By Banji Ojewale
Our leaders are our deadliest enemies.
Not given to altruism, these leaders don’t also subscribe to the law of the power of example. This is the golden rule insisting that rulers aren’t graded great until they exhibit selfless, sacrificial and Spartan conduct that sparks same virtues in the citizens. But our leaders, elected, selected or ‘dictated,’ believe in the precept of the example of power. Here, the goal is, as you grab power, you must dig in, you must live in it and flaunt it and extend its frontiers like you’d be in its embrace forever.
Tinubu and Buhari
It’s the reason our rulers
disengage from public office into private opulence. In retirement, they become epicurean
billionaires in a land rated as the global epicenter of poverty. When they drop
out of public office, they boast of 50-room palatial mansions, yachts, exotic
vehicles, private jets etc., forming oases of their ilk here and there.
Yet, the leader humanity would honour must leave
office a poorer man than when he comes in, even if he’s bearing the tale of one
born with the proverbial golden spoon. When you’re ruling the overwhelmingly
poor, you don’t take sumptuous meals while they feed from the trashcan. You’re
not to play the dandy in the midst of those in rags, as it were. Whether in your
closet or in the open, you must relate (acclimatize) with their indigence,
regardless of your aristocratic background or the lifetime harvests from your depthless
severance benefits. That’s the price of genuine leadership.
But Nigerian leaders don’t see serving the
masses in the light of sacrifice, of self-abnegation, of self-abasement. For
them it is to gain weight, enlarge harem, add so-called side chicks, cultivate sybaritic
habiliment, change wardrobe and eating habits to match new patrician status and
gargantuan tastes, wire money abroad in savings and for indulgence homes and,
finally, move into the phase of hedonistic hallucinations about life in an
idyllic future.
These engagements put our leaders in an alien and
broken world. They deliver great homilies on nationalism and religion and
sacrifice. But alas, they won’t drop their ornate robes to reflect their
oration. They copiously quote the Scripture; but they fail to follow its
teachings. They read of the abstemious lives of the prophets; but they don’t
take after them. They don’t duplicate the noble life of a personality called
Nehemiah, a governor in Bible-time Israel. He rejected the legitimate dainties
of office because he met a people in the arms of death, the same forlorn
conditions in which our current administrators met us last year.
He declined the offer of ‘’the bread of the
governor’’ together with daily provision of ‘’one ox and six choice sheep; also
fowls were prepared for me, and once in ten days store of all sorts of wine’’.
Nehemiah said he couldn’t live in such splendor when his compatriots were
locked in squalor. He said: ‘’the bondage was heavy upon this people.’’ His pillaging,
parsimonious and parasitic predecessors had pauperized the land with their
avarice. It was the suffering masses’ blood-robed toil that provided for the
masters’ table. Sadly, the leaders’ conscience didn’t quake as they gobbled the
product of the poor!
If our leaders don’t read the Scriptures,
wouldn’t they have read about a Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and
foremost Pan-Africanist? After the coup of 1966 displaced him, his traducers
turned local and international commercial banks inside out to bring out evidence
that Nkrumah was a corrupt leader who deceived the people with his socialist
ideology. They got none, because he didn’t have any. Like Nehemiah, Osagyefo
Kwame Nkrumah led a Stoic life, to serve his people.
He rejected so-called personal allowances, even
if there were legalized or admissible excuses to use them. The revolutionary
has been quoted as saying: ‘’I refused to accept, as a political gesture, any
of the expense allowances allotted to the President by law…If my Will had been
published…, it would have shown that I left nothing even to my own family but
bequeathed everything I did possess to the Party and the State.’’ The money he
had after office was royalties from his numerous books, which were paid into a
bank in the UK.
When he died in exile in April 1972, more of
this austere life came to light. His remains were to be interred at his
hometown, Nkroful, a small village in southwest Ghana. The military regime of Ignatius
Acheampong was horrified to learn that the road to the home of this revered
African statesman wasn’t motorable. Worse, what passed for the abode where
Nkrumah’s aged mother lived was only a shade above a shed. The junta wouldn’t
stand presenting these ‘eye-sore’ scenes to the world leaders who would be
attending Osagyefo’s funeral in July 1972. So, hurriedly, within weeks, they ‘civilized’
the access routes to Nkroful and gave Madam Nkrumah’s home a facelift, to
enable it face the VIPs coming to honour a greater VIP.
Late Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, the remarkable Nigerian Sunday
Times editor and columnist, once returned to Lagos from a visit to Tanzanian
President Julius Nyerere in Dar es Salaam, with the report that the home of a
middle level civil servant in Nigeria had more totems of civilization and
luxury than that of the man who has blazed into history as one of Africa’s
greatest leaders.
But Nigerian leaders are exemplars of power.
This is our chief curse. Our leaders, bereft of the power of example, have poured
themselves into the citizens, teaching us to follow their lifestyles of corrupt
enrichment, in public or private. We’re all reflecting our leaders’ materialistic
penchants: greed, corruption, power-snatching for oppressive rule for keeps and
illicit and exhibitionist wealth etc. It’s the reason all the society has gone
under. Whichever way you turn, the singsong is, The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born
(Ayi Kwei Armah).
The bandits, kidnappers, assassins, yahoo boys
and girls, ritual killers, armed robbers, embezzlers, fake prophets, raiders of
the national treasures, compromising security personnel and civil servants, are
all perfect replicas of those in power. These leaders, whether in politics, security
sector, traditional institutions, judiciary, religion, industry, academia, the
professions etc. are Nigeria’s deadliest enemies because they recreate citizens
larger than their own image who turn in gratuitous violent vengeance on the
people.
They entrench a rat-race system that encourages
a destructive lust for power and wealth. They make room for those succeeding
them in office to seek to outdo them. Therefore, the malcontents of the society
in the name of bandits, unknown gunmen, prostitutes, online fraudsters, false
prophets, prostitutes etc. are merely the outcrop of gaudy leaders who give
more time to addressing their leviathan tastes than to caring for the majority
poor in the land.
Meagre funds are released for strategic
infrastructural development and welfare of the masses, because a larger chunk
is retained exclusively for the leaders, leaving the society impoverished,
unsecured and at the mercy of marauders unyielding to reason or patriotism. The
wealth of society is headquartered in the rulers through a corrupt wage
structure that ensures those in government and their cronies are richer than
the creators of wealth. Thus, the state is rich, but the citizens are rendered
miserably poor.
One way out this national conundrum is to abolish salaries and allowances altogether for political office holders. Let those coming into office and their families be cared for by the state. They should make use of public schools and government hospitals. Only acute medical conditions would necessitate overseas attention at state expense.
There should be no wardrobe or vehicle allowances for them;
nor should there be vacation abroad for those who opt to govern us. Public office
shouldn’t be where to make money. It’s not where to invest N350m for a seat in
the House of Representatives and seek to gain some billions of naira at the end
of four years or so. Public office is where you give to the public, not where
you take from it. You leave there a poorer person.
Secondly, we must get
those who want to lead us to submit to the scales. We must record their weight
as they come in. As they exit, we take the stats again. Have they lost weight
to suggest they’ve been toiling sleeplessly for the people? Or they’ve put on furbished
flesh to tell the tale of tainted integrity and failed leadership?
These measures should help
sanitize the system in three ways: big money would be freed for more of society
as we wouldn’t have a humongous and bottomless wage bill for government; two,
only selfless and patriotic citizens would be attracted to the hallowed
business of serving the nation; three, we would no longer be having a venal
class generationally giving birth to its own small class of preying gourmands.
*Ojewale
is a writer in Ota, Ogun State (bmrtbo@yahoo.com).
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