|
New Page 14
Leadership values
C. DON ADINUBA
By
some curious coincidence, three Nigerian public officers have just attained 50
years. They are the Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Governor Sam Egwu of
Ebonyi State; and the Director- General of the National Agency for Food and Drug
Adminisration and Control (NAFDAC), Dora Akunyili. If their 50th birthday is
marked in any way in the public domain, the true significance lies not so much
in their attainment of the proverbial Golden Age as in what each person
represents in Nigerian public life: a fine combination of character and good
education. Deep knowledge and enlightened values are two critical elements most
needed by the leadership in Nigeria; and their absence has over the decades been
most responsible for Nigeria’s development mess.
As early as 1971 when Obafemi Awolowo
published a book on the direction Nigeria should take, he recognized the
possession of "mental magnitude" by the leadership as one of the critical
success factors to liberate nation from the shackles of acute underdevelopment
which creates and deepens mass disaffection, hunger, instability, hostility,
ignorance, illiteracy, homelessness, malnutrition and other old sorrows of
history - historical tragedies which seem to have found a permanent home in the
Third World. In his magnum opus, the End of History and The Last man,
Francis Fukuyama describes societies living in environments marked by these
tragedies as being "in the primitive age of mankind".
Awolowo’s prescription that the leadership
possess mental magnitude as a major antidote to Nigeria’s debilitating
underdevelopment disease is apt. Countries which not long ago shared the status
of very poor nations with us, but have in the last few decades, made prodigious
progress have been led at critical times by men with mental magnitude, that is,
high intelligence quotient. Take Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore who in 1965 began the
historic and monumental process of lifting his very impoverished and tiny
country from the abyss of gross underdevelopemnt to the dizzy heights of a First
World nation. Singapore was in 1965 kicked out of the Malaysian federation
because it was considered an economic parasite in the union. A nation of 2
million people 39 years ago, Singapore is not bigger than Lagos Metropolis; it
is actually like a dot on the world map. Its level of development by 1965 was
not higher than that of Nigeria’s Bayelsa State. While Bayelsa has oil and gas,
Singapore has no mineral deposit; in fact, nature is so unfair to Singapore that
the water which its people consume is imported from neighboring Malaysia.
So how did Singapore become within a
generation a worldwide model in manufacturing, information technology,
environmental integrity, social discipline, cultural pluralism, aviation
development, port management, an the entire gamut of posperity? The answer is
the uncanny leadership provided by Lee Yuan Yew, the founding Prime Minister who
holds a double first class degree in Law of Cambridge Univesity and whose lawyer
wife also made a fist class at Cambridge. Their first son, who is now the Deputy
Prime Minister, earned a stunning first class in Mathematics at Cambridge. Their
other children are also possessed of dazzling brilliance.
The leaders of Chile, Uganda, South Korea,
China, Malaysia, etc, who turned around the fortunes of their countries are
engaging minds. Mahathir Mohammed, Malaysian Prime Minister from 1981 to 2003,
was an outstanding student at the medical school of the National University of
Malaysia, then in Singapore. Augusto Pinochet, the right wing army general who
came to power via a coup d’ etat in 1973 in Chile, is a brilliant geophysicist
who went to the University of Chicago School of Economics to recruit whiz kids
trained by Milton Friedman, the eminently influential Nobel laureate. Chile is
today the third largest economy in South America, after Brazil and Argentina.
Yoweri Museveni grabbed power in Uganda 18
years ago through a bush war. He has made his landlocked country, ruined by Idi
Amin and other awful rulers, a model in economic structural adjustment. He was
an outstanding student of the humanities at the Tanzanian University in Dar es
Salam. Park who changed South Korea’s fortunes after coming to power via a coup
d’etat in 1961 did not have a string of university diplomas, but he was a man of
high thinking and imaginative ideas. Park was able to chart the direction whcih
gloriously altered Korea’s history through brilliant ideas, policies and
practical steps. Jerry Rawlings who returned to power in Ghana in a military
coup d’etat in 1981 may not also possess countless academic certificates. But he
is well-spoken and well-read, at home discussing stimulating books like The
Pedagogy of The Oppressed by Freira, the provocative Brazilian
development economist who was a renowned research fellow at Harvard. Rawlings
broguht to an end the kalabule tradition in Ghana perpetrated and
perfected by Afrifa, Achempong, Akufo and, to some extent, Liman. He thus set
Ghana on the path to discipline and prosperity.
By the time you take a deep and
dispassionate look at the intellectual abilitis of each Nigerian ruler right
from independence and compare them with those of the transforming leaders we
have cited in Africa, Asia and South America, you can begin to understand why
Nigeria, in spite of the superabundance of natural and human resources, is in
development morass, or why, as Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Amah would say, "we
are so blest’. Could our rulers have possibly given what they never possessed in
the first place? Awolowo popularized a scriptural truism when he stated that
"only the deep can call to the deep".
Still, no one is under the illusion that
the possession of high intelligence quotient by the leadership is all a society
needs to leapfrog or make appreciable progress within a short period. Among
other critical factors, there is the question of character. A brilliant person
without character is as bad as an ignoramus, or even more dangerous to society.
The three Nigerian high public officers holders who have just marked the
attainment of the Golden Year or the Age of Wisdom are not just bright minds
with considerable intellectual accomplishments, they mercifully have character.
Egwu and Akunyili are professional academics, and Okonjo-Iweala was the student
to beat at both Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before
rising, purely through merit, to the pinnacle of the World Bank in record time.
Each of these persons will make a
rewarding study in modesty, humility and simplicity. They have admirably
remained their old selves, unlike most Nigerians high public officers.
Okonjo-Iweala is easily the simplest and most natural minister; she possesses no
airs and flaunts no artificialities. Egwu and Akunyili are two persons you are
sure will take your telephone calls or return them. You need not book an
appointment to see any of them. If only a fraction of political office holders
could borrow a leaf from these three individuals, the prevailing sense of
alienation towards the leadership which pervades the land will be obliterated.
Most Nigerians see their governors, ministers, legislators and other high office
holders as their overlords and conquerors, rather than public servants working
assiduously for the common good and societal upliftment.
The love of education and an impessive
sense of proportion in the syle and conduct of political leaders, among others,
are the values widely recognized as being at the heart of the phenomenal
progress which Southeast Asian nations like Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia,
Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, etc, have made. The other values are hard
work, a high level of patriotism, an infectious sense of the common good,
loyalty, transparency and trust. These values form what social scientists now
call social capital. In Nigeria, conversely, the absence of these values which
are universal and not encumbered by geographical and acultural boundaries is
largely responsible for our development crisis.
At a time it seems there is no light at
the end of the tunnel, there are exemplars in Akunyili, Okonjo-Iweala and Egwu
to give Nigerians a glimmer of hope. These people are all, interestly, from the
Eastern part of Nigeria. Are they the legendary three wise men from the East
(though the Bible doesn’t state the actual numebr of magi who visited Jesus
Christ at his birth with three gifts)? Is it not amazing that despite the
presence of these first class achievers and a critical mass of others like
Festus Odimegwu, Bart Nnaji, Philip Emeagwali, etc, ill-informed elements like
Oladapo Fafowora pontificate there is no presidential material from the East?
Maybe, Fafowora’s presidential materials are intellectual cripples, squander
maniacs, swindlers, moral maggots, polluters of values, buccaneers, etc. Are
these the characters Nigeria will rely on to take it into the 21st century when
our citizens can produce computes, manufacture cars, build ships, aircraft, etc,
provide jobs and dramatically enhance our standards of living so that Nigeria
will not remain a quintessential Third World nation, plagued by the ancient
sorrows of history?
Meanwhile, congratulations to Dora
Akunyili, deservedly Nigeria’s most decorated public servant; Sam Egwu, the
golden governor; and Ngozi Okonjo-Iwweala, Nigeria’s last hope to get the
economy going, on their attainment of the Golden Age. Ad multos annos.
lAdinuba is head of Discovery Public Affairs Consulting.
|
