Style and the man: Jonathan’s speech and homily

By Idowu Akinlotan 02/10/2011 00:00:00

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Goodluck Jonathan

Two instincts are always at war in President Goodluck Jonathan’s mind. One side of him yearns to be an effective and transformational leader. This is the side he sells to us, the side we are still gingerly examining. The other side of him ensconces itself in the geniality and simplicity of his youth, an uncomplicated earthiness he grew up knowing and loving, one he is sometimes loth to disown especially when he is confronted by the complexities of ruling modern Nigeria. Judging from his sojourn in power so far, and the oscillations between firmness one day and galling hesitations another, he seems quite unenthusiastic about resolving the dilemma his personality and presidency confront daily. If my reading of him is realistic, it is unlikely the dilemma would be resolved soon or even before the expiration of his tenure.
More perplexing, in my opinion, is his refusal to determine, by books, what his understanding of leadership should be or the kind of leadership he should give his country, or even the sort of leadership his country requires at this time. Jonathan was given some moments to declaim on a topic of his interest during the 51st
 Independence Anniversary service in Abuja last Sunday. There he shocked us with an improper grasp of the topic of leadership, though he still managed to say what kind of leadership we should not expect from him, the kind he thought, by the examples he assembled from the Bible, was unacceptable to him and probably to any nation. At least now we are no longer in the dark as to what sort of leadership he detests. But, as we found out from Jonathan’s homily last Sunday, he finds it much more difficult to say what kind of leader he aspires to be.
This is not surprising. Most people face identity crisis at one point or another, and sometimes for an entire lifespan. Those who define who they are early in life may have been lucky to face what historians call defining moments, in which circumstances compel them to stand courageously for truth or principles, or to yield supinely to or accommodate the forces of the moment. Jonathan has faced political trials that offered him great moments to define himself and his presidency, a few of them during the interregnum, and others after he won the presidency. When it came to politics, he has found it quite distressing to summon the great character with which notable world leaders tackled the exigencies of the day, or to summon the great principles that ennobled the policy options of great leaders in defiance of the flatteries of their loyalists and supporters.
Jonathan has been heavily disparaged for asserting he would not gratify the wishes of Nigerian critics who he claimed wanted him to rule like a medieval king – like Egypt’s Pharaohs, like an army general, like Nebuchadnezzar, or like a lion. Perhaps because the time he was given was short, he did not tell us whether he thought all the Pharaohs who ever ruled Egypt were bad, or what part of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign he objected to. And if he were to rule like a lion, he did not also say what reservations he had about being likened to the king of the jungle. Two days after, however, he gave us an insight into what he really meant. At a lecture to mark the 51
st
 Independence Anniversary, Jonathan gave a definitive prescription for Nigeria’s greatness. Rather than leadership style or the strong personality of the leader, what a nation aspiring to greatness needed, the president said, were strong institutions.
So, if any of us expected Jonathan to offer strong Pharaoh-like leadership, we would instead, as he put it inelegantly, receive nothing from him but strong institutions, which he was erecting through the process of transformational leadership. I have written on the subject of leadership on more than four or five occasions in this place. I am tired of repeating myself to people who hardly take the pain to peruse critical views about themselves. Let Jonathan and his aides, if they are so minded, call for those articles in order to inform the president on the subject. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he needs both style and substance as a leader. His presidency is as much about his personality and style as it is about strong institutions, whether the institutions are created through transformational programmes or improved upon. Strong institutions can always be weakened and subverted by weak or strong leaders; but strong leaders always tend to create or improve strong institutions. Our colonial and post-colonial history proves this.
I fear that Jonathan’s ambition does not exceed leaving the country much the same way he met it – a united and fairly stable country. His talk of transformation looks undoubtedly at variance with what his ambition seems to evoke. I have an enjoyable habit of annoying some of my readers by my sometimes trenchant dismissal of their pretensions and sham intellectualism. They can rail at me all they wish; I am not deterred by their menaces, uncouthness, uncultured, not to say uninformed and unprincipled, vituperations. However, I must assert with all the energies in me that Jonathan’s disavowal of style and personality is nothing but escapism. All he is doing is attempting to hide his inability to boldly confront the major problems of the day behind the advocacy of strong institutions.
Many commentators have advised Jonathan to just give effective leadership instead of generating polemics on leadership style. The issue, I believe, goes beyond that. Jonathan, thankfully, does not appear to have uncultured and abusive aides, partly, I think, because he understands that whatever they say naturally and unavoidably reflect on his presidency. Let him keep that fine attitude. But except he confronts the issues of style and personality, his presidency will disappear unremarkably at the end of his tenure as a mere footnote in the annals of our nation. The problems we face today are the worst since independence, far in excess of the disagreements that led to the civil war. The Nigerian structure is not working; Nigerians have lost faith in their country; there is a chasm between our peoples, a chasm that cannot be bridged by fair words and homilies; and we have no sense of nationhood. Against these problems, strong institutions, as desirable as they are in a polity that works, are mere palliatives.
If it is not too late, I would like to remind Jonathan once again to seek refuge in books written by great leaders, some of whom he carelessly and almost recklessly dismissed.; for surely, among the welter of egotistic drivel of the Pharaohs, he will find pearls and nuggets worth both the sleuthing and his presidency. Let him burn the midnight oil on other great biographies, against which if he measured his presidency he would discover his inadequacies. As he is configured, and with his one-dimensional appreciation of leadership, if Jonathan were in Lincoln’s shoes before the American Civil War, he would endure slavery, reconcile with the South in mistaken abhorrence of fratricidal conflict, and take a dim view of history.
Given his present attitude to the current Nigerian constitution, if Jonathan were de Gaulle, confronted in 1958 by the problematic constitution of the Fourth Republic, he would make his peace with the constitution by amending it rather than replacing it. Richard Nixon, a former United States president ascribed the stability of the French Fifth Republic to the replacement of the Fourth Republic constitution by de Gaulle, even as he put the post-war instability of Italy down to the lack of similar leadership vision and strong personality as France mustered.
If Jonathan were Churchill before World War II, he would have made peace with Hitler in order to avoid war and escape the inconveniences of sacrificing millions of lives and possibly a political career in the defence of noble and lofty principles. After all, was Jonathan not disposed to negotiating with Boko Haram until the sect proved annoyingly intransigent? Are strong institutions enough to curb the crises engendered by unstable and weak political structures? Did strong institutions produce Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus the Great, Genghis Khan, etc or the other way round? They were strong leaders for their eras. We are at new and historic junctures in human history; and our era, and Nigeria in particular, still needs strong leaders. Strong leadership is, of course, not the same as dictatorship.
Jonathan needs to do more than attack terrorism with platitudes, as he did bemusedly in his Independence Day speech. We have reconciled ourselves to the sombre reality of his uninspiring speeches. But he exceeds even his own monotony when he called on politicians to eschew partisanship while he himself yields to his ruling party. It is surprising he has not placed his finger on the real factors that discourage business in Nigeria and make insecurity to flourish. However, his speech this time gave editors catchy headlines, but there was nothing said about the issues he raised that support those brave headlines.

If Jonathan is to reposition his presidency, he will need the firmness of Obasanjo without the latter’s bucolic rage, sanctimoniousness and obscurantism. He will need Gowon’s fairness and humanism pepped up by a fiery crusade against national and intellectual slothfulness. He will need Murtala Mohammed’s impatient activism circumscribed by a deeply intellectual and reflective understanding of both narrow and national issues. But at the core of the recommended eclecticism must be a powerful self-conviction that only great books can unearth, a self-discovery that will quieten his warring instincts and smother the tendency for escapism that has dodged his every step since he was unleashed upon the nation by the scheming Obasanjo.