I have a certain interest in President Muhammadu Buhari. It is not as a fellow citizen. My interest in Buhari is as an object of study. And this is in the course of my day job as an independent scholar, a lay historian.
And matters get interesting. It is only that one small aspect is missing. To pre-empt oneself, one wishes that Professor Chinua Achebe were well and alive. Achebe is the lead and most famous proponent of the thesis that the problem with Nigeria is a problem of leadership.
However, let us recall the following: By the time Buhari was elected President, Achebe had, many years earlier, written a certain book. The book was appropriately named “The Trouble with Nigeria.” And in the ensuing years, the book had turned into a cult-like charm and classic. Surprisingly, it acquired a pandemic pan-Nigerian following. That is the only book by a Nigerian writer that one knows that is quoted by mullahs from the North, bureaucrats from the West, merchants from the East and just about everybody else.
In the end, Okonkwo threw the cat and Achebe had persuaded all Nigerians that what ails them is leadership. As things go, it was pure speculation. And it was particularly seductive because Nigerians believed they never had good leaders. So, Achebe consolidated profile shooting towards the roof. Now, he was not just a literati in the class of Homer, Achebe was something of a theoretical Hegel. That is, Achebe was someone who could write as an angel and think as a god. But history and experiences are the ultimate markers of truths. Is ABC true? Just don’t die, time will tell.
And now there was a certain man named in the fashion of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. And in a certain year of the Lord, the same Jonathan was elected the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. And, suddenly, there was the uproar in town that Jonathan was ill-effective, clueless and even, don’t believe it, ethnicist. And, apparently, a pan-Nigerian coalition came together to shove Jonathan out. And fall Jonathan did. He fell off the high and dizzy cliffs of power, of Aso Rock. Today, poor, pitiful Jonathan is like the rest of us, a commoner. Today, even his wife’s properties, high street assets, are being demolished. And the reasons are no other than that Jonathan and spouse are now like us, commoners.
But we have our own speculation on these things as to the fall and collapse of Jonathan and his administration. It was the venom of the G2 conspiracy. The G2 is the special protocol arrangement of the South West and the core North. Their game is to quarry Nigeria into being a captured and reserve territory of their own. And the G2 just couldn’t put up with the fact of a South South, non-tenured citizen, a Jonathan running shop, as if Ijaws are security council or G2 members. So, they had to invent things against him. And in the course of the invention, they recruited venerable names like ace journalists and even a Nobel prize winner. See Abraham Ogbodo’s Buhari’s Presidency: Facts and Fiction.
And that didn’t even end Jonathan’s troubles. The conspiracy went international. Obama, Jonathan claimed, was on their payroll. And America, on Obama’s instructions, rolled in some fearful warships near Nigeria’s international waters. That was classic gunboat diplomacy. And all these players came together and threw Jonathan under a fleeing bus. It is a long story, so let us let things rest.
If we returned to the Buhari matter, the following happened. Buhari as a person and persona were sold to Nigerians as a very upright bloke and a rare moral genius. And that was besides his dexterity for transformative management, especially in times of national political and economic cholera. In a word, Buhari was the leadership Professor Achebe spoke and dreamed of.
And from there things took a life of their own. Suddenly, Buhari was compared with the best names in human history, sometimes sacrilegiously, with holy names. In short, Buhari was branded and sold to the Nigerian public as a political Mahdi they could not wait to have. Take him, we were canvassed. The promise was that, by the time Buhari is halfway through with things, Nigeria would have been a district of paradise. And a majority apparently believed and voted him in.
And, luckily, the elections were in substantial compliance with free and fair play, we were told. And Buhari won, we repeat. That is on the indices of good leadership, a people’s assessment of their prospective democratic leader, based on his antecedents, on personal integrity, Buhari had it, more than Nigeria needed. In other words, Buhari was the best leader Nigeria never had. It is only that now, by the conspiracy of the G2 machine and a miracle of things, the best President Nigeria never had, was given her. In flesh, in spirit and in full powers.
So, without saying so, we were on the test verification of the Achebe thesis. History never was so kind to provide a Petri dish. Achebe’s hitherto unverified claim was that, if we had a good leader, a Buhari, say, Nigeria’s problems would vanish. There is an ancient saying in natural philosophy. A Russian mathematical guy, Mikhail Gromov, gives it in modern idiom: But the physical level of rigor is higher on certainty than the logical one, since reproducible experiments are more reliable than anybody’s, be it Hilbert’s, Einstein’s or Godel’s intuition.
Yes, we have always held that Achebe’s intuition in this matter was wrong. We have also asserted that his logics are additionally woolly and rigged. But let us provisionally grant Achebe is cool and correct in this. And now Nigeria has found in practice an Achebe-style dreamed for leader. At this juncture, we would not allow for buyer’s remorse. So, it is to be assumed Buhari is as he was sold. Ahiazuwa.
At this point, Achebe’s thesis has to stand or fall on its ability to be made replicable and or checked against experiential and experimental results. Now, the report card on a good leader as Achebe speculated or dreamed is out. And the list of those signing and giving the report cards are the Buhari hand-in-gloves partners. Dele Momodu and Chief Bisi Akande are just two who have scored their Buhari a failure. So, we stop with them to save reading time.
It may thus be said that, with the Buhari experiment, Achebe’s leadership thesis has been debunked, falsified. And as happens in science, politics is one, perhaps that is why we say political science, a search for new paradigms is indicated. The old Achebean one has failed him and his nation.
Yet, one is troubled. Despite the collapse of the Achebe leadership thesis, a list of new kids are infesting the air with their body odour. They are claiming they have come to be the “new leadership.”
Economic development is about geniuses at play
If one cared and assayed through the great countries or companies, he did stumble on this common feature. It is that they are, one and all, the work of geniuses at play, not those of concerned professionals on pay. To repeat, economic development is about geniuses at play, not concerned professionals on pay.
Professionals, concerned or indifferent, are, at their best, princes, hirelings and inheritors. They are maintenance expats. Strangers, foreigners, who come in to maintain what they never built and apparently never can build. And these foreigner-men, these professionals, are never founders, creators or kings. They are born to be dauphins. Their foreignness is as to the issues at play.
What confuses many is this. A cool genius may be so entrepreneurially inept he can’t employ anybody but himself. And too often he can’t even be rich enough to provide board and banquets for himself or family. And people laugh at him. But the fact is that he is about the higher, in fact the highest, edge entrepreneurships. The real thing entrepreneurship, if you cared. And the proof? The ideas he produces, the insights he manufactures, prize open vast windows of new industries, new opportunities and higher lives. It is in the opening of these windows that you see the lower end entrepreneurs, concerned professions, bleeding-heart fools, godogodos, politicians, coup-makers muzzle in to claim honours. But, if you checked well, these little men are who they are, mere artisans.
But history is a merciless creditor. It forces smarties to confess their debts even if involuntarily. Now, if you listened to this – https://youtu.be/HNA6TXyWUNE – or read this – https://www.nytimes.com/…/ma…/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble.html – or read my book ECONOMISTS AS ASSASSINS, THE NIGERIAN CONNECTION, you may get an idea of what we are saying. The American smartie, Mark Zuckerberg, confesses to it. All this running making billions was essentially from the play of the mind of one genius. A Scottish guy. His name was James Clerk Maxwell. The point in issue is, how much penny was he worth? I will attempt an answer. Zuckerberg’s Labrador pets live on greater dollars than Maxwell ever did. But the industry is essentially a production and work of the genius of Maxwell at play, and at his game.
The truth of life? We are not paid as per our contributions. We are paid as per our pitches. So don’t get fooled. The big boys are not the Forbes rich kids. The really big boys, as we speak, are at their work and play – in Harvard, in Oxford and Sorbonne. O god, how we wished Nsukka could make the list. The list of the higher playgrounds, where men play to be gods; and in being gods give up the lesser and artisanal tasks of making money, of being governors, fools, presidents, to pettier minds and souls. Ahiazuwa.