The art of leadership is difficult enough in normal times. In an age of upheavals, the complexities are infinitely more daunting. Political leadership is the one vocation to which many are called but few are chosen. Today, sadly, the world is truly bereft of great leaders.
You wouldn’t, for example, call Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister a great leader. Anybody who deceives the Queen and decides to lock up Parliament for weeks ought to be tried for high treason. Nor would we dare to tag Donald Trump with the undeserved appellation of a statesman. Some psychologists believe that his entire cognitive corpus – by way of concepts, lexicon, and cosmology – does not transcend that of a high school teenager. I wouldn’t pass the torch to the young Emmanuel Macron who fancies himself the god Jupiter who dishes out ex-cathedra pronouncements to the uncomprehending hoi-polloi.
And there are still few madmen around: North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un is a good example. Robert Mugabe, as you all know, has gone where his types normally end up. I am not exactly sure where to place Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a de facto ruler.
In the West, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany fulfils some of my basic requirements of a visionary leader. She has served Germany well. In Africa, I would defer to Paul Kagame of Rwanda – warts and all. Recent Nobel laureate Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia has deservedly earned rock-star status within and outside his country. He is a breath of fresh air in Ethiopia where the people have been strangers to freedom for more than a century. President John Joseph Magufuli of Tanzania is also making the right waves.
By real leaders, I mean those servants of the people who have the courage of their convictions – who make things happen and who transform our world – transformational rainmakers who can move societies from a low level to a higher one.
One of the principal qualities that set apart great leaders from the common run is conscience and moral conviction. By moral conscience, we are referring to the still small voice which tugs tremulously on our hearts; urging us on when we are on the right and warning us when we are on the wrong. Every human being is born with a moral conscience.
Conscience lies at the foundation of the moral law. And it is largely from the moral law that natural justice and equity arise as precepts of jurisprudence. Conscience tells us that we must do unto others as we would wish them to do unto us. It also tells us that it is wrong to bear false witness against another or to take what is not ours or to take another’s life or property. Conscience dictates that we treat others with fairness and justice. It also tells us that all life is sacred.
It all goes back to Socrates, the Greek philosopher and ancient gadfly of Athens. He claimed to have been guided all his life by a voice. When he was doing the right thing, the voice always expressed approval. But whenever he was derailing, the voice would always give a reprimand or warning. The inner voice compelled him never to accept the dominant idols and prejudices of the age but to always question them. It soon got him into trouble with the ruling establishment. He was eventually tried on false charges of treason. He was forced to drink hemlock to his death. Socrates was one of the most remarkable human beings who faced the prospect of his death bravely and without bitterness. He recognised the awful fact that some lives would have to be sacrificed in the defence of truth, virtue, and justice.
His last words, as recounted by his student Plato are extraordinarily haunting: “Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death…The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better? God only knows.”
Martin Luther King Jr famously observed that a man has not begun to truly live until he has a cause for which he will willingly give his life. That is the foundation of conviction leadership. Mere politicians are two a penny these days. It is almost considered to be a mark of political sophistication for a public servant to be shorn of politics and convictions.
Three thinkers are guilty of this current state of affairs. The first is Niccolo Machiavelli. The Florentine political thinker famously proclaimed that “the end justifies the means” and that it is better to be feared than to be loved. The most dangerous type of leader is those who read The Prince out of context. Machiavelli was writing at a time when Renaissance Italy was made up of warring city-states.
What he wrote was a treatise on how the statesman might secure the existence of a free republic in an age of internecine strife. It is therefore not surprising that those who read him out of context are likely to behave like beasts.
The second culprit is the 17th-century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes’s famous work, Leviathan, was written during the years of the brutal bloody English civil war. His pessimistic temper was shaped by those violent experiences. The Leviathan emerged as a thought experiment of how a sovereign must govern under what he terms “the state of nature.” In that primordial condition in which life is “solitary, nasty, brutish and short”, the sovereign must rule with an iron hand. Moral considerations are to be suspended when what is imperative is the protection of human beings from devouring one another like beasts.
What will ultimately save our country is conviction politics. We may never all agree on values… we must be prepared to subject all our principles to the rigorous marketplace of ideas – to reason, debate and dialectical logic
The third is Robert Greene, the author of “The 48 Laws of Power”. An aspiring politician once gave me a tour guide of his library at his palatial home. The only book on the sprawling oak table was Greene’s book. He looked at me knowingly. Deep in my heart, I concluded that this man has become a lost soul. I believe that 70 percent of our politicians have read “The 48 Laws of Power”. The irony is that when all of you have read the same book and are trying to play the games recommended by the book on each other, it all becomes a fools’ market. You know that I know that we are all playing the games of power. In the end, it all leads to nowhere but a common dungeon of moral nihilism.
What will ultimately save our country is conviction politics. We may never all agree on values. This is why Winston Churchill described democracy as the worst system of government – except for the others. And because this is so, we must be prepared to subject all our principles to the rigorous marketplace of ideas – to reason, debate and dialectical logic.
The godfathers and moneybags that control our political and party systems abhor such things. They prefer pliable operators in dark, smoke-filled chambers. Most of our politicians think strictly in terms of religion, ethnicity, tribe, and region. Rare are statesmen and women who believe in Nigeria, her common good and her manifest destiny within the temple of humanity.
I daresay that our country will never live up to its promise of greatness and will never transcend its mediocrity unless we hand over the torch to a new generation who possess the courage of their convictions – who are guided by conscience and the ideals of enlightenment and civilisation.
