Tambuwal: between big men and impotent institutions

The class was comprised of brilliant technocrats from across a diverse field of human endeavour.  There was Craig Massey – Vice Chairman of Evan Energy Corporation; Robert Reuijl – President of Inter-American Coal; Dr Bobby Chhabra – Professor and Chair of the Orthopaedic Surgery Department at the University of Virginia as well as other senior […]

The class was comprised of brilliant technocrats from across a diverse field of human endeavour.  
There was Craig Massey – Vice Chairman of Evan Energy Corporation; Robert Reuijl – President of Inter-American Coal; Dr Bobby Chhabra – Professor and Chair of the Orthopaedic Surgery Department at the University of Virginia as well as other senior executives in the class of eighteen from NASA, America Science Foundation, Northrop Grumman Corporation among others.
Upon my return to Nigeria through the Nnamdi Azikiiwe Airport in Abuja penultimate weekend, the need for desperate change and retreat from the famished path our dear nation has been taken in recent times, if not the rapid economic growth Nigerians crave, could not have been more glaring.
To start with, the gangway leading from the aircraft leaked like a sieve because it rained on the day. The carpet leading from the same gangway into the arrival hall was a pale grey from its original colour of red. It was also torn in several places. The escalator leading down into the arrival hall creaked repeatedly to the embarrassment and annoyance of most Nigerians on the flight.
The pathetic situation contrasted sharply with the wonderful airport facilities we experienced at our point of departure barely seven hours earlier. It was hard to believe we were transiting through one of the numerous airports the immediate past Aviation Minister claimed to have renovated at colossal costs to Nigerian taxpayers.  
But that was only the beginning of our ordeal. Scores of officers from FAAN and other airport services now swarmed like vultures on the exhausted passengers making the already cramped space leading into the arrival hall even more inhospitable not to mention the baggage claims area which resembled a war zone.
The manner and demeanour with which most of the officers at the airport went about their duties also betrayed their primary motivation. Our airports are longer different from our streets and highways. Nigeria has become a large colony of beggars. We have become accustomed to the traditional beggars in their tattered clothes who confront us at different street corners on a daily basis, but thousands of our new breed of beggars in their starched uniforms assault our sensibilities at various road blocks as we transit from one place to another. And the way they ambush hapless Nigerians while pretending to be on official duty has become worrying because they are often armed and their methods can hardly be distinguished from actual robbery.
The situation at our airports, like the rest of occurrences in the rest of the polity, including, but not limited to the shocking denial of security protection of the Honourable Speaker of the House of Representatives Aminu Tambuwal, on account of his defection from the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressive Congress (APC), was the latest reminder of a nation on the drift aggravated by incompetent leadership and diminished institutions of statecraft.      
It was yet another damning reminder of how far adrift the nation is from the sort of genuine democracy critical for the overall growth and development of the country. Nigeria has had many corrupt and incompetent inspectors general of the police in the past, but this is the first IGP to ever contemplate the dubious responsibility of interpreting the constitution to explain a course of action that is both as irresponsible as it is also reprehensive. The question to ask is why?   
The program I attended at Darden may have been tailored to meet the expectations of corporate boardrooms, but in reality the lessons learnt can be used to explain the failure of every human endeavour including the success and failure of nation states.
The program involved three seemingly unrelated sequence of daily events over a one-week period which, put together, dispelled whatever doubts participants previously had on what it takes to build and maintain cohesive high performance teams which are resilient and goal-oriented. We had daily boat rowing sessions which culminated in the finale on the last day of the programme with an actual competition between the three teams of six participants from the pool of eighteen.
Each day started with breakfast followed by class sessions in the morning. At noon we departed for the University of Virginia Boat House for rowing lessons. Each rowing team was led by a competent coach from Team Concepts Incorporated led by Dan Lyons, a retired American Navy Officer and former World Champion Rowing Gold medallist for his nation. We had various case studies in the afternoons and syndicate classes in the evenings.
The program was gruelling in the end but the lessons were invaluable. We learnt what it takes to build high performing teams and how to position then on the part of growth by making them highly resilient by also knowing what we need to do to make them susceptible to change when it becomes necessary for their survival.
We learnt about the critical importance of goal-setting and staying true to a vision. We were drilled on the inevitable need for the alignment of the constituent and parts of the team which must all be in sync with the collective vision of the team to have the faintest chance of success. We knew from our rowing sessions that all it took for a team to fail is for one member of the six-member team to under-perform or ‘pick a crab’ – the rowing jargon for having one’s oar stuck in the water thereby slowing down the entire team. Needless to add, of course, that the team was also drilled on how to overcome even that sort of predicament.
The bigger and more fundamental lessons for me as I contemplated the rapidly unfolding events in the country, is that the more I looked the more I fail to see any of the critical buy-in required to make Nigerian project a resounding success from among its critical stakeholders. The recently concluded farce that passed for our national Confab proved just how deeply the various major ethnic groups loathed themselves.
 One lesson I learnt about building highly effective teams was about accommodating for weaknesses in the collective. The stronger members of the team did everything possible to bring the weaker members up to the desired level through constant encouragement and the recognition of roles in which they could be more effective to the collective. There was not a slightest hint at abandoning the weaker elements.
It is a common knowledge today that the insurgency in the North-Eastern part of the country is fuelled by the desperate economic condition of the region. The situation is so pathetic that even foreign governments have called for some form of Marshall Plan for the region. Yet, incredibly, at the same confab, there were strong agitations for the increase of allocations to the so-called oil producing states without the slightest concern to how it could drastically affect the resources accruable to the famished regions of the same republic.
That is not how to build a strong and resilient nation. Our leaders have repeatedly expressed the hope of joining the league of the twenty biggest economies in the world by 2020 without doing the critical homework necessary required to get there. They seem totally oblivious of the fact that to get there our political class must behave with greater responsibility.
Great and resilient nations do not evolve from the whims and caprices of big men alone but strong institutions which are equipped to protect will of the majority and the constitution that defines their commonwealth. Great nations do not emerge from the insatiable greed of a few, or the reprehensible folly of a snowballing colony of jesters to which the current IGP ultimately belongs.       
Great nations, like great teams, evolve when all the constituent parts share a collective vision agree to uphold a constitution supported by strong institutions that act in perfect synchrony in a manner that minimizes the damaging role of irresponsible big men of the type that traverse the African continent and much of the developing world like Dinosaurs. If we had that, no rascal would wake up one morning to say he has removed security protection from our Number Four citizen and the symbolic head of ‘the people’ in any virile democracy, no matter how imperfect, without consequences.