RABI’UL-THANI 232, 1429 A.H
TUESDAY, APRIL 29 2008
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Leadership challenges in Nigeria (I)
By Father Matthew Hassan Kukah
Introductory Remarks
AS a game, snakes & ladders capture the frustrations and the hopes of real life. The game itself consists of two or more players randomly throwing a die. The game was first conceived in India as a way of teaching children to embrace virtue and avoid evil. As such, on the board on which the game is played, there are fewer ladders and more snakes. The ladders represent hope and goodness captured in such virtues as generously, humility, love, compassion and faith. The snakes represent such manifestations of evil as lust, avarice, anger and greed.
To play the game a player rolls the die, movement on the ladders is determined by the numbers that appear on the face of the die when it is cast by the player. The higher the numbers shown on the face of the die (1-6), the higher you go on the ladder. But onwards progression does not mean victory in the game. When your opponent rolls the die, his hope is to secure the numbers, that will enable the snake to bite you. One you are bitten by his snake, you have to return to the base of the ladder. It is that frustration arising from being bitten by the snake and having to watch you climbing back again that gives joy to your opponent! And so the game goes on marked by climbing and falling! On its own, the game is a bit boring because it is simple and requires very little skills. It dies not task the brain as say, Chess might do. Despite the fact that players tend to turn and twist the die in their hand or make some incantations, your fortunes depend on the roll of the die. How does this game relate to Leadership in Nigeria?
I believe that the game of snakes and ladders represents one of the best metaphors for addressing the issues of Leadership in our country today. A much used, abused and misunderstood concept, leadership has become a popular mantra of daily life in our society, Nigerians have all been sold to the idea that the problems of our nation have been compounded by poor leadership.
Thanks to a media that has gone into over drive, one gets the feeling that these are the worst of times for Nigeria. But anyone who understands this country knowns that this road is familiar to all of us especially for a nation that seems to progress in reverse gear.
A gathering of politicians, women groups, civil society organizations, religious bodies, the academia, seeking solutions to the nation’s problems will come to the conclusion that our leaders have failed us. But, when you press any of these groups or individuals further and seek clarification or the causes of this leadership failure, you get a slightly different response.
The University lecturers believe that the government is not offering good leadership.
The students believe that the university authorities and many of their lectures are not offering good leadership.
Women believe that men have dominated the scene and they are not offering good leadership.
The older generation believes the present generation of leaders today have destroyed the legacies of the past.
What we have now is no longer leadership that is capable of service, but a bunch of greedy people who have replaced honour with selfishness. Things may be bad generally, but there is no consensus as to who caused the damage. The diagnosis is a curious exercise in buck passing.
The political elite blame the military for destroying the foundations of the leadership school. The military argue that had the civilians displayed the slightest disposition towards some from of decency and uprightness, there would have been no need for their interventions which, in their (military) view were necessary to steer the ship of state back on course!
But even in the response, there is a multiplicity of voices. Southerners and Northerners, Christians and Muslims all trade blame as to who is to be blamed.
The shrill voices in the Lazarus conference on the de-industrialization of Northern Nigeria provided a perfect example of how this blame game is played. Not unexpectedly, the conference provided an opportunity for the Northern elite to shift blame for their colossal failure in Leadership from themselves to external to external forces of darkness whom they claimed have compared to destroy the industrial life in the North. In their conclusion, singing on a lachrymal note, the sinners presented themselves as victims of Southern conspiracy who had been sinned against!
Beyond the narrow confines of regionalism, Ethnicity, Religion or class as spring boards for this game of denial, how might we reframe the issues surrounding Leadership in Nigeria?
In my modest attempt in this paper, I will try to see if I can slightly provoke us to think a bit differently on the issues of leadership.
Can we, to use the popular expressions, shift the paradigm. In seeking to do this, I will divide this paper into three sections and end with a conclusion.
First, I will try to define and look at what I call leadership typologies.
Secondly, I will briefly examine our experience and with a view to identifying what may have gone wrong with us.
Thirdly, I will try to reframe the issues and argue that perhaps we actually do need to think differently about leadership since I believe we may have been answering the wrong questions.
By way of conclusion, I will summarise the argument s and present some bullet points as to how we can take advantage of the present environment that democracy offers us to think more clearly about the need to deepen a leaders culture.
Leadership, Theory or practice? Some conceptual clarifications.
Although there is a vast cache of literature on leadership, the subject has continued to elicit mixed reactions and controversies. From the verb to lead, Leadership is the exercise of, the operational expression of the verb. Perhaps this is the beginning of the confusion. The fact that Leadership, is an act like walking, talking or playing, all of us will naturally do it differently as such, we can appreciate why there will necessarily be intense debate. The various definitions and interpretations of leadership have either elicited more confusion or generated even more intense debates.
Definitions of leadership tend to focus on such key concepts as influence, mobilising, taking charge, exercising power, persuasion, control, manipulation and so on. If that is the case , can we therefore ascribe some relativity to the concept? In order words, is leadership value free or neutral concept? In what way can we disaggregate these concepts or can all who manifest them quality to be called leaders?
We all know that wielding influence is not enough since this influence could be negative or positive. Is the leader of a riot group that attacks and destroys property and lives different from the leaders of a group of volunteers who decide to clean the streets?
For example in what way do we think of the leadership of such men as; Hitler, Charles Talyor, Jim Jones, Mobutu Sese Seko, Jean Bedel Bokassa, Osama Bin Laden or Nelson Madela, Mohandas Gandhi, Churchill, Lincoln?
What makes one person’s influence different from the other?
Here in Nigeria, can we say that people like the late Dr.Nnamdi Azikwe, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Aminu Kano, Chief Awolowo are all leaders in the same way that Col Ojukwu, Maitatsine, Adaka Boro, Faseun, Uwazurke, or Asari Dokubo, and others were?
In their own ways, all these men wielded tremendous influence and control over the hearts and minds of a vast number of people. So, why does the name of one leader elicit a different reaction from the other? From the above, we can at least begin to appreciate the fact that the concept of leadership cannot be understood or narrowed down to the attainment or possession of the ability to command obedience.
When we speak of the leadership offered by particular individuals, many of us might then have to introduce a prefix, saying, it depends. The prefix it depends might itself not even be value free because, as the saying goes, one man’s meat is another man’s poison Nelson Madela, Gandhi, Nkrumah, Nasser and all those heroes who were associated with our freedoms are considered leaders while the colonial state, the perpetrator of what they saw as injustice considered them as rebels and traitors fit only for death or jail.
Thus, whereas they may have been locked up or exiled on grounds that they were rebels without a cause, to their people, they were even martyrs with a cause! Let us therefore now turn our attention to what I call leadership typologies so as to widen the context of our discussions.
There is a fallacy that has become very popular and is now an adage. It says that leaders a re born not made! As such, many people feel that there is no need for individuals to worry about seeking leadership positions.
This was the dubious foundation on which feudalist tyrants built the house of sand they called the divine right of kings! Today, even politicians with questionable mandates are wont to simply remind themselves and the rest of us that leadership comes from God and that He gives it to whom He wills! True as this may be, most of those who spin the idea merely often wish to legitimize their claims to power. The concept and the issues are more complex especially in a democracy where access is competitive. Here, the concept is misleading and an anti thesis to our democratic culture.
Although there are many ways of framing the typologies, I will focus on only four schools of thought in the Leadership discourse.
These are, the situational, contingency and the transactional and character/traits schools of thought.
Briefly. Let me explain each of them. Each an everyone of them is controversial and none of them should be seen as full proof or even taken on its own as they are very closely related. They are and should be the subject of intense debate and discussions and I therefore hope that even beyond these confines, we can continue to debate these typologies and feel free to add many more. Inconclusive as they may be, they do offer us a wide enough template to contest or ideas and concepts of Leadership.
It will be discovered that there is a very thin line that separates these theories and as we shall see, there are very many overlapping in the claims and the contexts of their explanations.
The situationalist school argues that leadership arises from situations in which a given society finds itself. As such, it is circumstances that throw up the challenges that enable individuals to rise up to Leadership positions. This school would argue that it was the injustices done to black people under apartheid in south Africa that three up the likes of Govan Mbeki and Nelson Mandela.
In the same way, it is the conditions of racial segregation and the injustices against black people that led to the emergence of the likes of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X or the Rev Martin Luther King in the United States.
Here at home, the colonial state for example created the necessary conditions for the emergence of our first nationalists such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Saudauna of Sokoto, Aminu Kano, Chief Awolowo and hundreds of others.
