By Dan Onwukwe
First, a confession: The above headline is not original to me. It’s that of a young American political scientist, Brian Paul Klass. Brian is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, America’s flagship monthly magazine. He is the author of Corruptible: Who Gets Power and how it Changes Us. He’s the co-author of How to Rig an Election. His research interests include: Authoritarianism , Democracy, US politics, Political violence, and more.
Lessons in power will continue to elicit intellectual conversation. It’s not for nothing. It’s so because what leaders do while they are trying to get power is not necessarily, to borrow the words of historian Robert A. Caro, “what they do after they have it”. It’s, therefore, not unkind to say that it has been the misfortune of Nigeria to watch worse people rise to power and use that power to bend people to their will and impoverish the citizens.
They have no agenda but to
dominate others. Such men don’t seek power to accomplish real goals. Their
drive for power is inseparable from what they wanted power for. Haven’t we seen
that in our politics and governance, its raw, unadorned essence? That’s the
point Brian is making. He says only if leaders, whether in politics or
business, will realise that the positions they hold are like a trust on behalf
of the people, and in that respect, whatever they do, affect the people, either positively or negatively.
It troubles the mind, and
sometimes, hard to understand why the worst set of politicians are rising to
power in our country. It throws up the following poignant questions: Why is
Nigeria’s present generation of politicians worse than the previous ones? Why
are our political leaders not measuring up in the leadership scale? Why are we
lacking transference political leaders, who possess that ability to connect
with the people and shape their aspirations? Is Nigeria jinxed?
You
can ask your own questions. The truth is, today many find it difficult to trust
anyone in politics. They have also observed with great pain that the legal and
political systems favour only the wealthy and the powerful. Is this utter realism
a function of the nature of power and the complexity of ambition, and the role
that the greater good can play in the making of a leader, and thereafter, turn
him into a tyrant, always disrespecting, with impunity, the political party in which he ran and got
elected?
How terrible our politics has changed, indeed. For instance, could it have been possible in
the previous democratic dispensations, for a governor of a state to declare
public holidays just to receive a ‘President-elect’ who ‘won’ a controversial election on a different
political party, possibly to mock his own presidential candidate who he had
beef with? Who says our politics is not a fun to follow?
It reminds one of Lord Acton famous quote that ‘power corrupts and
absolute power cortupts absolutely’. That’s why Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers
state seems to be ‘winning’. Really? Didn’t you see during last week’s visit of
President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu to Rivers state, and what happened there. You
see, power reveals more than it hides. That’s what happens when a leader feels
he has got enough power, when he thinks he doesn’t need anybody anymore, he
begins to think and act in a manner that he is bigger than his own political
party.
But power is transient. Very soon, the curtain will go down, so will the
raw power and braggadocio. Don’t get me wrong. This is not peculiar to just one
political leader. It has become the occupational disease of most Nigerian
politicians, only that the impunity and tyranny are getting worse now. As
historians will remind us, having a larger end has always been very important
for political leaders than businesspeople.
It’s all about the disappearance
of conviction politics that has thrown up men without solid character and
integrity as champions of equity and justice. This has done irreparable damage
to our politics, governance and leadership. Any keen observer of Nigerian
politics will agree that our politics and politicians have become some kind of
enemy of their own people. No permanent enemy, but permanent interests
A few years ago, Matthew T. Page, a non-residential scholar at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Education, and former U.S.
Department top expert on Nigeria, and co-author of Nigeria: Where Everyone Needs to
Know, made a profound observation of what drives politics in Nigeria.
He says that in “Nigerian politics, there are no permanent
friends and no permanent enemies”.
He argued that in our politics, shifting alliances might indicate the
construction of strong opposition coalition, but the very changing political
field may present challenges of building good governance. Funnily enough, he
likened Nigerian political parties, and indeed, the politicians, to the old
Lagos yellow danfo minibuses swerving erratically, bulging as too many
passengers squeeze themselves inside, the drivers clinging viselike to both
steering wheels and wads of naira notes. Interesting observation, isn’t it?
Such comparison is not for nothing. It asks the following questions: Is
there really morality in Nigerian politics? How low and erratic can politicians
go sometimes? Why must selfish interests be the driving force always?
It really stinks. Sometime last year, Matthew Kukah, the erudite Catholic Bishop of
Sokoto Diocese broached this issue . He cautioned loyalists of politicians not
to kill themselves in supporting their candidates. Kukah was responding to the
exchange of pleasantries of the then Presidential candidates of the APC, Bola
Ahmed Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar of the PDP, at the Private Wing of Nnamdi
Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja.
For Kukah, that’s a lesson to learn for the party faithful of the
candidates. “These politicians”, Kukah said, “have lived their lives struggling
for the national cake which they will distribute among themselves. It is,
therefore, in the interest of ordinary Nigerians to know that they have to vote
to stay alive”… As we saw in the recent elections, scores of parties’ supporters were killed as a
result of clashes in different parts of the country.
That has not stopped the politicians from remaining friends, despite the horrible things they have said against one another. Indeed, the literature of our politics is replete with many uncomplimentary things some politicians have said against one another, only to double down later. Take Governor Wike as an example, what he said about Mr Peter Obi, former Governor of Anambra state, and the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party.
Watching Wike in an excitable embrace with Obi during the latter’s visit to the
state last year to commission one of the projects executed by the former ahead
of the election, tells the story that, if bad behaviour is a disqualifying
offence, none of our politicians will be fit for public office. Recall that
Wike had described Obi with the most superlative, fitting and dignified
language, and promised to provide him(Obi) with “logistics support” for his
presidential campaign. What happened later?
He worked against Obi during the presidential election. Tinubu became his
man, his ‘darling’, in whom all is good and beautiful. We perhaps
forgot that Tinubu’s placeholder, one Ibrahim Masari had told anyone who cared
to listen that Wike was working for APC and Tinubu. Make no mistake about it,
Wike has been a revelation of this dispensation.
He has done some wonderful things, and some terrible things too, and they all came from the same place. A few years ago, this is what Wike said about the APC and President Muhammadu Buhari: “When I hear people declaring for APC, saying the party should continue the good job of Mr President. What good job? Good job of people dying everyday, of naira falling everyday?
I feel ashamed that we have gotten to this level of sycophancy, where people say they like the good job of Buhari. What’s good job of Buhari? Is hunger the good job? Is poverty the good job? Is insecurity the good job? For me, the answer is simple: If speaking from two sides of the mouth, telling outright lies, exaggeration, playing fast and loose with the facts, and doubling down are political offences, no politician in Nigeria will seek political position in the country. Without a vision beyond their own selfish advancement, they will be paralyzed and thrown out in shame.
But is there shame in any of them? Shame has become a passé for them. It
has become a badge of honour to them. Imagine the Majority of the House of
Representatives, Alhasan Doguwa boasting that having four wives and 28 children
are good leadership skills to aspire as Speaker. Can you beat that? That’s how,
to paraphrase Peter Obi, ‘lunatics have taken over the asylum’.
*Onwukwe is a journalist and commentator on public issues
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