Failed leaders, blood and narrow interest
At
the end of the Rwandan political upheaval just over a decade ago,
more than one million people had been massacred. It was a
classic case of genocide in recent history reminiscent of the
extermination of an estimated six million Jews by Hitler’s NAZI
during World War II. But history is cyclical and underscores the
continuously ignored lesson that every contrived violence in man’s
history has advanced the economic and political profit of only a few
self-seeking men.
The ordinary Rwandans that survived the machetes and the thundering
guns have returned to their ordinary lives, far from the
‘pomp, glory and conceit’ of power for which their children and
parents were murdered in the ‘righteous’ cause of addressing tribal
grievances.
Often, the struggle for access to state resources among the
influential political or economic class is confounded by the
varying degrees of religious, racial or tribal differences in
the specific territory. When the struggle spill into the streets as
bloody warfare among the ordinary people, they are coloured as
religious, tribal or racial violence, leaving the real causes
untouched because it could undermine the short and long term
interests of the influential class who ignited the chaos.
But history, including contemporary history, is also replete with
inspiring stories of how the influential class, with a deep
sense of vision and responsibility has been able to provide
great leadership to carry an otherwise subdued community to look
beyond its primordial interest into a greater cause that
defines the human person irrespective of colour or creed.
Apartheid crashed into the dustbin of history in South Africa
because a few inspiring leaders refused to be denigrated by the base
desires that negates the greater good of the larger community.
The civil rights leaders in the United States offer a living proof
of what visionary leadership can do to address not just racial
discrimination but principles and social behaviors that reject
the equality of all humans and their rights to peace, opportunity
and prosperity. Mahatma Gandhi led a crop of leaders that
shaped India’s thinking beyond sectional interest for the greater
good of a country under imperial siege.
Thus, history has proven that influential men do at some times rise
to promote the common good of the greater community over their
own narrower interest. Unfortunately, Nigeria’s sluggish walk
to nation-state from a forceful amalgamation of clans and ethnic
kingdoms has been marked by the even narrower pursuit of its
few self-seeking, so-called political leadership, often priding
themselves as ethnic champions at their homestead and seeking to
also be regarded as national figures in Abuja.
Thus, in the deeper sense, the control of resource and the ability
to have access to that resource among a narrow interest group
remain the underlying cause of the Jos crises and most of the
crises elsewhere in Nigeria, nay Africa. The series of bloody
strives in Kaduna, the upheavals in Kano, the bloodshed and
the rising political tides in the Niger Delta that have been
hijacked by criminal elements; the murderous rages in the
south-west, all have their original causative factors in the
bankruptcy of the political class lacking vision and
innovative ideas to promote economic prosperity of the community
that could serve to secure its nobler interest. Imagine a
Nelson Mandela confined to see the response to the Apartheid
challenge through a narrower exigency of a Xhosa tribal chief.
Imagine a Gandhi resolving British imperialism in India
through the narrow pursuit of a Hindu agenda. Yet! These are
the traps into which many in the gifted membership of Nigerian
political class have fallen, including those that have had the
benefit of becoming truly national leaders, but who along the
way played the ethnic or religious cards to foster divisions among
the ordinary folks who look up to them.
The essence has always been to provide the much needed shield for
stolen national wealth or to secure the powerbase they have
appropriated at the national level through a gathering of the
‘tribe for a share of the national cake’. Of course, what the tribe
gets, if it gets anything at all, is trickles. The entire
Nigerian landscape is dotted with badly constructed roads,
white elephants and abandoned initiatives including scholarship
schemes and government funded NGOs under the offices of First
Ladies. In the first place, they were designed as conduits to
siphon illegitimate money to secret accounts in European and
American banks (the new favourite destinations are banks in Dubai
and the rest of Asia). The people’s wealth is locked away in
offshore banking vaults. Their mentality is tainted to see the
enemy as the other ethnic person who has equally been plundered and
denied the opportunity for growth. So while the people fight
and die, the corrupt political class share the booty of an abused
tribe.
While Jos burned, the British government was having final talks with
Nigeria’s central government on how to return already traced
stolen money that a former civilian governor of Plateau State
had hidden in British banks. The funds were originally appropriated
from the federal purse to develop Plateau State. But they
ended up inside the governor’s private bank accounts. Not many
can appreciate the link of failed and corrupt leadership to the
vanquishing of a hungry and frustrated people in bonfires on the
streets of Jos, Kaduna and elsewhere where the ordinary people
indulge in the ritual of self-annihilation.
Editor
Baobab magazine and
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