Where have all the leaders gone?

The crisis facing our country and the world at large is the crisis of leadership. In 1945 giants walked the earth: Franklin Roosevelt in the United States, Winston Churchill in Britain, Charles de Gaulle in France and Konrad Adenauer in West Germany. Stalin – in spite of his brutality – was one of the giants of the twentieth century. In the natural sciences, men such as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr were carrying on their eternal debate on quantum physics and whether or not God plays dice with the universe.

In the Indian sub-Continent we had Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. In the intellectual sphere the Nobel physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the poet Rabindranath Tagore and the philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan were the harbingers of the Indian Renaissance.

In Africa brilliant young men such as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Jamal Abdel Nassir, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Julius Nyerere were preparing themselves mentally and spiritually for the burden of leadership. 

Reel forward to Anno Domini 2014. The world has been taken over by little men. In Europe they have become either colourless bureaucrats or comedians and crypto-fascists.  What makes big news in France these days are the navy blue frocks won by Marine Le Pen and the new mistress that the unmarried President François Hollande has acquired. In Belgium the prime minister is an openly gay Franco-Italian Luxembourgeois. In Italy, while the dirty old man Silvio Berlusconi is serving time in community work for tax evasion and sundry felonies, the high magistracy of the Italian state has been taken over by a young man who seems overwhelmed by the sheer gravity of the rot he has inherited. 

Chancellor Angela Markel of Germany is obviously a safe pair of hands. But I doubt if anyone would remember anything she said in a hundred years’ time.  Most people do not know the names of the current prime ministers of Spain and Portugal. And nobody gives a hoot.

In the United States all the poetry and chutzpah have gone out of a graying Barack Obama. He took the world by storm, but it seems will leave the political firmament like a bleak comet.

The late baroness Thatcher once remarked that one of her greatest achievements in life was to have survived Oxford. David Cameron of Britain impresses me as someone has survived neither Eton nor Oxford. He appears torn between a rabidly Euro-skeptic Conservative Party and the imperatives of economic prudence that necessitate Britain taking its rightful place at the heart of Europe. The bickering goes on even as Britain drifts absentmindedly into dissolution. The prospect of Scotland leaving the union in a referendum billed to take place on Thursday 18th September is a real one. All the more astonishing that British politicians are carrying on as if it is business-as-usual.

Vladimir Putin is the new strongman of Russia. One of the lines in contemporary Russian political mythology is that Putin is the grandson of the sinister Siberian monk Grigory Rasputin, whose diabolical shenanigans brought the hapless Romanovs to ruin, plunging Russia into the long night of Bolshevism.  His claim to fame would be that he once worked for the KGB and has the chutzpah to gobble up the Crimea. A man of legendary taciturnity, nobody knows the mind of the Russian potentate. I doubt if he himself knows what he wants beyond maximizing his grip over the Russian people. Beyond the sabre-rattling and showmanship, Putin’s Russia is a world apart from the lofty vision of Holy Russia that the philosopher and mystic Sergei Solovyov once prophesied.

Cast a glance at Africa.  We could say in all honesty that the current generation of leaders marks a sea change from what obtained during the era of the strongmen from Mobutu to Ngwazi Kamuzu Banda and the succession of brutal military tyrants. The first President of post-Apartheid South Africa, 

Nelson Mandela, set a new standard for African leadership. Meles Zenawi and Yoweri Museveni started off on the right track. In smaller countries such as Mauritius, the Seychelles and Cape Verde, a tradition of responsible democratic leadership has been fully entrenched in their political systems. 

Rwanda’s Paul Kagame is held in high international esteem not because he is a real democrat but because of his focused commitment to excellence and effective leadership.  The Rwandan state is second to none in capacity for delivery and effectiveness.  If Kagame had a chance to rule Nigeria, we would be competing with Germany in a matter of a decade.

In the days of Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Aminu Kano, we in Nigeria would have been inundated by now with books and political tracts on the policy choices facing our nation. The statesmen of that generation had their weaknesses, but they were intellectual giants. Obafemi Awolowo was a profound thinker who wrote prodigiously — a master of the art and science of statecraft.  General Yakubu Gowon once remarked that he is yet to meet the equal of Obafemi Awolowo.

By contrast, our leaders of today Lilliputians. Nobody knows the political philosophy of the ruling PDP or that of the opposition APC. Beyond their hunger for power and the spoils of political office, nobody knows what they stand for in policy and substance.

Where are the great men? Where are the ideas that will move our epoch and move our people to great undertakings? Where are the great projects for national rebirth and rejuvenation?   

I look in vain for those Penkelemes men who have the fire of the Egyptians and the audacity of Aeschylus — men of valour who love Africa and Humanity. All we hear is Ikimi this and Ribadu that. And the mumbo-jumbo of political jobbers who call themselves “Transformational Ambassadors”. Is this the land of Ayodele Awojobi, of Chuba Okadigbo with his Hegelian dialectics – of the famed men for whom ideas mattered? Why are we fed such soporific nonsense by ignorant men who arrogate to themselves the right to rule without a modicum of intellect or Reason?

OBADIAH MAILAFIA