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- Celestous Juma, March 5, 2015
Last week, the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation formally presented in Lagos, the Awolowo Prize for Leadership to Mr. Thabo Mbeki, a former president of South Africa. Dr Tokunbo Awolowo-Dosunmu, Executive Director of the foundation, explained the choice of Mbeki as predicated on his willingness “to make huge sacrifice in defence of the great ideals he believes in.”
Very few would contest Mbeki’s entitlement to the accolade although some may ask whether the choice of a non- Nigerian is a reflection of the internationalisation of the prize in keeping with Awo’s global forte or whether it is an implied comment on the poverty of leadership in the Nigerian firmament. However that is, I crave the reader’s indulgence to enter two short takes.
Requiring clarification, at the very least is a statement credited to former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, that there are too many think-tanks in Nigeria. What Nigeria needs, Obasanjo quoted by The PUNCH reporter, Sam Awoyinfa, remarked, are “do tanks” (The PUNCH, March 6, 2015). It is difficult to uphold the statement that Nigeria which probably has less than 15 active think-tanks has too many of them. I take it that by think-tanks we are referring to organisations that engage in policy research and advocacy on matters that deal with different aspects of governance. This writer has often lamented the divorce between policymaking and research resulting in the virtual absence of substantial policy dialogue among both the political class and civil society. To illustrate the point, the vacuity and slogan dominated nature of the current presidential contest has been much lamented, not least by Prof Niyi Akinnaso in his piece, “2015 Campaign and glorification of mediocrity” (The PUNCH, March 10, 2015). Is this not a vacuum which think-tanks properly so-called can fill by setting policy agenda around which conversation can flourish? It is a crying shame as this writer leaning on Prof Bolaji Akinyemi observed last week that our politicians are now flocking to a British think-tank, Chatham House to make policy pronouncements.
Is this not an eloquent admission of our failure to develop a national scientific infrastructure from which think-tanks derive? Whether we downgrade evidence-based policymaking or not, other countries will continue to make use of it. Recall in this respect that the conservative monetarist revolution which became a global wave in the 1980s and 1990s came from intellectual kites that were first flown in conservative think-tanks in the United States and Britain. When this right wing revolution fully unfolded, our politicians had no answers to it beyond buzz words borrowed from the West such as “structural adjustment with a human face”.
The prescription that governance should be informed by intellectual depth and sound ideas has a distinguished ancestry dating back in the West to Plato’s academy and in African societies to the flowering of a scholarly priestly class. If we do not harness the potential of marrying intellect to power we leave ourselves open to the scheming and stratagems of countries and societies which do.
Influential novelist and scholar, Prof Kole Omotosho, in a rejoinder to a recent article by this columnist has come up with an explanation as to why corruption flourishes in our country. Argued Omotosho: “The problem is not corruption but unpunished corruption. Where corruption is less, it is because it is punished where it occurs. Now, punishment causes disruption and nobody wants the disruption consequent on such severance of relations. If we punish corruption, what happens to families, to friendship, to old school tie, to home boy? If we punish corruption, we disrupt the comfort of what I call RELATHIEVES and we need to seek new and fresh relatives.”
My takeaway from Omotosho’s insightful intervention is that the country needs to throw up leaders and institutions that are prepared to leave their comfort zones brimming over with RELATHIEVES in order to create a better society. Daunting but not impossible task.
Going back to our main comment, it is important as Prof Celestous Juma mentions in the opening quote for countries to leapfrog in the search for leadership by rewarding as the Awo foundation is doing, leadership excellence. In a country like ours where the high and mighty create their own awards of excellence, it is noteworthy that this particular leadership award has not been auctioned or traded off in the country’s multiplying bazaars of meaningless awards.
Neutral spaces uncontaminated by partisanship or cash and carry practices are hard to come by in our country. The courts hand out polluted judgments, our media though still vibrant regrettably line up behind political warlords while even the hallowed portals of religion have been invaded by political racketeering. In this tawdry context, finding spaces that exist above the political fray is of considerable relief and the foundation is enjoined thereby to maintain the standard it has set for itself.
As Mbeki correctly noted in his acceptance speech, the challenges that confront Nigeria and other African countries require not just another Awolowo but many Awolowos. That is, building a leadership cadre in which the virtues associated with great African leaders become the norm. To do this, Mbeki has usefully suggested an emphasis on leadership studies in our universities undertaken with the aim of refreshing national memories about the labours of our heroes past as well as teaching the values that make for outstanding leaders.
It is important in this connection to inaugurate awards of leadership excellence across the occupational, generational and social strata. As of now, there are few awards of substantial merit that reward excellence in such diverse terrains as the professions, sports, music and the like. In order to increase the possibility of raising the quality of leadership at the top, we need to diffuse leadership values across the entire spectrum of society including our local communities. This of course is not a task that any one foundation can undertake, but one which should enlist the energies of state and society. In our literature, one encounters frequently the ideas of a deus ex machina or intervention of the gods that will right all wrongs and jerk slumbering people awake. There is of course a grain of truth in this theme but it has the disadvantage of chloroforming citizens who refuse to take action in their immediate environments because they are waiting for a Messiah. Such a mindset has been regrettably updated in the ongoing campaign as one of the presidential candidates has been constructed as a messiah in waiting armed with a magic broom to sweep away decades of accumulated dirt.
In the opinion of this writer, a bottom-up approach to leadership renewal which envisages the renovation of values, institutions and policies in dynamic context is more believable and more productive. That I believe is what Mbeki was hinting at while recognising the extraordinary impact of leaders like Awolowo, nonetheless went on to advocate “the formation of the cadre of thought leaders and transformation agents which our continent needs.”
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