Now, the twin criticisms of my stand which I find sufficiently interesting to want to answer are: (1) that my view of the Nigerian predicament is elitist, because it emphasizes the role of a crop of leaders rather than of the broad masses; and (2) that my diagnosis wrongly identifies people rather than economic and political systems as the source of the Nigerian problem.
I do recognize, of course, that there are broadly three components to the equation for national development: system, leader, and followers. In an ideal world, each would mesh nicely and efficiently with the others. But quite clearly Nigeria is not in such a world, not even on the road to it. She seems in fact to be going in the opposite direction, towards a world of bad systems, bad leadership, and bad followership. The question then is, How do we redirect our steps in a hurry? In other words, where do we begin and have the best chance of success? To change the Nigerian system; to change the Nigerian leadership style; or to change the hearts of one hundred and twenty million Nigerians?
Proponents of the supremacy of system would argue that unless you have the right political-economic arrangement no good leader can emerge or survive and certainly no good followership can develop. I am no stranger to the allure of this argument, and I admit it can be engaging, especially when it is presented by first-class minds. I remember hearing C.L.R. James (author of The Black Jacobins) at a memorable lecture he gave at the University of Massachusetts making a case for systems. James was a bold and erudite Marxist thinker and was putting forward the rather startling argument that during the Great Depression America had a choice of following one of two eminent citizens—Franklin D. Roosevelt or Paul Robeson. Roosevelt, he said, had proposed to tinker with the traumatized American capitalist system, while Paul Robeson, a more brilliant person by far, stood for scrapping the system altogether. Of course America followed Roosevelt and cast Robeson on the rubbish heap. And the result, said C.L.R. James, was Watergate, a scandal that was deeply exercising America at the time of his lecture. And then with typical hyperbole James told his spellbound audience that even if Jesus Christ and his disciples were to descend and take over the running of the American White House there still would have been Watergate!
What he was saying, in effect, was not only that the American capitalist system was unviable but that systems were all that mattered. And that was plainly doctrinaire. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs of social reconstruction and his restructuring of American financial institutions, especially the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), may not today be called the revolutions some people thought they were at the time, but anybody who would dismiss them as mere tinkering would have to be a very committed adversary indeed! And he would have to demonstrate, not merely through intellectual abstractions but by pointing to an actual system in practice somewhere which can show better results and no scandals of one form or another.
In my view the basic problem with efforts to bestow preeminence on systems is, however, their inability to explain how an abstract system can bring itself into being autonomously. Would it drop from the sky and operate itself? Would Tanzania have chosen the socialist path to development if Nyerere had not been around? And, next door, would Kenya have gone capitalist if Oginga Odinga rather than Kenyatta had been leader? When fellows speak glibly about the right system, they forget that they are talking about political arrangements brought into being either evolutionally or revolutionally in other places and times by leaders of those times and places or their forerunners. It would not have occurred to Lenin or Castro (to use just two examples) to dismiss the leadership factor in thinking systems out and converting abstract social models into actual institutions. These are inescapable roles of intellectual and political leadership.
Of course, one could argue that all the thinking that needs to be done in this matter has already been done elsewhere by other people and that we, the latecomers, do not need to reinvent the wheel, as it were. But that is a proposition we could not live with.
We need not spend too long on the argument for the preeminence of followers. It is enough to say that no known human enterprise has flourished on the basis of followers leading their leaders. The cliché that people get the leader they deserve is a useful exaggeration—useful because it reminds the general populace of the need for vigilance in selecting their leaders (where they have a chance to do so) and for keeping them under constant surveillance.
But to go beyond that and suggest, as one has often heard people do in this country, that when a leader misleads or fails to offer any leadership at all it is because Nigerians are unpatriotic and impossible to govern, or that when a leader accepts a bribe he is no more to blame than the man who offered the bribe, is completely to misunderstand the meaning of leadership.
Leadership is a sacred trust, like the priesthood in civilized, humane religions. No one gets into it lightly or unadvisedly, because it demands qualities of mind and discipline of body and will far beyond the need of the ordinary citizen. Anybody who offers himself or herself or is offered to society for leadership must be aware of the unusually high demands of the role and should, if in any doubt whatsoever, firmly refuse the prompting.
Sometimes one hears apologists of poor leadership ask critics whether they would do better if they were in the shoes of the leader. It is a particularly silly question, the answer to which is that the critic is not in or running for the leader’s shoes, and therefore how he might walk in them does not arise. An editorial writer can surely condemn a pilot who crashes an airplane through carelessness or incompetence, or a doctor who kills his patient by negligent administration of drugs, without having to show that he can pilot a plane or write prescriptions himself.
The elite factor is an indispensable element of leadership. And leadership itself is indispensable to any association of human beings desirous of achieving whatever goals it sets for itself.
When such an association is engaged in a difficult undertaking or is in pursuit of a risky objective such as nation building, the need for competent leadership becomes particularly urgent. It is like having the captain who takes control over those “who go down to the sea in ships” or up into the clouds in airplanes. Even a nation already firmly established will in times of emergency allow unprecedented powers to its leader, no matter how deeply its democratic instincts may run in normal times. During the Great Depression, the fiercely independent-minded industrial/business complex in America virtually handed its affairs over to President Roosevelt.
When we speak of leadership, we generally are thinking of political leadership. This is to be expected, because under normal circumstances political institutions provide the overarching structure of human society. But there are other kinds of leadership operating under the political superstructure: military/industrial, intellectual, artistic, religious, et cetera. Each of these subgroups evolves its own peculiar rules and chain of command, from the top through a more or less restricted core of middle managers down to the mass of followers. This model can of course be described as elitist.
Unfortunately “elitist” has become a dirty word in contemporary usage. It was inevitable and indeed desirable that with the spread of democratic principles in the world, elite systems inherited from mankind’s immemorial past should be subjected, like any other received values and practices, to critical scrutiny and reappraisal. But in a world in which easy sloganeering so quickly puts the critical faculty to flight, what has happened to the word “elite” is a good example of how a once useful word can become manipulated to a point where it no longer facilitates thought but even inhibits it. But perhaps the cloud under which the word has come is not entirely undeserved. A word is more likely to become abused when the concept it represents has been corrupted.
I should like to examine briefly the uses and abuses of the elite system, using the example of a national army. An army is, of course, one of those branches of human organization where the need for clear, unambiguous leadership exists. The line of command is both necessary and rigid. E
ven the armies of “people’s democracies” have not succeeded in obliterating the line between the commander and the commanded.
Now, in addition to the inescapable fact of hierarchy in their organization, most modern armies have devised special, elite corps of troops whose job is to move in and smash particularly difficult obstacles and move out again, leaving the regular forces to carry on routine military activities. Members of such an elite corps are rated much higher than regular troops and are given all kinds of special favors and perquisites to compensate them for the extraordinary exertions they make and dangers they face.
But supposing an army were to recruit its elite corps not on the highest and toughest standards of soldiering but because they were the children of generals and admirals, it would have created a corrupt elite corps pampered with special favors without having the ability of storm troopers. So the real point about an elite is not whether it is necessary or not but whether it is genuine or counterfeit. This boils down to how it is recruited. And this will be true of any elite system. An elite corps of scientists is indispensable to the modern state, but if its recruitment is from the children and brothers-in-law of professors rather than from young scientists of the greatest talent, it would be worse than useless, because it would not only fail to produce scientific results itself but would actually inhibit such results from other quarters. A counterfeit elite, in other words, inflicts double jeopardy on society.
So the real problem posed by leadership is that of recruitment. Political philosophers from Socrates and Plato to the present time have wrestled with it. Every human society, including our own traditional and contemporary societies, has also battled with it. How do we secure the services of a good leader?
A magazine columnist who doesn’t share my view on this matter published a picture of me with my chin resting on my hand and a caption below saying: “Achebe waiting for the Messiah.” Most unfair, of course! But even so, waiting for a messiah may not be as far-fetched or ludicrous as the columnist may imagine. For we have no fail-safe prescription for bringing the great leader into being. No people have had a monopoly in this. Great leaders have arisen in diverse places from every conceivable system: feudal, democratic, revolutionary, military, et cetera. Kemal Atatürk, Chaka, Elizabeth I, Lenin, Mao, Lincoln, Nkrumah.
Does it mean, then, that like the iroko tree the great leader will grow where he will and that the rest of us should just sit, put our hand under our chin, and wait? No! If we cannot compel greatness in our leaders, we can at least demand basic competence. We can insist on good, educated leaders while we wait and pray for great ones. Even divine leaders have needed precursors to make straight their way.
In traditional monarchical systems such as we would today dismiss as anachronistic, there were elite groups called kingmakers whose business was to keep an eye on all the eligible princes and choose the best when the time came. These kingmakers were specially qualified by tradition and by knowledge of the history of the kingdom, and no less by being themselves ineligible for selection so that they could be seen to be reasonably disinterested. Those of us who often doubt that we could learn anything from our traditional systems and usage should compare the scrupulousness of the kingmaker arrangement with the lack of it in our elections today!
Be that as it may, the universities and other elite centers with deep knowledge of national and world issues can play a role somewhat analogous to that undertaken by kingmakers of the past, not in selecting the king themselves but by spreading in advance general enlightenment and a desire for excellence in the entire constituency of the nation, including those who will aspire to national leadership.
We must admit that the Nigerian university has not acquitted itself too brilliantly in this regard in the past. The university man who has sallied forth into national politics has had a rather dismal record. No one can point to any shining achievement in national politics which the nation can recognize as the peculiar contribution of university men and women. Rather, quite a few of them have been splashed with accusations of abuse of office and other forms of corruption.
Those who have not sallied forth but remained in the ivory tower have hardly fared better. Many have cheapened themselves and eroded their prestige by trotting up and down between the campus and the waiting rooms of the powerful, vying for attention and running one another down for the entertainment of the politician. For this and other reasons, the university has deservedly lost its mystique and squandered the credibility which it had in such abundance at the time of Nigeria’s independence.
To cap it all, we have had a zealous policy maker from the highest level of university administration whose sole preoccupation was a balancing act of applying the wealth of the nation to keep back the go-ahead, and reward and pamper the sluggard, in a mistaken and futile effort to achieve unity through discrimination, and parity in backwardness.
Who, then, is to champion that pursuit of excellence on which the university ideal is founded and which no people can neglect without paying a heavy price in stagnation and decay? The Nigerian university has so far shown little faith in its own mission. Is it any wonder that others should be lukewarm?
One remarkable feature of Nigeria used to be that no one who ruled it in its first quarter century had been to university. Did that say anything about our national preoccupations and values? Look around us and compare our record in this regard with that of our neighbors, even in Africa.
I do not suggest that the university is the only fountain of enlightenment and excellence. Far be it from me to suggest that. But not to have had one university man in eight, and not once in twenty-six years! Our traditional people would have sought the offices of Afa divination to explain that!
As the twenty-first century takes hold of us, we must take a hard look at ourselves and ask why the intellectual leadership which the Nigerian nation deserves to get from the university has not been forthcoming. It is imperative that the Nigerian university set about cleaning up its act. It must go back to work so as to produce that salt of excellence which the nation relies on it to drop into the boiling soup pot of Nigerian leadership.
1988
Stanley Diamond
I was intrigued to be asked to contribute a paper to a volume of essays in honor of Stanley Diamond. Dialectical anthropology is not a field in which I can wander freely and at ease. My accustomed turf is elsewhere. But I assume there was a reason for asking me; and for that very reason (if I have divined it correctly) I couldn’t refuse or let the occasion pass without a single word.
Stanley Diamond came to Biafra. In fact, he came twice during the terrible civil war that ravaged Nigeria from 1967 to 1970. For many of us embattled there, his coming meant so much. Why? He was only one of so many visitors we had. What made his coming so special?
Biafra had stirred deep emotions across the world. It probably gave television evening news its first chance to come into its own and invade without mercy the sacrosanctity of people’s living rooms with horrifying scenes of children ground to dust by modern war—a surrogate war fought with modern weapons. Said Baroness Asquith in the British House of Lords: “Thanks to the miracle of television we see history happening before our eyes. We see no Ibo propaganda; we see the facts.”1
If governments were largely unmoved by the tragedy, ordinary people were outraged. I witnessed from the visitors’ gallery of the House of Commons what was described as unprecedented rowdiness during a private member’s motion on Biafra. Harold Wilson, villain of the piece, sat as cool as a cucumber, leaving his foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, to sweat it out.
It was hardly surprising that many remarkable people would want to visit the scene of such human tragedy. Auberon Waugh came, and afterwards wrote a devastating book on Britain’s duplicitous policy. He also named his newborn child Biafra Waugh! Frederick Forsyth, a mere reporter then, was soon sacked by his employer, the BBC, for filing stories too favorable to Biafra. Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen, the Swedish nobleman who became a legend in
the 1930s when he volunteered to fight for Haile Selassie against the Italians, came back to Africa to embrace Biafra’s cause and threw Nigeria’s air force of MiG and Ilyushin fighters into disarray and panic with five tiny two-seater Minicon planes.
There was an American Air Force colonel (retired)—I cannot now recall his name—who came out of his retirement in Florida to fly food and medical supplies on behalf of Joint Church Aid from the Portuguese island of São Tomé into Biafra. He flew many missions into Uli airport—a segment of highway the Biafrans had converted with great ingenuity into a landing strip, camouflaged during the day with leaves and transformed into one of Africa’s busiest airports at night. One stormy night, the colonel did not make it back. I called on his widow during a visit I made to Florida. It was a painful meeting. I didn’t really know the man and there was nothing I could say to this woman who sat so calm and courteous but remote. But before I took my leave she asked her question: “Tell me honestly, did he do any good coming?”
“Yes,” I said. “Definitely. He saved a few children.” She smiled then with tears in her eyes.
There was a small group of American writers who came to show solidarity with Biafra’s beleaguered writers—Kurt Vonnegut, Herbert Gold, and Harvey Swados. They barely got out again before Biafra’s final collapse and the closure of the airport. Each of these visitors and scores of others, many of whom I did not meet or know about, came in answer to the call of a common humanity. They came to the losers. I was told that when von Rosen heard of the defeat of Biafra he said it would take the world fifty years at least to understand what had happened.
Stanley Diamond came like all these others. But he also brought something additional—a long-standing scholarly interest and expertise in the territory. In her book The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War, 1967–1970, Suzanne Cronje, onetime diplomatic correspondent of the Financial Times of London, makes the following point: “On the whole, the emphasis on suffering and the relief of it damaged Biafra’s chances of gaining international recognition. The problem came to be regarded as a humanitarian rather than a political dilemma; it was easier to donate money for milk than to answer Biafra’s international challenge.”2
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