the collapse of apartheid. A leader must meet his moment; not too soon, lest he falter and even fail, or too late, lest he succumb to discouragement or even die unfulfilled. Circumstances met Mr Mandela, and they kept him alive until he fulfilled his destiny. According to President Nixon, there was hardly a great leader he knew who did not have that inscrutable expectation which they called by various names. Some called it luck, others called it hope, and yet others called it destiny. Whatever name it is called, it plays a crucial role in both the emergence of a leader and his promotion into the pantheon of greats.
It was perhaps the acute awareness of this fact that made President Obama, who by much study understands the essential elements of greatness and power, to conclude that we would never see the likes of Mandela again. Mr Obama knows there is little a leader can do to furnish the conditions under which his greatness would manifest. Lincoln did not create the conditions necessary for the American civil war. But he met it with character, courage and great principles, and anchored all three on a deep and unyielding philosophical conviction about human dignity. Imagine for a moment that Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup of Eighteenth Brumaire in 1799 had failed; imagine if General Hindenburg had had Adolf Hitler shot after the latter’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 failed; imagine if Churchill had been killed when he was being captured in 1899 during the Boer War. And would the world have had an Augustus Caesar had his great-uncle Julius Caesar not been assassinated in 44 BC, or, since he was sickly, had he succumbed to the illness that plagued him as a youth before he wormed his way into power?
If President Goodluck Jonathan understood some of these things, he would not have spoken the way he did during last Sunday’s memorial service organised in honour of Mr Mandela, nor would he rule with the spectacular incompetence former President Olusegun Obasanjo has alleged against him. Gen Ibrahim Babangida could of course not be a Mandela, but he stood on the threshold of honour and history in 1993, and failed the test. The sanctimonious Chief Obasanjo had the best opportunity next to Mandela to be an African legend, but he was unfortunately too unknowing to understand what history was telling him in a still small voice during his boisterous eight years as president. See, also, what great chance Gen Yakubu Gowon fluffed in 1973 when he abandoned his transition to civil rule programme. We must acknowledge that once a leader does not have the qualities of greatness in him, in full or half measure, he cannot even begin to climb to the mountaintop, let alone see the Promised Land, or imagine how to get there.
It is futile to preach to Dr Jonathan the principles and practice of leadership. He does not have it in him; for these things are innate in a leader. More, they are sublime and indefinable values that grate on the nerves and senses of a leader irritated by his own constant misapprehensions. There was nothing anybody could do to discipline or caution Chief Obasanjo as he frittered away the great chance history threw upon his undeserving laps; and there was nothing anyone could have done to make Generals Gowon and Babangida see the future beyond their fateful actions of 1973 and 1993 respectively.
Once a great leader comes along in Nigeria, Nigerians will know. And they will see in the stars and in the signs of the age indisputable proof. When that happens, they will not fear he would misfire and make irredeemable mistakes, for though he is human, he would have the intellect, intuition and judgement to do what is right at grave moments. When he comes, he will beat the swords of our ethnic and sectarian disagreements into ploughshares of development, and the spears of political mediocrity into pruning hooks of democracy, peace and good governance. He will also cause the arithmetical madness in the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) to cease, and the constitutional folly exemplified by the police in Rivers State to come to end. And from Abuja shall come forth the law to govern the people and make crooked places straight.
