Freedom and Responsibility
by Dr. Obed O. Mailafia (O.MAILAFIA@AFDB.ORG)
The last couple of years have been years of exceptional turmoil and upheaval
in our country. During the darkest days of our benighted republic, many
courageous voices in this country and abroad were raised in defence of human
liberty. Some of our patriots paid for their exceptional courage with their
own lives while others suffered imprisonment, torture and exile, among other
forms of persecution. And it is fitting that we honour those patriots who have
given so much by way of sacrifice so that the light of liberty may never be
extinguished in this long-suffering land of blood and tears. Throughout those
days we have heard so much about freedom and about the Rights of Man. What I
am about to say may cause some unease in a number of quarters: At the risk of
sounding re-actionary, I should like to contend that perhaps it is time we
heard less about rights and more about duties. One does not have to be a cynic
to see that human rights are virtually becoming an industry, an industry whose
primary stakeholders are not the Nigerian people but the international
development set and their aid recipients. It is of course easy in human
affairs for good causes to be hijacked by opportunists and other free riders.
Let's look at it this way. Human rights are a worldwide problem. True, indeed.
They are not just an African problem, although African abuses tend to be more
pronounced and exacerbated due to poverty, instability and civil strife. In
recent years minorities in Ger-many, France, Belgium and the United States,
have been the victims of all sorts of serious human rights abuses. Racism and
fascism are highly endemic in the post-Cold War Europe. But these are hardly
ever featured in the human rights rhetoric of the international development
set. It is perhaps for this reason that the Singaporeans and the Chinese have
always vehemently rejected the Western agenda of human rights. They have
always insisted that there is a unique 'Asian Standard'. They have been wary
of foreign human rights concepts that, if imported lock, stock, and barrel,
are likely to do more harm than good to Asian stability and cohesion.
According to this argument whilst Western liberalism puts emphasis on what the
philosopher C. B. MacPherson calls "possessive individualism", the non-western
approach tends to stress the precedence of the community over the individual.
This is in fact the fundamental grundnorm - if I may use the Germanic
juridical term - which underlies the African Charter of Human and Peoples'
Rights. Not too long ago in England the human rights agenda was carried to a
rather ridiculous extreme: Gays were demanding the right to proselytise in
schools, and to do so using local council funds. I think we would all agree
that this campaign for the rights of homosexuals and transsexuals would be
simply baffling to most Africans, to say the least. I suspect that a time will
come when our own 'activists' will begin to harangue us with similar demands.
Our own human rights industry seems more than eager to impose on us agendas
whose long-term purposes may have nothing at all to do with civil liberties or
the well-being and stability of our republic or indeed our own understanding
of the moral universe.
It is obvious that human rights cannot be divorced from the cultural and
political context. A relatively young and in many ways experimental, country
such ours has to tread with great care in this area. Where would China be
today if it had succumbed to the demands of the students at Tiananmen Square?
It would have spelt, in my view, the beginning of the end for the delicate
balance that has held China together as a corporate entity since Mao and his
fellow revolutionaries captured power in 1949. One fact that was hardly ever
mentioned by the international media was that the students at Tiananmen were
extremely racist in some of their demands. They had earlier attacked African
students as Aids-carriers and had called for their immediate repatriation.
Tragic as the bloody suppression was, I believe it was quite healthy for
Chinese sovereignty that Beijing did what they had to do while ignoring
foreign ranting about human rights. External support for so-called 'human
rights' in China has more to do with fostering fissiparous tendencies in order
to weaken a rising Asian colossus than about the humanitarian desire to
protect individual liberties of the Chinese people. In our own country some of
the so-called 'pro-democracy' - whatever that means - activists and
organizations have been largely funded from outside. This, as far as I am
concerned, greatly compromises their political and moral legitimacy.
Oppressive and dehumanizing as it was, our situation was not the moral
equivalent of Apartheid in South Africa, which the UN and the entire world
community had condemned as a crime against humanity and a violation of the
most sacred precepts of the law of nations. It was right and proper that the
ANC and other anti-Apartheid groups sought and did receive support from
external sympathizers. In this country we were faced with a military junta
comprising of our own countrymen who had taken it upon themselves to lord it
over us. They were a tiny band of criminals. As such, it was a domestic affair
requiring a domestic solution. One is hard put to defend the view that some of
these 'human rights' and environmentalist organizations are not merely part of
the instrumental paraphernalia of the international development set in their
eagerness to meddle in the domestic affairs of poor countries. A lot of gold,
diamonds and emeralds and other precious stones are to be found in Southern
Kaduna, the region where I was born. It would not be that difficult to get
myself bankrolled here in London and re-packaged as a so-called environmental
or human rights activist claiming to be fighting for my oppressed people, the
Ninzam people, who inhabit the area. Loaded with pounds, Euros, dollars and
Lord knows what else, one could then return home to pursue a rabble-rousing
project, leading to chaos, anarchy and civil disturbance.
International forces know only too well that African political systems are
weak and highly vulnerable to ethnic and sectarian manipulation. They also
know that overloading the central machinery of state with all sorts of
impossible demands would be the surest way of overturning the apple cart. It
is a more economical and more effective means of undermining those societies
than declaring outright war against the state. In our sister-country of Sierra
Leone, much of the civil war there was financed by Lebanese and Syrian diamond
smugglers, among other mercenaries. It was quite incredible that even
Ukrainian soldiers of fortune, who had painted themselves with black ink, were
to be found among the rebels. The same story goes for mineral-rich countries
such as Zaire and Angola. Some multinationals are creating private armies to
wreck havoc to African security in the name of defending private investment
interests. A German recently had the effrontery to remark to my hearing that
the state in Africa has no future. Slavery is a state of mind, just as freedom
and independence are largely matters of political habit and social praxis. If
we have the habit of constantly allowing others to denigrate everything
African and to level the entire region as consisting of nothing but 'failed
states'? to use a pernicious expression? then sooner or later someone
somewhere would be called upon to legitimize the recolonisation of Africa.
Unless we show clearly and rigorously that the state, the good state, should
be protected and defended, we are simply playing the game of losers.
My point is that human rights must go hand in hand with commitment to civic
responsibility and patriotism. Our own human rights activists have studiously
avoided the all-important question of civic responsibility. From them we have
heard next to nothing about the imperatives duty - about the duties we owe our
communities, our families, our neighbourhoods and our country. Lest my
critique is taken amiss, I would hasten to say that some of those who have
been at the forefront of the human rights struggle deserve the highest honours
that this country can bestow. A man such as Chief Gani Fawehinmi ? whom I
would rank as our own Soc-rates and national gadfly - deserves more honours
than an entire gaggle of brigadiers put together. Dr Beko Ransome Kuti is a
genuine patriot and one of the great Nigerians of our generation. The work of
the Civil Liberties Organisation, lead by gifted young leaders of the likes of
Olisa Agbakoba (Senior Advocate of Nigeria) are deserving of praise and
commendation. Our country is the richer that we can count such men among its
citizens.
As it turns out, and to all intents and purposes, we are all human rights
champions now. We all agree that all sorts of sordid and bestial things were
done by Abacha and agents like Gwarzo, Hamza, Omenka and their cohorts.
Killings, disappearances, hired assassins and mindless graft were the order of
the day, thanks to the unhappy reign of these evil men. Human rights were
indeed abused in Nigeria. And it is right and fitting that we condemn the
vampire regime that started with the self-styled 'Maradona' (General Ibrahim
Babangida) and reached its nadir in the illiterate Lilliputian called Sani
Abacha. They were birds of the same feather, the one a logical extension of
the other. Contrary to what some may think, Abacha was nobody's fool, demented
though he was. The gargoyle spotting the ominous dark glasses simply carried
to its logical and absurd conclusion the antediluvian system of rule based on
shameless kleptomania which Maradona and his fellow travelers had earlier
perfected. Why smile at people when you know your rule is killing them slowly?
Why bribe them when you can simply corner the whole treasury to yourself? Why
even pretend there is a military council? Why not simply rule as a military
Sultan and arrogate to yourself the right over the life and death of all those
who have the misfortune to call themselves your countrymen? Our self-styled
"evil genius" was possessed of the same ruling spirit, although he camouflaged
it with the false veneer of cosmopolitan refinement. In reality, his primary
instincts were and remain those of the highway. Our military Sultan had the
sense to do without those pretensions. I always warned my Yoruba compatriots
that Abacha's real wish was to foment a war in the West, and that a war
started in Yorubaland would have given him the best excuse to remain in power.
He incarnated and personified the paradigm of irresponsibility in our country.
He really did not give a damn if Nigeria survived or dissolved into the ether.
What mattered, as far as he was concerned, was that he had arms to protect
himself and that he had un-trammelled access to the national treasury. Even
the outgoing Abdulsalam and his treas-ury-emptying cabaret cannot escape their
share of the blame. It was unsoldierly and cowardly of them not to have owned
up to the fact that that they and Abacha had all along been in the same game.
Mariam Abacha said as much. Instead of owning up and seriously repenting for
their sins at their moment of ungraceful departure, they proceeded to behave
like bandits who had landed on a pot of gold. President Obasanjo would be well
advised to avoid any future contact with "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves".
In our country far too many skeletons remain to be uncovered. I suspect that
there are not a few robber barons that ought to be put behind bars. If you see
them on the road driving by in a Rolls Royce and enjoying their ill-gotten
wealth, never be tempted to envy them. Always remind yourself that this is
blood money - money made from the blood and sweat of our people. Never give
them any honours and always remember that these people are nothing but common
criminals. It is a shame that we in Nigeria have lost our sense of values and
have tended to defer to people who have lost the right to sit at table with
elders and with all men of honour. As a basic minimum those of them who are
known to have committed blatant acts of treasury looting should have been made
to forfeit their statutory pensions. A criminal should have no rights that
should only properly belong to law-abiding citizens. It is now a law in Tony's
Blair's Britain that a policeman caught in corrupt practices would have to
forfeit his pension or at least a large chunk of it. It is regrettable that
the remit of the panel recently set up by the Obasanjo administration does not
extend to the question of financial restitution going as far back as 1984. I
suspect that some people are celebrating their having been left off the hook.
Somebody somewhere is literally getting away with murder. Having said this, it
is not my intention to paint every senior officer in the Nigerian military
with a black paint. That would be grossly unfair to those of them who are
patriotic and God-fearing professionals. In the course of my career some of
the best Nigerians I have ever met have surprisingly been men and women in
uniform. Outstanding officers such as Yakubu Danjuma, Yohanna Madaki and
Ishola Williams can command any armies in any part of the world, including
America, Britain and Russia. The Nigerian Army still reserves a modicum of
dignity only because such officers and gentlemen such as these have served in
it.
The main contention of this essay is that, having spent all these years asking
what our country owes us, it is time our country demanded from us what we can
and must do for her. We need to address ourselves to the following pressing
questions: What is our responsibility as citizens in a free democracy? What
are our duties as parents, as teachers, as community leaders, as civil
servants and as politicians? Are there indeed responsibility-ties that
inescapably go with freedom in a democracy? Isn't it obvious that freedom
with-out responsibility would simply lead to anarchy? And where there is
anarchy, society be-comes what the international lawyers call a terra nullius
- a no-man's land devoid of constitutional order, law, morality and all the
other requirements of civilised existence.
The real tragedy of our time is not merely that of human rights. It is also
about the absence of responsibility. When the British departed in 1960 there
were a few secondary school dropouts who found a military career as the best
escape from a life destined for pedestrian obscurity. They suddenly and
unexpectedly found themselves catapulted to the summits of power and
leadership in our country, thanks to the vicious circle of military praetorian
interventionism in the civil polity. They were now in a position to give it
back to those who had been their intellectual betters at school. It was like a
pig finding itself miraculously enthroned in the most royal and exalted of
palaces. They knew in their hearts of hearts that they were usurpers who did
not merit to be there, and they proceeded to behave exactly like people who
did not merit those high offices of state. For most of them, responsibility
was not a word that featured in the lexicon of public duty. Having tasted what
Winston Churchill called "the ambrosia of power", they proceeded to behave
with increasing recklessness and irresponsibility. A senior military officer
once narrated to me how he shot and killed two suspected armed robbers in the
vicinity of Yaba Bridge in Lagos. They had stopped him to ask for a lift as he
was driving by. But he believed they were armed robbers. I asked him what
happened next. He said of course he drove off, what else? Did he feel
accountable to anyone? No. Was it his duty to report the incident to the
police? Hell, yes. He had no sense of responsibility or accountability to
anyone. And if I may give yet another anecdote, a tragic episode involving
someone I personally knew very well. He was a major at the time and a
university graduate to boot. He had accompanied his commander on a shopping
spree abroad. This was in the late 1980s, before we had acquired our
international pariah status. The civilian driver who picked up his luggage at
the airport is accused of making off with one of the suitcases. The poor chap
is taken to the army barracks for some 'disciplining'. The following day he is
re-turned to his pregnant wife in a body bag. Did anyone take responsibility?
No. Should anyone have been made to answer a few questions? By Jove, yes. A
civilised society cannot be built on the foundations of self-help. That can
only be the law of the jungle, a law fit only for barbarians. A civil order is
built on the basis of the rule of law and of respect for the established
machinery of justice in society.
It would of course be foolhardy to see the evil in military regimes while
ignoring the culpability of their civilian accomplices. The professional
military coup plotters have always insisted that in nearly every single coup
civilians have always been directly or indirectly involved, either as
instigators or financiers or both. Civilians must therefore take their full
share of the blame for the evil perpetrated by military tyrants. Some of the
soi-disant intellectuals among us have virtually made careers out of totting
their CVs at the sound of every solemn proclamation of, "Our fellow
countrymen?" From regime to regime, these miserable gold-diggers were always
to be seen peddling their half-baked political theories for a mesh of naira
pottage. They are our latter-day Sophists - those mercenary teachers whom the
great Greek philosophers condemned. Many of our careerist politicians ? some
of them with no known means of gainful employment - have been the political
pimps of their military paymasters. Our politicians and intellectuals cannot
run away from their roles as accomplices in the systematic destruction of our
country. Some of our eminently distinguished citizens, figures such as Olikoye
Ransome-Kuti and Eme Awa, have been the rare exceptions in an otherwise sordid
record of intellectual collusion in military tyranny. It is salutary that some
of our intellectuals heroically kept themselves from being polluted by
Babylonian military harlot who fornicated so shamelessly with virtually all
the members of our political class. At an international conference in the late
1980s, I once teased the late Professor Claude Ake with the suggestion that
perhaps he was about to be "settled" by way of an Ambassadorship somewhere in
Europe or North America. I still recollect his exact words: "God forbid!" It
seemed the mere suggestion had made him literally sick. Professor Wole Soyinka,
in spite of his occasional infantile outpourings, must be seen and treated as
a national treasure. Almost single-handedly, he was the voice and conscience
of our oppressed and long-suffering people in exile. Some of the
pronouncements made by his enemies and critics make them look even smaller
before the shadow of this patriot of world stature. At home, our most
distinguished scholars - men such as Ade Ajayi, Bala Usman, Chinua Achebe,
Tekena Tamuno - have maintained a Pharaonic dignity throughout the long night
of the barbarians. They are the true moral sentinels of our country.
Do intellectuals have any responsibility in the making of great nations? Yes,
of course, they do. The founders of the American republic ? George Washington,
John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson ? were as much intellectuals as they
were practical men of the world. Thomas Gariggue Masaryk, the revered
founder-president of the former Czechoslovakian republic was a distinguished
philosopher. Our own nationalist leaders in Africa, among them Nnamdi Azikiwe,
Obafemi Awolowo, Amilcar Cabral and Julius Kambarage Nyerere, were serious and
disciplined thinkers. The task of national guidance, moral as well as
intellectual, has been the province of the men and women of ideas since
Aristotle, Kautilya and Ibn Khaldun. The guidance of nations is the most
sacred role of the intellectual. Never called to be a millionaire, the scholar
nevertheless accumulates billions in terms of the wealth of memories stored in
the hearts and minds of posterity. Who will remember the Sultan of Brunei or
Bill Gates after a thousand years? Probably nobody. But I can assure you that
the names of Newton, Plato, and Einstein will remain imperishable as long as
Reason remains the defining quality of the human species. The thinker's role
is exalted because he lives not for the material comforts of the present but
for the timeless ideals of eternity. The role of the intellectual is to be the
guardian of Rea-son, justice, morality, and the common good. His or her
vocation is to teach and to warn and to inspire to higher human purposes. The
intellectual keeps ever before him the vision of Truth, Goodness and Beauty.
He is the exemplar of all that is noble and refined in all human excellencies.
When he loses such a vision he betrays his calling. When a lecturer forces a
female student into a corner where she has to compromise her womanhood in
order to pass an exam, he clearly falls below the minimum standard in his
profession; he ought to be dismissed at once. When a professor grovels
shamelessly before little men in uniform he does a profound disservice to the
intellectual world community. And we must of necessity look askance at this
deference to inferior men. When, like the immortal Okigbo, the intellectual
sides with his own little 'tribe', pitting "Umuleri against Ugwul-eri", or "Ijaw
against Itsekiri", "Kuteb against whoever", what are we to make of it? I think
we have to conclude, as Professor Ali Mazrui does conclude in the Trial of
Christopher Okigbo, that the intellectual has tragically failed in his
vocation as guardian of the Universal.
What about the responsibility of the politician and the civil servant? What is
the responsibility of all those charged with the task of managing our public
administration? We cannot escape from the simple fact that the political class
has been the paradigm of civic irresponsibility in our country. Under the
present dispensation, some of the Old Guard are returning in full force, some
of them sadly with their old chicaneries in tow. They still predominate over
the so-called 'new breed' politicians. In the second republic parliamentarians
required bribes before they could even read a draft legislation, let alone
approve it. The Speaker himself moonlighted as a car importer; parliamentary
votes had to be paid for by way of cars or coloured television and videos by
the hapless Shehu Aliyu Usman Shagari. And who would forget the gun-totting
rogue who once taunted his op-posing interlocutor with a gun during a full
session of parliament? If a British MP had the nerve to show a gun in
parliament, his actions would be considered an act of high treason against the
British nation and against the mother of parliaments. How sad that in
Nigeria's second republic it was laughed away as a rather baroque display of
eccentricity. And more recently, a former mercenary-arms-dealer-turned-senator
had the chic to stop the senate from sitting through the technicality of a
court action. Somebody somewhere is unaware that parliaments the world over
are protected by constitutional law from judicial action. In the United
Kingdom parliament is supreme, and not even the Queen in all her royal majesty
can stop the House from sitting. This again illustrates the lightness with
which individuals in our country can hijack institutions of state and paralyse
the machinery of government for the sake of frivolous gains. Recently reports
alleged a massive bribery scandal in the House of Representatives in my home
state of Kaduna. Where is political responsibility in all this?
In the matter of civic responsibility, our lawmakers must set the example by
unfailingly and consistently upholding the law of the land. In England
parliamentarians have legal immunity for whatever they do or say in their
official capacity. But they lose such immunity when they violate the laws of
the land. A recent case is that of Jonathan Aitken, a former senior minister
in the government of Prime Minister John Major. Two weeks ago he was sentenced
to prison for eighteen months for lying about who paid his Ł1000 bill during a
private stay at the Ritz hotel in Paris. He had taken a national daily, the
Guardian and its editor Alan Rusbridger, to court for libel. He lost. In the
course of the proceedings it transpired that he had perjured himself and lied
consistently. He was charged for perjury and sentenced. Scion of the great
newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook; an old Etonian and graduate of Oxford
university; a successful businessman and founder of a multi-billion pound
merchant bank; a Privy Councillor and adviser to the Queen; a debonair and
handsome womaniser who jilted Caroline, daughter of Mrs Thatcher. The world
was quite literally Jonathan Aitken's oyster. Those whom the gods wish to
destroy they first intoxicate with the fateful wine of hubris. Haughty and
arrogant, he became entangled in the chains of his own deceits. Once a
powerful minister and seen by many as a future prime minister, he is today an
inmate of Belmarsh prison, a jail for common criminals. While one is almost
tempted to feel sorry for him for going to jail for what many would consider a
mere indiscretion, it is nevertheless a landmark case for British justice and
democracy. It means that no matter how politically exalted or well connected
anybody may be, he or she cannot be placed above the laws of the land. It
reminds one of a remark by Alexis de Tocqueville, to the effect that in its
essence democracy is about equality before the law rather than about the
equality of conditions.
How many parliamentarians in Nigeria's second republic did openly take bribes
and per-form other illegalities under cover of presumed parliamentary
immunity? While our MPs are the watchdogs of the other arms of government, the
judiciary, the police and the Fourth Estate should also be watchdogs of the
dignity of the legislature and its members.
And what about the civil servants? It is a known fact that the large-scale
corruption for which our country has become notorious throughout the world has
been done with the connivance and sometimes direct participation, of our civil
servants. It is an axiom of management science that bad leaders prefer to work
with incompetents and inferior minds. With the sort of intellectual and moral
bankrupts who have been ruling Nigeria in the last fifteen years, it is not
surprising that those who have risen to the highest positions in the public
service have tended to be not men and women of ability. There was indeed a
time when our civil service was as good as any in the world. Sadly, this is no
longer the case. The evils that civil servants can do are particularly
pernicious because they can operate from the shadowy background of
bureaucratic anonymity. It would be interesting to study civil service files
over the last fifteen years to find out what advice civil servants gave to the
military oligarchy. But there are also stories of hope. A diplomat of my own
generation, known for his high ability and integrity, was invited to work in
the Presidency. Given that these regimes are by nature terribly uneasy with
those rare individuals who combine intelligence and virtue, a few millions had
been secretly deposited in his bank account without his knowledge. When he
discovered it he raised questions about its provenance. He was told that "the
powers that be" felt he ought to have some compensation for all his pains. To
their astonishment, he did the most 'un-Nigerian' of things: he turned it
down. He politely but firmly asked that the money be withdrawn at once
otherwise he would have no choice but to leave the government. They complied.
And it was not as if he was from a rich family. He was just a humble young man
who happened to have a conscience and who believed in his country. Similarly,
a top advisor during the Shagari regime, a professor, was once offered vast
sums of money from the public treasury. He vehemently turned it down. He
refused to be corrupted. Now, these are stories of genuine heroism that have
gone virtually unsung and unremarked. This however cannot absolve our higher
civil service of collusion in some of the systematic pillage of our country.
In our fledgling democracy civil servants must awaken to their constitutional
responsibilities. Anti-corruption slogans alone will not do the trick. We
would probably need a system of judicial review as currently obtains in
English constitutional law. It is a system that exposes governmental actions
to judicial scrutiny while protecting citizens from ultra vires actions and
governmental highhandedness.
What about the youth, on whose breast, all the hopes of the future rest?
Joseph Mazzini, that great prophet who championed the national rebirth of
Italy, remarked that it is the youth that bear in their hearts the sign of the
future. Sadly, the behaviour of our youth gives us little or no hope. Students
in our universities have constituted themselves into all sorts of atavistic
cults, terrorising campuses and even killing fellow students and their
lecturers. To the best of my knowledge, there is almost no other country on
earth where such a phenomenon occurs. Some of our youth clearly haven't
understood the meaning of responsibility. Young men and women who see the
bringing down of buildings and the burning down of every movable object as the
only means of expressing political grievances clearly have a long way to go in
understanding the imperatives of civic culture. Our democracy will survive
only if we embark on a complete re-education of our country, focusing in
particular on the youth that will inherit the mantle of leadership in the next
generation.
In the building of the new Nigeria of our dreams, the practice of freedom must
go hand in hand with the practice of responsibility. It is one thing to have a
good constitution; it is quite another to run the affairs of the land in
accordance with its letter and its spirit. A constitution in itself does not a
republic make. The building of a democracy has to be a slow and sometimes
painful process, involving surgical operations here and there, weeding out bad
eggs, locking out a few scoundrels, mobilising men and women and creating a
moral and intellectual climate which facilitates the flourishing of the rule
of law, commerce, industry and the arts. We can succeed in this effort if we
begin not on the basis of rights that we can demand as just deserts against
the state. We have to begin with the claims of duty. I believe that Rousseau
erred in claiming that "Man is born free". I believe the opposite: Man was
born not free but in chains ? the chains of duty. It is in everyone fulfilling
his or her duties that society and indeed civilisation as we know it is built.
Without social order the claims of liberty will have little or no meaning.
Every citizen and indeed anyone in a position of power - be he a judge or
politician or civil servant or policeman or customs official - must always ask
first and foremost: what are my duties? To whom am I accountable and for what?
What do I owe Nigeria? What are my inescapable duties to my parents, to my
family, to my relations, to my community, to my church, to my mosque, to my
profession, to my patients, to my pupils, to my clients, to my managers, to my
workers, to my country and to my people?
The peace and harmony that we long for, the prosperity that we seek will only
come about if each and every one of us feels truly responsible and accountable
for their actions. Our country, once the pride of Africa, now lies in tatters.
Our people are clothed, like the Biblical Lazarus in rags and ashes - with
multiple afflictions of hunger, disease and penury. Nigeria, once the proud
jewel of Africa, is now its monumental shame. I have been privileged to travel
to many parts of the world, and I can say without any fear of contra-diction
that my beloved country, more than any other, evokes strong feelings of
repulsion in almost every corner of God's earth. How did we come to such a
sorry state? Is it global conspiracy? Is it the shadowy machinations of world
imperialism? I am inclined to think it is none of the above. I believe the
cause lies in our failure - individually and collectively - to take
responsibility for our actions. Pampered by the illusory wealth of
petrodollars, wealth we did not create with our own sweat or our own wit - we
have developed a mindset that believes that the world owes us a living for
doing nothing. With our twisted values and convoluted beliefs, cheating and
hustling are considered best business practice in our national ideology. We
seem to believe that we do not need to exert ourselves and we do not need hard
work and disciplined application in order to become rich. Our national
sickness is the failure of responsibility; responsibility of those in power
and the responsibility of citizens.
With the election of President Olusegun Obasanjo there is a palpable sense
that a new culture of responsible leadership is beginning to emerge. He
himself has apparently undergone a spiritual rebirth, having undergone a
baptism of fire in the dungeons of Abacha's Gulag Archipelago. I am inclined
to think he really means what he says about rooting out corruption and helping
Nigeria 'rise again'. One can't help but be moved by the wonderful memories of
the hand-over of Saturday the 29th of May. Some of us, not usually of a
lachrymose nature, simply couldn't hold back a few tears. One got this strange
Hegelian feeling that, perhaps, after all, there is such a thing as a
Universal Mind guiding the destinies of men and nations. Clearly, a new spirit
is abroad in our land. Per-haps the African Renaissance that Thabo Mbeki has
spoken about may not be such an illusory chimera after all. Mbeki, a
disciplined intellectual thinker, is now the new President of South Africa
after the departure of the legendary Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. A relatively
young statesman, he embodies my concept of responsible leadership. Our own
Olusegun Obasanjo has extended to him the hand of fraternal friendship and
solidarity, so that together they can help our continent move forward. Noble
sentiments no doubt. But I dare say that no leader can succeed alone, however
well meaning, however capable. He has to work with parliament and cabinet and
the civil service. He will have to deal with the members of his party.
Pressures and demands will mount. He will need good advice from virtuous
intellectuals and worthy citizens. But the president cannot stop the student
who wants to cheat in his examinations. He cannot personally oversee every
traffic war-den or policeman. He cannot check every accountant who is
hell-bent on cooking the books. He cannot stop every single drunken lorry
driver on the highway. He cannot stop the hand of every civil servant that is
determined to take a bribe. What he can do is set the tone and create the
right moral atmosphere. Democracy requires creative leadership; but above all
it demands that everyone take responsibility for his or her own actions.
I am inclined to believe that the train of our national progress has only
temporally gone off the rails. The next few years will see whether we are able
to get the wagons back on track ? in resuscitating the economy, in reforming
the financial and banking system, in crime prevention, in restoring civil
harmony and in building sound and effective institutions. But the engine of
progress will never start without the oxygen of a vibrant civic culture. This
is the ingredient that is vital in ensuring that things will work ? that the
taps have water and that electricity does not fail. If the taps don't run and
the lights fail some-one must be held to account. If there is no fuel and the
refinery fails someone must be made to take responsibility. These things are
basic requirements of modern civilisation, not luxuries. It does not take
magicians, Mallams, Marabouts or Babalawos to run a country. It takes ordinary
people with moderate brains and some basic grasp of organization and
management. And such people must have the courage of their own convictions and
the guts to "kick a few asses" if necessary.
Nigerians of all walks have remarked ad nauseum that ours is the most
difficult country in the world to govern. I strongly disagree. I have always
contested such a proposition, based as it is on an undemonstrable axiom. India
is probably even more complex than we are in terms of its diversity. And yet
India is moving fast up the ladder of industrialised societies. As far as I
know, Nigeria is not such a difficult country to rule. The present anarchy in
the Delta and other regions, for example, is largely due to poverty, neglect
and political emasculation. Give the people freedom and a capacity for
political self-expression; allow them to take responsibility for their own
lives and their own development. Provide clean drinking water, clinics, jobs
and education for their children. Who on earth would want to go on rampage and
for what? Sadly, Nigeria for the last thirty-nine years has been ruled on the
basis of oligarchies of one shade or the other. People have a right, as John
Locke would tell us, to take up arms against unjust governments. It is their
historic, moral and legitimate duty to do so. There are also those who have
claimed that their own part of the country has a "natural talent" for
rulership while the vast majority of us must of necessity content ourselves
with being 'followers'. A prominent politician from the Old Guard once made
this arrogant and bogus claim; he was and is a vacuous and loquacious drone
whose only claim to fame is the ability to eloquently recite prepared
speeches. There are mercifully few Nigerians who any longer believe in this
satanic apostasy. The logic of events has overtaken by quantum leaps and
bounds those oligarchs who have held back the progress of this country for
nearly forty years. Now they must only watch and see, but they will not be
allowed to spoil the show. Of course, they will try to use religion,
ethnicity, regionalism and other familiar types of manipulative and
diversionary tricks. But they will ultimately fail. They will fail because
Nigeria and Africa are far bigger than any one section, group, cabal or
Masonic Lodge.
What has become crystal clear over the decades since independence is the fact
that our people - the Nigerian people - are a highly energetic and resourceful
lot. When talent and energy are not given full expression, they lead, as the
Freudians tell us, to all sorts of mental sicknesses and destructive
regressions. Create a sound government and a stable, enabling environment.
Weed out the bad eggs in the civil service and put honest and hardworking
people in the administration. Make the public service a merit-based system for
both recruitment and promotion, as is the case in India, Britain, France,
Korea and other civilised countries; promote excellence and punish indolence
and corruption. Make the social and economic environment right and see the
wonders that will become of Nigeria. It could quite easily become a
technological-industrial state of the first rank in a matter of two decades.
It is not magic or voodoo; it is science and in fact common sense. Sadly, it
has been our singular misfortune that nobody who understands concepts has ever
ruled Nigeria. The only exception is probably Olusegun Obasanjo. The greatest
tragedy in life is for a great people to be ruled by monkeys. If you let your
country be ruled by monkeys you will sooner or later end up as a land of
monkeys. Even the best among you will soon begin to behave like monkeys ? even
if only as a survival mechanism. Such a country, I dare say, will be fit only
for monkeys to live in. Having been ruled by "goonies" who understand only
guns, dollars, booze and girls our country has gradually turned into a
paradigm of the banana republic. Someone called it "the Zairinisation" of
Nigeria. The first task required for the moral and social regeneration of our
country is to raise the standards of public life and of public accountability
in general. And we must do so sooner rather than later; and by action rather
than mere platitudes. Our people have suffered in-describable pain and
hardship for too long. One cannot blame them for being impatient for change.
As the minutes of this century's clock tick hurriedly to the end of our
millennium ? a millennium of oppression, murder and war ? where do we as a
people want to be as we gaze at the dawn of a new era? Two paths diverge in
the woods, to paraphrase American poet Robert Frost. There is the road of
barbarism folly, and of Reason and civilisation. What historic choices are we
going to make? Quo vadis?
I believe we have no choice but to pursue the path of progress and
civilisation. We have no choice but to raise our standards in every sphere of
our national life ? in education, in the provision of social services, in
banking and finance, in high culture, in scientific re-search, in industrial
capability, in the quality of leadership and in the public administration. In
the coming decades our people would have to survive in a highly competitive
and in many ways more brutal, global economic system. The post-Cold War order
is gradually taking the form of a Darwinian jungle in economic, political and
military relations. I call it the Triumph of Capital. In the emerging global
hierarchy of states Nigeria and indeed Africa is being consigned to the ghetto
of international capital. The resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire as
embodied in the European Union - a political grouping with no instinctive
affinity with democracy or global ethics ? may allow the fascists of yesterday
to re-package their world ambitions in ways more difficult to isolate and deal
with. They will want all the resources which God has blessed Africa with. But
I doubt if they will be keen to see Africa come out of the woods. Nothing in
their international economic policy gives us any reason for optimism. The
Chinese and the Asians in general have read the writing on the wall and they
are re-assessing their world economic and financial relations. It would amount
to an act of historic suicide for Africans to persist in their post-colonial
illusions, looking constantly to others to come and help them out of their
miseries. According to Richard Joseph, noted African-American scholar and
friend of our country, "the natural and human resources in Nigeria are just so
profound that if it can be free from those things that have crippled it, there
is no limit to what this country can do". I was in South Africa last year,
visiting Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria. I was astonished at the level
of infrastructure and industrial development in that country. They have
excellent highways, world class universities, fantastic cultural centres,
schools, hospitals and other facilities. The only thing that reminds you that
it is Africa is the glorious sunshine, the soft breeze, and the faces of our
African brothers and sisters. It struck me that what does actually make a
difference is not the land but the people. We are blessed with everything else
except that rare stuff of which great leaders are made. With the possible
exception of South Africa, Nigeria is the only country in Africa that has the
potential in terms of human capital and resources to become an inwardly
directed and inwardly generated global player.
But we would be jokers if we imagined that those who have arrogated to
themselves the roles of masters of the universe will sit idly by and see us
move forward industrially and technologically. Through corporate exclusion,
financial manipulation and media propaganda, Nigerians the world over are
being vilified as the "most corrupt nation on earth". It has been alleged, for
example, that Bechir Ben Yahmed, the Tunisian publisher of Jeaune Afrique (a
magazine with close links to French intelligence), has gone so far as to
suggest that Nigeria should not be connected to the global information highway
because of its corrupt reputation. And he had the bile to say this soon after
meeting in Paris with the outgoing Nigerian head of state. Every Nigerian
abroad is adjudged to be a potential criminal, be he or she a neurosurgeon or
a doctor of divinity. Of course, there is no denying that some of our
countrymen are involved in all sorts of shameful financial chicaneries. But
such people are not the majority. The majority of Nigerians abroad are highly
educated professionals and they are contributing quietly and humbly to the
progress and prosperity of their host communities. The world media evidently
prefers to focus on the really bad few among us and then projects these as the
blanket label for all Nigerians. This wholesale slandering of an entire nation
and people may be seen as evidence of an international conspiracy to undermine
Nigeria as a potential world player and leader of Africa. We must resist it at
all costs.
I predict that the coming century will be an even more dangerous one for
Nigeria and for the African people in general. If we realised the dangers
ahead we would shake off at once the stupor which makes us behave with the
licentiousness of drunken sailors. We would get to work straight away. We
ought to remember that no civilisation was ever built by moneychangers, mere
contractors and "area boys". Great nations are built not by hoodlums but by
men of integrity and character; men and women of knowledge and ideas; men of
quality and industry. Simple, ordinary, hardworking men and women toiling
quietly in the villages and in the cities, men and women who are respectful of
the law and who possess civic virtue. I am quite convinced that not all is
lost, and that we can even make for ourselves a nation as great as the ancient
Egyptians have made in times past. We must reject the international propaganda
that makes us feel nothing but shame about ourselves, our country and our
people. Liberty, coupled with justice and responsibility ? pressed down with
courage and optimism - should be the bedrock on which we build the Temple of
Humanity in our New Africa. It really does not matter where we stand at the
moment. What really matters and matters so desperately, is where we are going,
where we have set our sights. China at the turn of the century was nothing
more than a creaking behemoth of unruly warlords, gangsters, opium addicts and
other disreputable potentates. Today the country is at the threshold of an
economic and technological take-off that has astonished her friends and foes
alike. Some observers believe it would not be too long before the mantle of
world leadership passes from the Americans to the Chinese. Given that no major
seismic change in the world balance of power has ever taken place without
major tensions, vigilance for us must be the eternal price of liberty. Nothing
in this amazing universe of ours is fixed like the stars forever. The laws of
nature and of nature's God show that that Scientific Man, Economic Man and
Political Man does operate according to discernible and predictable
principles. Once these are understood, mastered and harnessed we can create,
through social engineering, an environment that will allow our people to
unleash their creative energy.
But of course, we could equally choose to do business-as-usual, playing our
little games of tribe and religion and sectionalism while others are hurrying
to colonise outer space. If we persist in our follies our people would
continue to get poorer and poorer. Poverty is a hungry and bottomless pit. The
late Chief Moshood Abiola once told us at a dinner that, as a young man, he
knew what poverty was and he hated it. Poverty is a rapacious beast, a
leviathan that devours all talents and saps the creativity energy of nations
and peoples. Its rapacity has no end. If we do not change our ways we would
simply continue to go down and down the drain - until we are out. We would
remain miserable beggars at the tables of the rich, constantly seeking escape
from our misfortunes through cultism, religious fundamentalism, tribal wars,
and even cannibalism. Those with any talents to sell abroad will swiftly vote
with their feet. The Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevski once ob-served that
there is no depth to which men may not sink. In the great famine of the 1980s,
for example, the starving Ethiopian refugees were so famished that at night,
in the parched, dark open spaces, hungry hyenas used to come and take them one
at a time. First a child, then a mother, and so on. They didn't even have the
strength to cry. There was only the silent wailing of those who dwelt in the
valley of the shadow of death. Nigeria wallows under such a curse and yet we
do not realise it. Recently a commentator wrote in the Guardian: "The other
day, a man drove over a burnt human body in Mushin, Lagos. He was later to say
that when he felt the thud under his tyres, he thought he had actually ran
over a dead dog." The sorrow that passes all sorrow is that the majority of
our people live lives that are no better than the lives of dogs. The average
dog in Europe and America gets more nutrition and enjoys a better quality of
life than the average human being in Africa. We should not deceive ourselves.
What we have is no longer a country worthy of the name. It is a sprawling
monstrosity of lawlessness and anarchy and all sorts of social evils, a place
akin to what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes termed 'the state of nature'. Our
situation is quite reminiscent of the ancient Melians, of whom the Greek
historian Thucydides said: "the strong took what they could and the weak
granted what they must".
The task before the new administration is a stupendous and onerous one. It
would be foolhardy for anyone to under-estimate the challenges ahead. We must
affirm that this government and this president deserve the trust and support
of all people of goodwill. Tough and often painful choices will have to be
made in the coming years. It might even be necessary to wield the stick rather
than the carrot from time to time. Nigeria's gradual descent into nihilism
does call for extraordinary measures. I agree that human rights are sacred,
but I also believe that we cannot afford the luxury of hair-splitting
legal-constitutional niceties while Rome is being reduced to ashes. Statecraft
is not the province of mere lawyers or those who make a living from legalistic
hair-splitting. To echo Achebe, the yam of rights would not go down smoothly
without the palm oil of civic virtue. It requires no less than the
re-education of an entire generation of Nigerians. A rather mischievous pupil
once asked the philosopher Aristotle to tell him the best way to go to Rome.
The Master replied that he should ensure that every single step he takes leads
to Rome. We should not and must not be overwhelmed by the task ahead. We must
simply ensure that every step we take from now on is in the direction of
greatness and national honour. The Martiniquan poet and statesman Aime Cesaire
has reminded us that humanity's work is not yet ended, and that we did not
come into this world to be merely spectators or parasites. We must therefore
work and work, as if the whole of humanity's destiny depended on us. To labour
for one's country is the ultimate labour of love. Africa and posterity demand
no less from us. And in this journey of a thousand miles, God's work must also
be ours.
