Five failings of Nigerian presidents: Nigeria is the most populous nation on the continent, the seventh largest in the world. By 2050, a mere 26 years away, it will be swarming with over 400m people, according to the United Nations. Five critical failings of the Nigerian leadership account for its arrested development.
By Ogochukwu Ikeje
The world’s best brains may be preserved in Nigerian skulls, shining in the arts, music, sciences, academics, and business. Nature is also lavish with its blessings. But all that is of little comfort to the people and their country now in its 63rd year of freedom from British rule. The country is hopelessly poor, crippled by N87 trillion debt, and growing. Every day an alarming number of its brightest minds, seeing no way out of the agony of rough life, flee overseas, leaving behind those yet to flee, those too old to flee, and those resigned to fate until the good Lord calls them home. Statisticians say out of the country’s over 200m population, some 133m are in multi-dimensional poverty, meaning they are poorly fed, their kids poorly educated or not at all, and cannot afford a car. They are in rural villages trying to eke out a living, and are also in seedy neighbourhoods in the towns and cities, bogged down by rent and sundry pressures. Life is tough.
This is the most populous nation on the continent, the seventh largest in the world. By 2050, a mere 26 years away, it will be swarming with over 400m people, according to the United Nations. Five critical failings of the Nigerian leadership brought this rot about.
One, the leaders are unwilling to admit that the country they lead is in a mess, that their people carry with them an eternal smell wherever they go no matter the fragrance of their body cream or the perfume they wear. If they admit that there is a problem, they quickly toss it behind them to the previous administration. They fail to see why every care must be taken, every effort made to rescue the country. Rolling up their sleeves to do the hard work is simply beyond them. Worse, they carry on as though they were next in importance after the discovery of the revolutionary mobile phone.
Nigerian leaders rarely decline overseas invitation but are rather eager to be seen among world leaders and photographed shaking their hands. In April 2018, former President Muhammadu Buhari was in the White House in the Trump days but brought nothing back beyond being dismissed by his loquacious host as “lifeless”. The American president neither found anything exciting in his guest nor in his country. Buhari should have stayed back in Aso Rock to fix his broken country. Why pretend that leading the fallen giant of Africa is all you need to hobnob with world leaders? And the greatness of a nation is not measured by its population nor the size of the presidents’ agbada. And certainly not by the starchiness of the lawmakers’ caftans or size of their salaries and allowances, or even the number of their aides and their aides’ aides.
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Two, there’s an obsession with the Western world. And it is not merely about seeking their validation (shameful as that is); it is also about thinking that perhaps with enough push, they will someday develop Nigeria and we will live happily ever after. It’s a pipedream that will only prolong a nightmare. Europe and America have enough problems of their own to bother with helping anyone grow. Is the burden of leadership not the reason their presidents and prime ministers age so fast upon getting into office? Contrast their withering looks with the freshness of our presidents notwithstanding our grave challenges.
The third failing is thinking that catch-phrases will do the job. If we don’t kill corruption, corruption will kill us, Buhari liked to say, but till he left office after eight years, the country was still in the choking grip of corruption. When President Bola Tinubu started shuttling from one world capital to another upon taking over last May, his favourite phrase was ‘Nigeria is back’. But how? What has changed? The naira has again become scarce, as was the case in the last days of Buhari. Petrol now costs a lot more, so does transportation, expectedly. Foodstuff is hard to come by. There is an outcry of ‘We are hungry’ on the street, despite the President’s famous ‘Let the poor breathe’. And the terrorists’ thirst for blood is yet to abate.
Our leaders’ fourth failing is failing to inspire. A leader fails to inspire when their words do not match their actions or their body language is at odds with their messaging. When Buhari took office in 2015 on the back of significant goodwill and integrity, one of his major promises was to defeat Boko Haram in a matter of months. He failed. Though the terrorists were pushed out of some locations, they continued to cause a lot of trouble till the end of the president’s tenure last year. So when he and his aides said the terror group had been technically defeated, nobody believed them.
Finally, lip-service to the anti-corruption fight. When President Tinubu announced late May that petroleum subsidy was gone, some applauded. He had chalked up the courage to frustrate the swarming thieves in the oil sector, they said. But who has been prosecuted and jailed? Which country, even with lavish human and natural endowments, can develop with such baggage?
• Ikeje can be reached on X @ogochukwu_ikeje, while text messages can be sent to 08171325662
