In a blistering and widely celebrated philippic, Chinua Achebe once laid the problems of
Nigeria squarely and fairly at the doorstep of inept leadership. Titled, The Trouble With Nigeria, it was obvious that the master-novelist was in no mood for taking hostages. Ever conscious of the historic significance of unfolding events, it was, for Achebe, not the appropriate time for subtle nuances and sublime ironies.
He ploughed the cane deep in the back of Nigeria's wayward politicians. Achebe was writing
at a time of acute danger for the nation. A depraved political class was bent on repeating the worst excesses of its political forebears, excesses that led to the first military intervention. The politicians appeared to have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They appeared bent on committing professional suicide.
Twenty years after, it will be interesting to listen to Achebe pronounce on the state of the nation, particularly after a series of thieving military despots, the bitter struggle for civil empowerment, the return of civilian governance and its obviously mixed fortunes. Are we condemned to repeat the past in clinically programmed phases? Before we lapse into unrelieved gloom or undeserved optimism, it must first be admitted that the circumstances are vastly dissimilar, and every republic must have its unique character and identity.
But those who believe that history stands still while they toy with the destiny of their nations are in for a shocker. If nothing else, the wages of the failure of leadership of the
old political class are here with us: the total and merciless domination and subjugation of the entire Nigerian political landscape by retired military chieftains, their paramilitary adjutants and civilian stormtroopers.
Many of the politicians Achebe dragged before the court of history are some of the most illustrious names in the Nigerian political firmament: the Awolowos, the Azikiwes, the Tarkas, the Sules, the Osadebeys, the Enahoros, the Iges, the Orizus etc.
Something curious must have been going on, for some of these men prepared themselves for public office with rigour and painstaking clarity of mission. Perhaps it was the great novelist that lost his celebrated equanimity and fabled perspective. Whatever the case, the matter deserves a closer scrutiny and a deeper investigation, for it bears direct relevance to the
current crisis of transformation on the continent.
Why did men-and women-who emerged as heroes and heroines of the decolonising struggle suddenly become such a menace to the post-colonial political and economic transformation of the same nations they have rescued from the imperialist dungeon?
How did yesterday's famous freedom fighter become today's infamous tyrant and psychopathic villain?
An impish American sports writer, ruing the speedy degeneration of Mohammed Ali's brilliant boxing career at the turn of the eighties, noted that the normal evolutionary pattern was for a grub to transform into a butterfly, but that this was the unique case of a butterfly that became a grub. This vicious metaphor of evolutionary regression can be applied to the dismal collapse of visionary leadership in Africa in the post-independence epoch. It is this contradiction that has made this column to be very reluctant in joining the hordes of Mugabe-bashers. For if the unfolding disaster in Zimbabwe is taken at a surface and superficial level, there is every possibility that a great injustice might be done to an illustrious son of Africa who is already roiling in self-inflicted distress.
The occasion for these ruminations is a published interview with Pauline Opango.
But who is Pauline Opango? Pauline Opango is the widow of the illustrious Patrice Lumumba, the martyred founding president of the Congo nation. Surviving in vastly reduced circumstances, and in glorified penury, in a village thirty miles away from Brussels, the interview is a study in dignified solitude and the immense stoicism of distinguished widowhood.
As revealed by his widow, Lumumba ate and dreamed the Congo. He prepared himself for the task ahead with a punishing and purifying schedule. Even as an ordinary postal clerk, Lumumba secluded himself away from the crowd, constantly reading and ruminating on the prospects of his much abused people. He was steeling himself for the future task, and by the time he emerged, he was
ready, almost too ready, to sacrifice himself for the greater glory of his fatherland.
And here was a young man who was barely in his mid-thirties when he was sensationally abducted, gruesomely murdered and gruesomely disposed. One of his murderers even kept
his teeth as a souvenir.
Patrice Lumumba is a compelling case-study in higher patriotism and sublime nationalism.
The struggle for decolonisation in Africa threw up many Lumumbas in virtually every corner of
the continent. They are just too numerous to mention.
From West Africa came the Azikiwes, the Majas, the Macauleys, the Abdallahs, the Mokwugo-Okoyes, the Ransome-Kuti couple, the Nkrumahs, the Toures, the Senghors, the Sultan Nyoyos, the Amilcar Cabrals; from East Africa came the Jomo Kenyattas, the Matigaris, the Nyereres, the Odingas, the Obotes, the Mboyas, the Haile Sellasies; from the North the Ben Bellas, the Nassers, the Bourgibas; and from the expanded South the Mandelas, the Thambos, the Mbekis, the Mugabes, the Mondlanes, the Kaundas, the Augustino Netos, the Samora Michels, the Sam Nujomas and a host of other august children of Africa.
Many of these had their careers and their lives tragically short-circuited by contrary forces. A few left while the ovation was the loudest, while a few became part of the problem of their fledgling countries and had to be dragged off the stage.
Why did many of these heroes, otherwise brilliant and perceptive, fail to read , or choose to
ignore, the handwriting on the wall?
During his celebrated treason trial, Chief Obafemi Awolowo wondered aloud whether it was possible for a man who had contributed so much to the building of an edifice to then set an axe upon the same building. Perhaps the conundrum can be posed in a different way. The very notion of a man for all seasons is nothing but a profound myth. It is possible that the drive, energy
and gifts needed for the struggle against colonisation are of a different qualitative order from those needed to rapidly transform a country and build an economic and industrial base.
It was said of Ahmed Ben Bella that after the draining and terrible experience of the
Algerian civil war, the poor fellow spent all the time vacantly gazing at the ceiling until he was bundled out by exasperated colleagues. War time leadership is hardly the same thing as peace time path-finding.
In functioning democracies where the people have a genuine say, they shrewdly give the war time leader his retirement notice. That was how Winston Churchill found himself out of office shortly after the Second World War. When he returned, it was to prepare the ground for his successor, Anthony Eden, (later Lord Avon) who was also to fumble the Suez Canal crisis
very badly.
During one of those long nights of ruminations along side Andre Malraux, his beloved Minister of Culture, Charles De Gaulle once noted that providence and historical events have always combined to throw up the exceptional leader for France in her most critical moment of need. As proof, the greatest Frenchman of the last century recalled Charlemagne, Joan of Arc and, by honorable extension, his very eminent self.
After leading his countrymen to victory in the second World War, De Gaulle could have resorted to every trick in the book, every compromise and immoral concession to hang on to power. But the great intellectual complimenting the great soldier in him came to the shrewd conclusion that he was not a leader for mundane times. He was a great rallying force, a providential instrument for France in periods of great crisis. De Gaulle retired to his farm-house knowing fully well that, like naughty children, his compatriots would come calling again.
True enough twelve years later, they came knocking. Years later, De Gaulle would again succumb to his own referendum, but by then he would have fashioned out the dominant political party for the faithful and handed down to France enduring institutions.
African Leaders whose skills and gifts make them nothing but transitional figures, who are in fact proven mediocrities in other spheres, but who, under the influence of delusion and sycophancy, begin to fancy themselves as transformative titans are setting themselves up for a catastrophic collapse.
This is as sure as daylight, particularly in the chaotic ambience of post-colonial nationhood where circumstances change swiftly and with speedy resolve.
Who would have imagined the current challenge to Robert Mugabe in the eighties? But then perhaps that rule ought to have ended, and would have ended, in the eighties in a proper democracy. By staying too long for his own good, the great liberator and heroic warrior has been transformed into a pathetic parody of his former self. After a life time of turbulent exertions, what remains for the founding father of modern Zimbabwe is to negotiate a speedy exit in
order to extricate himself from an approaching tornado.
Had a system of delimited tenure been in place, many post-independence African leaders would not have come to grief. It is obvious, then, that an impersonal structure of orderly succession is more important than grooming self-selected successors. The founding fathers of the United States reflected exhaustively on this matter and greatly resisted the temptation to turn themselves into self-perpetuating demagogues.
The great transformation of America came in phases and these titans live in the heart of their grateful countrymen by their examples, by the profundity of their intellectual outpouring rather than by physical monuments. Had Nkrumah's tenure ended after two terms in 1965, the great pan-African nationalist would have returned home feted and garlanded as the father of the
nation and as a great African intellectual .
In Nigeria, it was obvious that Yakubu Gowon's noble, humane but vacillating and weak-willed nature was more suitable to the war time leadership of a fractious nation than peace time transformation. Had Gowon put in place a reasonable programme of democratic succession shortly after the civil war, he would today be remembered as the founder of modern Nigeria rather than the embittered ethno-regional revanchist he has transformed into.
The very first time both Kenneth Kaunda and Hasting Kamuzu Banda allowed free and fair
elections in their respective countries, they were resoundingly rebuffed by the electorate.
History repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy and the second as a farce, observes Karl Marx with seminal insight. In an expanded analogy, Marx had gone on to focus on the career of the second Bonaparte, Napoleon's cousin. It was not just that the other Bonaparte was a comprehensive mediocrity, this was how even the illustrious uncle would have appeared if he had chosen to return at that point in time: a regressive self-caricature. There is time for everything, and this is the signal historic lesson that many African leaders chose to ignore.
African leaders who hold on tightly to the rein of power long beyond their sell-by dates, long beyond the skills their maker has endowed them with, long beyond the precise conjunctures that threw them up, and long beyond the specific problematic that historical forces have defined for them, are a nuisance to themselves, their nations and the world at large. When the project ends in wailing and gnashing of teeth, as it has for many of their deluded fellow-travellers on the
continent, they will have nobody to blame but themselves. By then, all the self-serving lies, all
the cheap tricks and inane justifications, would have exploded in their face.
Luckily for Africa, there is some light at the end of the tunnel, and it is all coming from
intellectuals who have found themselves in power on the continent. When the formidably cerebral Lepold Sedar Senghor walked away from the seat of power in Dakar, his parting shot was that there was life after power. By so doing, Senghor set in motion the process of an orderly transfer of power within party and between parties in Senegal. This symbolic and statesmanlike act of self-denial set the stage for the prosperity and stability that Senegal enjoys today.
When Senghor, a minority Christian leader in an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, died recently, there could be no denying his status as the undisputed father of his nation. It was a national outpouring of genuine grief. The same thing goes for the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere who left for his farm-house at the height of power and glory and by so doing forged a nation and a democracy out of a crucible of feudalism and multiple ethnicity.
Finally, when the incomparable Nelson Mandela shrewdly and sensibly limited his tenure to a single term, he knew that he had already fulfilled his historical destiny, which was rooting
apartheid out of South Africa. For this you need a world-historic personage which Mandela definitely was. After that, ruling South Africa only requires a visionary manager. By the time Mandela was released from jail, it was clear that the epic struggle had taken its toll. The rest would have been a self-embarrassing anti-climax.
African leaders who confuse transition with transformation, or who conflate the two, set the
structural modality for the inept and incompetent leadership that pervades the continent. Had he not been cruelly murdered, it would surely have been interesting to see how a charismatic, dynamic and deeply thoughtful Patrice Lumumba would have bridged the gap between transition and transformation.
Forty years later, Pauline Opango is still grieving for her beloved husband and the missed opportunities for a continent.
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