Medicinerocky
As the nation wobbles towards the precipice of another general election, it is imperative to ask this question: what manner of president do we really need? Post-independence Nigeria has not been lucky with leadership. Those who showed sparks of quality leadership were either cut down at high noon or were hamstrung by our self-contrived contradictions. The great sage, Nnamdi Azikiwe, with all his lustre and high-octane intellectualism ended up as a mere ceremonial head at a time the nation needed a leader with more decisive pluck.
Shehu Shagari, in spite of his cerebral limitations would have filled the void but he was too weak and lacked the gumption to square up to the bureaucratic mandarins. Under his nose, corruption was writ large. Import licence was traded on the streets like sachets of ‘pure’ water. Shagari, the honest man, surrounded himself with men of banal roguish tendencies. His regime was glossed in uncomplimentary epigraph bordering on corruption, ineptitude and leadership amnesia. Since that darkling hour when he was shooed out of office by the martial chants of a so-called corrective military junta, nobody remembers his regime with any pang of nostalgia. That’s a mark of failure.
The over three decades that the military saddled the nation’s cathedra of power was a period of aimless wander in the wilderness. They failed to live to their populist mantra of being corrective regimes. They plundered the treasury with bold-face audacity and failed to provide a leadership compass to chart a new course for a nation in dire need of salvation. The military was at best an aberrant punctuation that should never indent the pages of our collective history.
At the fading away of the last silhouette of the military regime personified rather fortuitously by Abdulsalami Abubakar, the civilian regime of Olusegun Obasanjo came close to providing the answer to our leadership question. But Obasanjo lacked the discipline to match his uncommon boldness. Yes, Obasanjo was bold. Yes, he ruffled feathers and upturned hitherto untouchable monuments and power blocs, but he was soon consumed by the same national malaise he set out to conquer. He was stewed in the juice of corruption. He could not provide basic electricity for eight years though he desired so much to do so and spent billions of dollars to generate darkness.
Obasanjo made more political enemies than friends and spent a better part of his tenure hounding them. He did some good surgery though in restructuring the military and breaking the Northern stronghold on and monopoly of a supposedly national institution. He rejigged the economy to some extent; getting debt reprieve and growing the external reserves. He preached prudent fiscal management but he lacked the discipline to practise it. On the political front, he was chief witness to two national elections in 2003 and 2007. Both ended like their predecessors: with controversial outcomes.
So, Obasanjo ended his tenure neither the hero nor the superman. He was just the man, only that. Umaru Yar’Adua was thought to be the man to lead the national salvation army. But a number of factors not least was his ill-health conspired to do him in. Yar’Adua was undone by the foibles of humanity. His ill-health, his innate weakness, just like Shagari, that made him unable to rein in some of his notoriously dubious aides and a wife that combined the materialistic acquisitiveness of Imelda Marcos with the raw brutism of Jezebel, the Phoenician wife of Ahab, robbed him of any petals of glory. He dithered on many issues that required presidential decisiveness. He was not the man, but the nearly man.
It is difficult to place the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan. Except for appearing to be riding on the wings of inexplicable mercies of Providence, becoming governor and now president all by default, Jonathan is yet to pull himself together to confront the incubus of corruption and the succubus of disorientation that have over the years threatened to asphyxiate the nation’s socio-economic well-being.
Though, he towers above the rest in that he seems gifted with long suffering spirit and an inner strength to endure the pangs of shame just to reach his goal. But Nigeria needs more than a good-natured leader or one trusting the divine interventions of the power from above. Nigeria needs a president that would be resolutely ruthless against corruption and the band of treasury plunderers. She needs a leader that is both physically healthy and intellectually adroit; not a dense illiterate.
Many people have called for a debate among the presidential contenders. I welcome debate but doing well on the rostrum does not always translate to providing the right leadership to complement one’s oratory and deep appreciation of the challenges of governance. Otherwise, President Barack Obama, the first American president of colour would not have lost his allure too soon. Nearly two years in office, it is difficult to locate the ‘Yes, we can’ mojo with which he rode to the White House chalking votes from both Democrats and Republicans who were charmed by the sheer force of his argument. Obama was long in speech but he appears very short in action. Nigeria does not need such president now. What Nigeria needs is a president who can combine the boldness of Obasanjo, the honesty of Shagari, the fortitude of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the visionary ability and oriental work ethics of Sun Yat-sen – the fabled father of modern China.
Nigeria needs a president who can break the stranglehold of jaded and retired Generals and the platoon of recycled political fossils and crooks who have refused to quit the stage, instead have continued to impose their jaundiced ideas on us. The next president must be one who would gather this clan of yesterday’s looters and put them in prison…to herald a genuine revolution.
