The trouble with Nigeria is leadership

The late literary icon Chinua Achebe popularised this notion in his slim booklet, The Trouble With Nigeria, originally published in 1983 where he declared emphatically that the “trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership”. One of the problems with the ‘failure of leadership’ argument is the neglect of the influence of environmental variables – or what some would call the ‘Nigerian factor’ or political scientists would call ‘system dynamics’.

There is also a wrong belief that the followership is necessarily virtuous. Adherents of this perspective equally fail to explain convincingly how this ‘good leader’ would emerge, especially as it is commonly believed that a country often gets the leader it deserves or that the quality of the leadership is a reflection of the quality of the followership. 

In Nigeria, where the leadership recruitment system is structured in such a way that only those with deep pockets and rough edges have realistic chances of being elected as President or Governor(or in fact for most political positions), how will ‘nice’ fellows with impeccable credentials, manners and moderate views have any chance?  Even if such people win elections, will they be able to retrieve their mandate from the system?

People who believe that the trouble with Nigeria is “squarely” that of leadership will also often  talk about the “transformational” leadership examples of Lee Kuan Yew,  the Singaporean statesman and lawyer who served as the first prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990; Mahathir bin Mohamad, a Malaysian Doctor and politician  who served as the Fourth (1981 to 2003) and Seventh ( 2018 to February 2020) Prime Minister of Malaysia; and Paul Kagame of Rwanda who has been President of the country since 2000).

In fact, before becoming President in 2000, Kagame was considered Rwanda’s de facto leader when he was Vice President and Minister of Defence under President Pasteur Bizimungu from 1994 to 2000 after which the vice-presidential post was abolished. A crucial question here is: would these leaders have succeeded in Nigeria? Lee Kuan Yew ruled for 31 years; Mahathir Mohamad ruled for  a total of  24 years, while  Kagame has been ruling Rwanda effectively for over 30 years. Would Nigerians, in our context where our ethnic and religious identities are  more of ideologies, allow anyone of any ethnic background to dominate the polity for so long without this country being set literally on fire?

The trouble with Nigeria is corruption

It has become almost a mantra for many Nigerians to say that the problem with Nigeria is simply corruption, and some will add that if we do not kill corruption, corruption will kill the country. While I accept that corruption is a serious issue, my personal opinion is that it is merely the symptom of a more fundamental malaise. Corruption is a systemic problem that is exacerbated in climes where the nation-building process has manifestly failed – as in Somalia – or engulfed in deep crisis – as in Nigeria and several other African countries.

The best way (methodologically speaking) to assess the effectiveness of any fight against corruption is to use the ‘before’ and ‘after’ benchmark – that is to pose the question: what was the situation before the beginning of the ‘fight’ against corruption and what happened after the ‘fight’ started and afterwards? Procedural issues like how much money a financial crime buster succeeded in confiscating from people or how it has forced public figures to find other avenues of concealing their loot, are really mere details. If we have been right about corruption and the way to fight it, why has the incidence of corruption appeared to be increasing rather than declining despite the EFCC and ICPC? Why has ‘fighting corruption’ been a cornerstone policy of all the post-independence regimes in the country?  

Africa needs strong institutions, not strong men

In his speech on July 11, 2009 to the Ghanaian Parliament at the Accra International Conference Centre, then President Obama declared that “Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions”. Since Obama’s famous speech, a new song emerged, and for a while dominated the political ecosystem:  “what Africa needs are strong institutions, not strong men”. What is easily discernible when people brandish the new mantra is the tendency to equate ‘institutions’ with structures, organisations or public bodies such as the civil service, the police, the parliament and contraptions that fight corruption like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, in Nigeria. This manner of understanding ‘institutions’ is at best only partially correct because institutions are also rules, conventions, ethos that have endured over time. Even individuals, to the extent that they purvey a certain brand, which is consistent over time, can also be called institutions. Since institutions necessarily have to be built by people, and since the environmental variables seriously constrain leaders who will want to encourage such, how will strong institutions then be built in a country like Nigeria?

Insecurity is the major problem of the country

With the wave of kidnappings, terrorism, banditry and armed robberies in the country, several analysts have argued that insecurity is indeed “the trouble with Nigeria”. For people who argue within this framework, insecurity inhibits foreign direct investments and scares away Diaspora Nigerians from returning home to invest in the country.

I will argue that while insecurity is a problem, especially in terms of discouraging farmers in heavily affected areas from going to their farms, it is not the fundamental trouble with Nigeria. In fact, some of the purveyors of the security challenges in the country such as the Boko Haram and separatist agitations, are often responses to other perceived grievances.  Without trying to trivialise the current security challenges, I also believe that it is an overstatement to say that insecurity inhibits foreign direct investment. The truth is that capital smells opportunity for accumulation and often moves into areas where it can reproduce itself – often regardless of the security situation there. Sometimes it moves into highly volatile areas like Iraq with its own security arrangements. This is why we see that in mineral-rich countries investments in those sectors continue despite insecurity – hence the evolution of such terminologies as “conflict diamonds” or “war diamonds”, meaning diamonds mined from war zones.

The fundamental problem of the country is the crisis in the nation-building argument

This has been my pet argument since February 2012 when I was invited by the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria South Africa to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the Boko Haram phenomenon, after the group attached the United Nations Office in Abuja via a suicide bomber on August 26, 2011, killing 23 people and injuring more than 80 others. My argument was that the past efforts and projects at building unity in diversity were unravelling and that the crisis in Nigeria’s nation building feeds into the crisis of underdevelopment to create an existential crisis for many Nigerians. I contended that for many people and groups, a way of resolving the consequent sense of alienation appears to be to delink from the Nigerian state into primordial identities – often with the Nigerian state as the enemy. I called this a “de-Nigerianisation” process. Under the above situation, no leader or institution enjoys legitimacy across the major fault lines because people’s perception filters often coincide with their location in the fault lines. 

I argued that unless the crisis in the country’s nation-building process is resolved, any solution thrown at the country’s myriad problems will quickly become part of the problem. 

I have moderated my views on this:  A crucial question, therefore, is how do we re-start the stalled nation-building process in a highly polarised and low-trust country like ours where the action of every leader is likely to be viewed with deep suspicion? Also how can the nation-building process be re-started when leaders and their in-groups seem to assume that once they are in power, it is their turn and their in-groups – ethnic, religious and friends? Remarkably, the fear that a person who wins or captures state power will use that power to privilege himself or herself and the associated ethnic and religious in-groups and deliberate disadvantage others, is a major reason for the anarchic character of our politics.

*Jideofor Adibe is Professor of Political Science at Nasarawa State University, Keffi.