Tag: Shettima

IN their brief addresses at a book presentation in Abuja two Thursdays ago, both Senate President Bukola Saraki and Borno State governor, Kashim Shettima, made very unflattering remarks about ex-president Goodluck Jonathan’s leadership style and quality. “No matter what you say about him,” began Dr Saraki sanctimoniously, “I don’t think he was someone who was desperate for power. (But) he was not someone that was prepared for leadership.” He illustrated his conclusions with two personal recollections on business and politics, both suggesting that Dr Jonathan was obtuse in his handling of the economy and incomparably and incomprehensibly indulgent in his politics. But in drawing these conclusions, Dr Saraki inadvertently betrayed his own instinctively realpolitik approach to governance and politics.

Governor Shettima was even more scathing and unsparing. Said he: “This is the second book I am reading on the Jonathan saga. I think President Jonathan is essentially a decent person, an unsophisticated country politician caught up in the vortex of power politics in Nigeria…If you look at Obasanjo, hate him or love him, you have to respect Obasanjo for not only believing in the Nigerian project but by surrounding himself with men of quality.” The governor was, however, not through with the former president. He added, with his sometimes patrician candidness, that the president was an “unsophisticated dash dash dash (the word he used is too trenchant to be repeated here). Obviously, the Borno governor is still too angry over the Chibok schoolgirls’ abduction saga to allow himself a little sober reflection on Dr Jonathan’s presidency.

In the remarks of the senate president and governor is located the unmistakeable leitmotif. Both politicians believe Dr Jonathan was unqualified to be president. In addition, except Gov Shettima who somewhat seemed to think the world of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, both agreed that Nigerian leaders assumed office unprepared. Until they expressly indicate otherwise, it is safe to assume that both politicians, one of whom Dr Jonathan’s man, Reno Omokri, described as a sycophant, really think that so far no Nigerian leader had assumed the presidency possessing the style, depth and character required of the leader of the most populous black nation on earth. It will be good to engage the two gentlemen and grill them on the subject of leadership over which they pontificate so glibly, and on the character, intuition and intellect leaders need to have to govern well, over which they also seemed to glide very effortlessly.

Mr Abdullahi’s book, “On a Platter of Gold: How Jonathan won and lost Nigeria”, should have afforded both the senate president and former governor the opportunity to critically interrogate the components of great leadership. Instead, at least judging by newspaper reports of the book presentation, they seemed to have limited themselves essentially to passing judgement on Dr Jonathan’s style and, to some extent, his presidency. Perhaps in the coming years, the eminent zoologist, and now statesman as he likes to see himself, will give Nigeria the benefit of his memoires. In it he will hopefully attempt to give some answers and explanations to many of the very difficult puzzles that confronted him in office. Even then, he is unlikely to satisfy everybody, for the puzzles are many, difficult indeed, and incredibly perplexing.

The most salient question needing an answer was not how Dr Jonathan’s lack of preparedness and poor qualification undermined his own presidency, but why from the very beginning to the present day no Nigerian leader, military or civilian, came into office prepared. Obviously there is a missing link somewhere, a link not attenuated by free election or the searing passion of a military coup d’etat. The circumstances behind the assumption of office of these rulers and leaders are diverse. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was duly elected, but there was nothing he did or said as prime minister that gave any indication he was prepared for office. In fact the irony of the First Republic is that the regions seemed to have had better leadership than the centre. President Muhammadu Buhari often likes to give the impression he came in prepared. But thirty years out of power neither equipped him for the complexities and difficulties of the modern era nor helped him to reflect on and fine-tune his style and vision. Between the two — the very first and the current — Nigeria has had the undistinguished honour of welcoming and tolerating a slew of poorly prepared rulers and megalomaniacs, of which admittedly Dr Jonathan was the archetype.

Indeed, Dr Jonathan was merely the manifestation of a deep-seated national problem that is partly structural and cultural. Until those problems are addressed, with the requisite wisdom and courage the circumstances demand, the appalling merry-go-round and submission to mediocrity will continue. Nigeria is multicultural; it need not also be multi-structural in order to avert the crises and dissonance that have subverted its political, social and economic operations. Neither Dr Saraki nor Gov Shettima spoke to these underlying problems. Like most Nigerian politicians and leaders, they found it easier and even appealing to gloss over the country’s structural and cultural anomalies while emphasising the idiosyncratic and undisputed failings of Dr Jonathan. Nigeria’s structural problems are real. So, too, is its mystifying cultural malaise, with a part of the country hanging precariously on a theocratic abyss, and another part on unregulated permissiveness masquerading as liberalism. This explanation in part illustrates very vividly why it seems pernicious gangs of cabals hold the country hostage.

It is not surprising that for more than five decades the country has been sandwiched between accidental rulers and incompetent leaders. There is not one elected president who came in prepared, and not one military ruler who had a definite idea of what he wanted to do beyond articulating his remonstrances against the previous regime’s policies. Even as recent as the Fourth Republic, the return of Chief Obasanjo was entirely the handiwork of cabalistic generals who were themselves untutored about the country’s needs, unmindful of the complexities of modern politics and governance, and visionless about the country’s future. In turn, Chief Obasanjo, himself perhaps the greatest apostle of ad hocism, and still remorselessly steeped in the old ways of doing things, arrogated to himself the task of foisting a successor on the country along his fractured worldview.

It is that discredited and fractured worldview, often regurgitated by some governors who insist they know those who would not succeed them, that produced the late Umaru Yar’Adua and, inexorably, the subject of Dr Saraki’s and Gov Shettima’s imponderable putdown, Dr Jonathan. And as Dr Saraki said in his remarks at the book presentation, those who voted Dr Jonathan into office were also complicit in the crises the country has been facing since then. But the same Nigerians, overwhelmed by the common and retrogressive features and strictures of Nigerian politics and society, voted President Buhari into office, and seem even prepared to repeat the same electoral perversion of ignoring the huge failings of their leaders.

It is clear Nigeria’s progress will continue to be circumscribed as long as no bright and brave politician boldly offers himself for leadership. Something simply must be done about the country’s structural and cultural anomalies. Gov Shettima may be mean to Dr Jonathan, and Dr Saraki imperious; but President Buhari is really not substantially any better than his predecessors. Indeed, contrary to what the governor and the senate president think, whoever wins in 2019 is unlikely to be any better, let alone offer the country the real change needed to forge a speedy entry into the First World. They are simply too incapable of the depth of understanding and visioning required to foster a rapid and lasting transformation of the country.