As the first set of our governors who took office on May 29, 1999, prepared to wind up their two terms in office in 2007, Newswatch editors decided to initiate an important project called Legacy Projects. Our objective was to give a selected number of them a chance to look back on their eight years in office and determine by themselves those projects, be they economic, social or industrial, that best captured the essence of their performance and philosophy in government.
Legacies are very important in human societies. Rulers or leaders at all levels nurse the ambition to be remembered by their legacies. Legacies refer to the human ambition to leave something behind by which the have-beens would be remembered by present and future generations.
It could be loosely said that this is the driving ambition of all those who seek the people’s support to lord it over them. I have advisedly used the word loosely here because in theory everyone who seeks power wants to serve. But the truth is that not everyone is motivated by such high-minded altruistic ambition. While some want to serve, others want to chop.
Legacies are either visible, i.e. physical, or invisible. Their common denominator is their capacity to make positive contributions to human development. They add value to human lives and help to positively drive a common vision. That, in a nutshell, was why the Newswatch editors decided on the Legacy Projects.
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Our first shock was that the governors we approached had never given a thought to their legacies. In response to our enquiry, therefore, they talked glibly about the roads, school and the hospitals they built. No one can dispute the value of roads to human development. The Romans, bless them, made this important point long ago: civilisation follows the roads. Even inter-communal foot paths serve the same purpose. But road construction, like schools and hospitals, is a routine business of government. No philosophy of development undergirds it. They do not qualify as legacies because governors before them built roads, schools and hospitals too. A legacy must derive its relevance from the philosophy of a unique development paradigm. It could be an elevation of the mundane or a grand vision wrapped in a simple approach to societal development.
One of the best known legacies in the country was the introduction of free primary education in 1954 by the first premier of the Western Region, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo. It was so successful that by 1962, the Western Region boasted primary school enrolment of 1,250,000 pupils. Compare that with that of that towering giant, the Northern Region, with 250,000 pupils in primary schools. The success of this single legacy went far beyond getting children to school. It changed the face and the rapid pace of education in the region. And everything else was soon added to the region and the Yoruba.
General Yakubu Gowon left us the legacies of state creation and the National Youth Service Corps. In the first, he changed the architecture of our national politics and in the second, he lifted national unity from the drawing board and made our youths its driving force.
Early in his second term in office, President Shehu Shagari launched an ethical revolution. His objective was to address the country’s moral turpitude. It was a fine example of an invisible legacy. You could not see it but you could feel and appreciate its place in our societal development. Had he remained in office and driven it successfully, he would have succeeded in kindling the spark of our moral regeneration. And perhaps, we would not be sinking daily in the morass of crass corruption – financial and moral – despite the noise that attends the anti-graft war.
Had President Ibrahim Babangida sustained his two-party system for the country it would have qualified as his important legacy because this too would have profoundly affected the nature of our party politics.
I am sure you could deduce from this narrative that the Newswatch project failed. I draw attention to it to make one important point about how we are ruled and why our national development is so jagged, with no discernible objective in our development ambition. One of our young musicians once put it indelicately, everything jaga-jaga.
I draw your attention to the increasing hollowness in our philosophy of governance. You could easily get this from listening to our leaders. Their lack of profundity is evidence of this jarring hollowness. It is impossible to think of your legacy when you are merely going through the motion of governance in the manner of Father Christmas. What we are losing is that essential thing that drives human progress – vision. The good book put it nicely: without vision the people perish.
Men of vision are lacking. We have ambitious men who are so fascinated by power they ignore its purpose. We have men who enjoy the protocol of power but ignore its responsibilities. Can you think of a politician in the country today who can rouse the people into a frenzy with the power of his oratory and the vision of a better country he paints in such beautiful colours?
I can think of none. Everything is grey and drab here, even in an election season. There are no electrifying speakers to put spark in the system. We thus have people who expect to get into public offices, not by the profundity of their thoughts or the clarity of their visions but by the depth of their pockets.
I see our society rapidly in decline because our political leaders at all levels are not thinkers. Or, to put it another way, they think less of anything but more of how to capture and hold onto power either in the driving seat or as godfathers. It is impossible to have a vision when you cannot think clear, visionary thoughts about a better tomorrow. Human development is a product of human thinking. Our post independence leaders, the first eleven in our political soccer game of power, placed a high premium on making the people think by showing that they were thinking men, committed to a better country or parts thereof. Awo, Zik and Bello wrote books infused with their vision of a better country.
It is sad, utterly sad, that we are doing Rip Van Winkle. While we sleep on, Africa and the rest of the world are on a steady march into the future, a future not made by prayers and miracles but by human beings with clarity of thoughts and clarity of visions. At this point, we face the twin problems of a) managing 216 million people, 138 million of whom live on less than one US dollar a day and b) managing poverty in the midst of plenty.
Without vision, we are drowning in the ocean of mediocrity and small mindedness in our national politics.
[This column was first published in the Daily Independent, September 26, 2018]
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