For those
of us who still believe in the geographical expression called Nigeria, at no
other time that our country needs more fervent prayers than now. But the
current situation also demands eternal vigilance and critical immediacy. Yet,
the Coronavirus pandemic ravaging the human race since November 2019, more than
anything else, poses a grave challenge to leaders across the world. While the
COVID 19 pandemic has really revealed leaders with the sterner stuff who have
shown the capacity to lead at very auspicious moments in the affairs of man, it
has also exposed the soft underbelly of others who lack the capacity to walk
their talk.
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| *Buhari |
It is now so apparent that Nigeria, my country, is a nation of
experts without roots. We are always creating tacticians who are blind to
strategy and strategists who cannot even take a step. And when the culture has
finished its work, the weak institutions handcuff the infirmity. But what is at
the centre of the panic which is our national culture since we are not yet free
to choose our leaders?
Seeing how ineligible dunces who don't even understand the
secret of their private appeal, talkless of what the nation needs jostle for
power, I realize all over again that Nigeria is an unhappy contract between the
rich and the poor. It is not that Nigeria is altogether hideous, it is even by
degrees pleasant, but for an honest observer, there is hardly any salt in the
wind. While not saying that our country is an experiment in debauchery, it is
safer to assume that it exists as a cash cow for our murderous and sadistic
ruling class.
Yet, in
Nigeria, the myth of politics and the reality of life have diverged too far.
There is nothing to return them to one another: no common love, no cause, no
desire, and most essentially, no agreement here. It is a vast entity without a
leader not to talk of a hero. Nigeria needed a hero before the exit of the
White man, a hero central to his time. Nigeria needed a man whose personality
might suggest contradictions and mysteries which could reach into the alienated
circuits of the underground, because only a hero can capture the secret
imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation.
A hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the
liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow. Each mind can become
more conscious of its desires and waste less strength in hiding from itself.
Roosevelt was such a great hero. And Lincoln, Churchill, Lenin, De Gaulle and
Mandela. Even Hitler, to take the most odious example of this argument, was a
hero, the hero-as-monster, embodying what had become the monstrous fantasy of a
people. But the horror upon which the radical mind and liberal temperament
foundered was that he gave outlets to the energies of the Germans, and so
presented the twentieth century with an index of how horrible had become the
sacred heart of its desires.
Again,
Roosevelt is, of course, a happier example of a hero; from his paralytic legs
to the royal elegance of his geniality he seemed to contain the entire United
States within himself. Everyone, from the meanest starving crippled to any
ambitious young man, could expand into the optimism of an improving future
because the man offered an unspoken promise of a future which would be rich and
great.
In Roosevelt, as in Neru, the grandfather of Indian nationalism,
the poor, the hardworking and the imaginative well-to-do could see themselves
in the President, could believe him to be like themselves. So, a large part of
the United States was able to discover its energies because not as much was
wasted in feeling that the country was a poisonous nutrient which stifled the
day. This is just an attempt to construct a simple model. But the thesis is
after all not so mysterious.
It would merely nudge the notion that a national hero embodies
his time and is so very much better than his time, but is larger than life and
so is capable of giving directions to the time, able to encourage a nation to
discover the deepest colours of its character. At bottom, the concept of the
hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress, to the belief that social
ills can be solved by social legislating, for it sees a country as
all-but-trapped in its character until it has a hero who reveals the character
of the country to itself.
The
implication is that without such a hero the nation turns sluggish. Babangida,
for instance, was not such a hero. He was not sufficiently larger than life. He
inspired familiarity without excitement; he was a character while in power but
his proportions came from cunning. And because of his high sense of
insincerity, Babangida as a national leader was full of salty common sense and
small-minded uncertainties. Small wonder, he declared himself an "evil
genius ". He is full of tragic-comic mix-ups. Whereas Abacha had been the
anti-hero, he was only the spoiler-as-regulator. Nations do not necessarily and
inevitably seek for heroes. In periods of dull anxiety such as we are, one is
more likely to look for security and food rather than dramatic confrontation.
And Abacha could stand as a hero only for that small number of Nigerians who
were more proud of their lack of imagination. Talk of Shagari?
In Nigerian national life, the unspoken hopelessness of the
Second Republic took place between the Large City of Corruption and the Small
Town of Hypocrisy: corruption was dynamic, orgiastic, unsettling, explosive and
accelerating to the psyche. But Hypocrisy was narrow, cautious and planted in
the life-logic of the lazy yes-men and political jobbers. Rather than retard
the expansion of these two weapons of failure, Shagari could only beautify them
with colour and character thereby elevating them into national novelty.
It was
Murtala who was close to a national hero but was summarily extirpated by the
evil machinations of imperialist forces. He was also said to have had a very
untamed but murderous past. Awolowo made the list at the regional level but was
halted by feudal pretenders just like Odumegwu-Ojukwu did at the regional level
as a clear-headed protester but became a victim of the Cold War. Buhari as a
military leader was a twin-faced Janus who was neither here nor there. Nigeria
needed him, not Nigerians.
What was even worse, he did not amplify the hopes and
aspirations of the nation as a hero might with a dramatic dialogue as a result
(which was what Obasanjo had pretended to do in 2005). Buhari merely excluded
one part of the nation from the other by banning free speech and freedom of
association. The result was the alienation of the best minds and bravest
impulses from the festering but faltering history which was in the making.
Buhari was so lucky to have had the rare privilege to correct
his mistakes of the past when he won the keenly contested March 28, 2015
presidential election and was sworn in as an executive president on May 29,
2015. But he is an unrepentant soldier hardly interested in historical
relocation. Aside from his serial leadership gaffes, the COVID 19 pandemic has
exposed Buhari as manifesting what a brilliant columnist in The NATION
paraphrased last week as "toxic ineffectual leadership." For
Obasanjo, he might claim that he did not invent corruption in Nigeria, but it
merely proliferated during his fearful reign. And the incredible dullness
wrecked upon the Nigerian landscape in his eight years of civil dictatorship
has been the triumph of corruption as a national enterprise.
A
tasteless, ordourless, colourless sanctity in manners, modes and style, had
been the result. Obasanjo embodies half the needs of the nation, the needs of
the timid, the petrified, the sanctimonious and the sluggish. He knows that he
cannot be counted as a national hero in the true sense of the word.
The late President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua would have made the list
but for his enfeebled constitution which led to his untimely exit. The tenth
anniversary of his death last week clearly underlined him as a hero in the
making. He has been lionized by his party leaders, his rival and Nigerians, at
large. His successor, Goodluck Jonathan, despite his obvious lack of pragmatism
wrote his name in gold on the sands of time.
Paradoxically, it is unbelievable but true. He did not give a
damn but had helped Nigerians to rediscover themselves by providing a platform
on which Nigerians of various stations in life could talk freely about their
destiny and the type of country they ultimately desired. He took an existential
turn, to walk into the nightmare and faced that terrible logic of history which
demands that the country and its people are more important than the ambition of
one man.
He
conceded defeat and congratulated his opponent even when the result had not
been announced. Jonathan also dissuaded his party from contesting the outcome
of the election in court despite the revelation of massive rigging and
under-aged voting in the far north.
Whether Buhari in his remaining three years
would help Nigerians become more and more extra-ordinary and more adventurous
in search of good materials for leadership; whether he is interested in what
history would say about him, the answer is as clear as the design of your palm.
That remains his ineluctable burden. But if
the saying that "the morning shows the day" is anything to go by, the
signs are not there. What we have seen so far are the signs of internal decay,
the dry rot of apathy and indifference. It is there for all to see: in his
lopsided appointments, tribal and religious bigotry and actions even as many
believe that he would likely preside over the liquidation of this empire, God
forbid! So, the search for a national hero or leader continues even under the threat
of this unpredictable scourge called COVID 19.
*Amor is an Abuja-based commentator on public issues
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