Leadership Afterthought, Inc.
One day soon, Muhammadu Buhari will write an open letter. Of course, that implies that on that day, there would still be a Nigeria, but also that Nigeria would still have pens or pencils, and even paper. And the media, in some form. And that having been too confused and incompetent as a people to […]
One day soon, Muhammadu Buhari will write an open letter.
Of course, that implies that on that day, there would still be a Nigeria, but also that Nigeria would still have pens or pencils, and even paper. And the media, in some form. And that having been too confused and incompetent as a people to produce electricity, that we did not simply give up and return to firewood and candles.
It also presumes that the writer will sign it as former President Buhari. And that he would be alive and in good health.
He would be addressing his output to his successor, or their successor, in some form. He would have a lot to say: the importance of national unity, and human rights, and the rule of law, and human life. He would talk about leadership: good leadership.
His tone would at once be conscientious and impetuous, condescending and challenging, visionary yet vacuous.
In other words, the open letter Buhari writes would sound exactly like the one addressed to him last week by another former Nigeria leader: Olusegun Obasanjo.
To be clear: I rarely have reason to agree with Obasanjo, who, by the way, ought to hire a writer to help him express his thoughts. In his latest open letter, strictly as a cautionary word from a former leader to the current, I praise him. He presents the state of the nation as it is and describes the danger as best he can. He then suggests how President Buhari should respond.
Obasanjo is right. Sadly, Nigeria lacks statesmen, otherwise one would describe his effort as the work of a statesman. Buhari would do well to listen to him; Nigeria-not Obasanjo-will benefit from the urgency and strategy Obasanjo identifies.
Nonetheless, this is what I call “leadership afterthought”: the tendency among former Nigerian leaders to know it all after the fact, having delayed, deferred and compromised when they were in control until things got out of control and they needed an illegal term of office to try to do it all over again.
Obasanjo is right, but had he taken the right steps when he was in control for eight years, we would not be where we are today, and it is doubtful that the trajectory of our political evolution would have dumped us into Buhari’s hands. Buhari is partly Obasanjo’s responsibility.
Obasanjo speaks with a fake swagger, but some of the seeds of our pain were sowed by him. Under his control, the demon of impunity and savagery in Nigeria’s uniformed and security forces matured.
In November 1999, for instance, hundreds of people were massacred by the military in Odi, Bayelsa State. Nobody was brought to justice.
Two years later, the military also butchered over 200 unarmed civilians in Benue State. Despite a report submitted to the government by the judicial commission of inquiry which investigated such incidents in Benue and neighbouring states, nobody was ever brought to justice.
Obasanjo’s government was always handy with commissions of enquiry into inter-communal violence, including the one in Kaduna in 2000 in which 2000 persons were killed, and another in September 2001 in Jos which killed another 1000. But he did not bring anyone to justice.
Concerning Jos, in October 2004, the Committee of Rehabilitation and Reconciliation of Internally Displaced People, a Plateau State government panel, toured all areas affected by various communal clashes between September 2001 and May 2004. Obtaining accounts from relatives, it found out that the numbers of the dead had been grossly represented, concluding that an astounding 53,787 – comprising 17,459 children, 17,397 women and 18,931 men – had been killed.
That investigation examined the three years beginning on 7 September 2001 and 18 May 2004, when Obasanjo declared emergency rule in the state following an upheaval in the town of Yelwa when a Christian militia massacred hundreds of Muslims.
Also, during Obasanjo’s eight years, it is on record that the uniformed forces routinely arrested, detained, tortured and extrajudicially killed members of such vigilante groups as the Bakassi Boys, the O’odua People’s Congress and the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra.
What is not on record is that Obasanjo affirmed the primacy of justice and the rights of the victims and their families by ensuring that the perpetrators of those crimes went on trial.
In fact, anyone imagining that Obasanjo has true commitment to any of these principles would do well to remember the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission, alias Oputa Panel, which examined similar abuses that took place under administrations preceding Obasanjo’s.
Obasanjo established the panel within two weeks of taking office in 1999, and its mandate included establishing the causes, nature, and extent of human rights violations between January 15, 1966 and 28 May 1999: the eve of his inauguration. In May 2002, he received the panel’s report, which held the Nigerian military responsible for gross human rights violations and affirmed the complicity of prominent Nigerians in numerous coups. Obasanjo then promptly lost his appetite to learn the truth, or even to publish the report promptly. Most of all, he lost interest in the delivery of justice.
Because injustice, or the refusal by Nigerian leader after Nigerian leader after Nigerian leader to put the public interest first, is what has led us to the narrow path Obasanjo appropriately describes in his latest high-profile letter.
Injustice-or refusal to commit to the public interest-in which leader after leader when he is in control and can make the critical decisions, chooses instead to chase the corrupt interests of politics or convenience or ethnicity or money, is what has led Nigeria to this thin edge of the cliff.
In Obasanjo’s letter, he pretends-or believes-he is writing about the failure of Buhari to do the right thing to make Nigeria prosperous, or at least secure and united. At the micro-level of analysis, that may be persuasive. But what has happened since he took that famous step back as military Head of State in 1979 for Alhaji Shehu Shagari to assume the presidency is that one military man after another (sometimes they hide inside an agbada), has arrived to compound the Nigerian situation through one form of injustice or dereliction.
That is why, one day soon if we are lucky, Buhari-sounding high and mighty and patriotic-will be publishing his own open letters. Like Obasanjo, he will conveniently forget that he once had the supreme opportunity to build a toilet but chose to turn the house into the toilet. He will accept no blame, pay no reparations or apologize for anything.
It is leadership afterthought: you are the expert, the wise and the patriotic not when you can lead and inspire and build or mend, but after the horses have fled the stable after discovering that through collusion, incompetence and manipulation over time, the horse-keepers did not lock the stables at all. It is why no Nigerian leader leads by example or can walk the streets once out of power.
That said, Nigeria has a crisis, and it is in in Buhari’s hands now. He can do the right thing or be remembered as the one in whose time those horses found those unlocked gates.
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