Until the twentieth century, Igbos did not have
written literature. Therefore, observers
of Igbos do not have a body of literature to examine, and from which to draw
conclusions about them. This lack is even more pronounced in the area of
leadership. There simply is no known body of writing on Igbo political
leadership that an observer can take a hard look at, and from which he makes
statements on Igbo political leadership.
The
meager writing that seems to exist about the Igbos of the past tends to be
mostly anthropological in nature. Anthropology assumes a preliterate and or
traditional society. (Both terms are euphemisms for primitive society.)
Anthropologists tend to study societies that have no known body of literature
on their ways of life, even their history. Trevor Roper,
a Regius Professor of history at Oxford University,
observed that Africa has no history that a historian like himself should bother
studying. As Roper sees it, primitive societies are the purview of
anthropologists, who should try to infer those societies past and present
traditions through ethnographical, physical anthropological and archeological
researches.
In
that light, post second world war twenty-something year old Western graduate
students descended on Africa, performed the requisite one year of anthropological
field studies, returned to their Western universities, wrote their observations
of the people they had observed, submitted them as their doctoral
dissertations, and subsequently become acclaimed experts on every thing
African. In time, African anthropologists followed suit and wrote booklets on
their people’s cultures. See, for example, Victor Uchendu’s
“Igbos of Southeast Nigeria”.
Anthropologists
are not experts on management and leadership and, therefore, their conclusions
on Igbo politics are hardly relevant to any serious study of Igbo political
leadership.
There
are writings on extant Africans by political scientists. One
can
think of James Coleman’s
seminal study of the Political Culture of Nigeria and Richard Sklar’s
trail blazing study of Political Parties
in
Nigeria. However, political scientists
are not experts on leadership and management. Their thoughts on African
leadership
issues
are seldom relevant to those interested in actual leadership issues in Africa. At best, the efforts of political and other
social scientists are scholastic and appeal to academics. They lack knowledge
of how human beings are led in trying to achieve organizational goals.
Leadership
is about positing goals and mobilizing people in an effort to achieve those
goals. Management is about using men and material in accomplishing
organizational and social goals. See Ozodi Osuji, The Art and Science of leadership for Africans.
Real
leaders and managers understand macro and micro economics, public finance,
business finance, accounting, budgets, marketing, productions/operations,
general management, supervision, human resources, industrial relations,
organizational behavior, computer applications in business, customer care, some
history and law etc, subjects that political scientists usually do not study.
Political
scientists study the polity and its: legislature, executive, judiciary, bureaucracy, political culture,
political socialization, political ideologies, political parties, interests
groups, public opinion, public policy, civil rights, civil liberties, military,
religious organizations, labor unions, international relations, international
organizations, comparative politics, terrorism and so on. They study these subjects in such a global
manner that they are generally not really of interest to practical political
leaders who are struggling to use men and materials to attain social goals.
Political science is an academic discipline and its writings on leadership,
such as there is, are the stuff of students and idle scholars, but not
materials for actual leaders.
What
all these add up to is that observers of Igbo political leadership really do
not have any place to go to for a body of legitimate literature that they can
build on. I will, therefore, try to overcome this disadvantage by making
informed inferences from first hand observations of Igbo political behavior.
IGBO POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL
SOCIALIZATION
The
Igbos
are, generally, classified as a stateless people. The implication of this
classification is that the Igbos did not develop large scale social-political
organizations before their encounter with Europeans. The Igbos did not have a
political superstructure that encompassed all Alaigbo.
What they had were disparate self governing towns.
Lord
Lugard,
the architect of Nigeria…he agglomerated disparate tribes into one political
entity and his girl friend invented a name for it, Nigeria (nigger area, nigger
land),… had contempt for the Igbos. He
thought that they were very primitive because, in his view, they had not even
developed the basic rudiments of large scale social-political organizations. He literally had to invent large scale social
organizations for the Igbos. He established village transcending local and
regional authorities in Igboland. He invented warrant chiefs (Indirect Rule) to
rule the various local authorities that he invented for Igbos. Lugard attempted to form Igbo organizations that
transcended villages and towns.
(Many Igbos, today, run around Nigeria calling
themselves chiefs. They are probably unaware that it was a white man who, in a
condescending frame of mind, invented chiefdoms for the Igbos. Traditionally,
it was said that “Igbo Ama Eze”,
meaning that the Igbos did not have chiefs; they were republican in their
attitude towards politics. But, the
colonized minds that currently pretend to rule Igboland go about calling
themselves by the names their colonial masters gave them. Names that were
supposed to apply to primitive societies without developed political
infrastructure. The Igbos did not have Kings, Dukes, Earls, Counts, Marquis,
village Squires etc, leadership institutions that would have impressed
Frederick Lugard’s monarchical thinking. Lugard invented chiefs…as white Americans invented chiefs
for those Jean Jacque Rousseau
called the noble savages, Indians. And our now ill educated Igbo leaders who,
instead of being ashamed of the titles given to them by their colonial masters,
run amuck calling themselves chiefs. The term chief is of Frankish origin, a
term given to the leaders of primitive German war bands.)
Lord
Frederick Lugard had enormous admiration for the
Hausas, Fulanis, Yorubas
and Edos. He
admired the fact that those people had established large scale political
organizations and had rulers that reminded him of his much admired English
monarchs. Indeed, he borrowed his indirect rule framework from observing those
African societies, their Emirs (Arab for small Chief), Sultans (Turkish for big
chief) and Obas. Those societies had in place
mechanisms for controlling the people, and the Igbos, Lugard
believed, did not have those mechanisms for ruling people, for civilizing them
and making them appropriate to live in cities. He set about inventing a
political structure for the Igbos, to help, in his view, “civilize these wild
people with no known leadership structure.”
Make
no mistake about what governments exist for. Governments exist to enable
society to control its people. As Thomas Hobbes
observed, in nature, people are a threat to each other and their lives were
nasty, brutish and short. Government was therefore invented as a mechanism for
stamping out the wild side of the people and civilizing them, making them live
with one another and respect one another’s interests. Government is composed of
legislatures that make laws to reign in the people’s wild natures, executives
to implement those laws and polices, judiciary to adjudicate disputes arising
in the polity, police to arrest law breakers and bring them to justice, courts
and judges to sentence antisocial criminals to jail, penal institutions to
punish law breakers. Simply stated, to the British conservative mind,
government is designed to get people to obey the laws that make for civilized
living and without governments, people revert to primitive anarchy.
Without
the strong arm of government, Anglo-Saxon thinking believes that all would be
chaos, and Lugard set about trying to bring law and
order in what seemed to him a primitive and chaotic Igbo society. Lugard did not see any structures for governing (which
means controlling) human beings in Igboland and, therefore, concluded that the
Igbos were extremely primitive. He thought the Igbos contemptible and
despicable for not even embarking on the first stages of political development.
To Lugard, the Igbos amounted to the likes of the
naked Pygmies running around in the Ituru forest in
Congo.
Of
course, Igbos had structures for self governance, perhaps, not in the manner
that Lugard was used to seeing. See John Locke,
Second Treaty on Government.
Anthropologists
have a methodological approach to studying traditional societies called
structural functionalism. In societies where there are no formal
mechanisms for governing people, no legislature, executive, courts, police,
jails etc, anthropologists inferred who performed those functions by observing
the people. Thus, whereas there were no designated legislatures, presidents, and
courts in some societies, close observation of them inferred how those
functions were carried out. Apparently, every society must carry out those
governmental functions, in one form or another; otherwise they would not be
classified as human societies. As Aristotle
reminds us, human beings are those animals that are political in nature and
politics requires institutions for actualizing political decisions.
Early
anthropologists inferred that there were legislatures in Igboland by observing
the adult members of Igbo villages gathering and making decisions as to how
their villages were governed; inferred the presence of executives by observing
how the village “council” delegated to some men with the function of executing
the decisions they had reached, and inferred the existence of courts by
observing how those who disobeyed the rules of the village were punished.
Inferring
the existence of political functions from observing the polity at work, rather
than see those branches of government and study them, means that the identified
society is perceived as not developed.
Hence, David Hume
would say that Africans did not develop sophisticated societies worthy of his
study.
I
am an Igbo, a very proud one at that. I am
inclined to be defensive when other people consider me and my people as
primitive. However, I would gain nothing
by being defensive. I will, therefore,
accept that the Igbos did not have sophisticated frameworks for governing
modern polities. As far as I know, the
Igbos did not have an Igbo wide parliament, president, judiciary, bureaucracy,
religious institutions…means for controlling the people. In so far that those institutions now seem to
exist in Igboland, they were, more or less, borrowed from Western countries.
Ali
Mazrui
pointed out in his popular book on “Africans” that it is precisely because most
contemporary African political institutions are borrowed from the West, that
they are breaking down everywhere in Africa. These institutions are not
indigenous to Africa and, as such, have no root in African cultures. An
institution is likely to survive in a polity if it has cultural
underpinnings.
The
British Parliament evolved gradually in England, beginning in 1215 when King
John made accommodations with his lords and agreed to consult them before he
taxed them or went to war, Magna Carta. Parliament
then evolved with the evolution of British society, at each point reflecting
the lay of the times. When Aristocrats ruled, the House of Lords were the
rulers of Britain. With the triumph of the industrial revolution in 1746, and
the emergence of the professional middle classes, power shifted to the
commoners. Today, the middle class rule Britain, reflecting the middle class
society Britain now is. Tony Blair, the
current British prime Minister, a very smart chap, is, at this very moment,
trying to decide what to do with what remained of the House of Lords: whether
to disband it as anachronistic or retain it as a pasture where those old men
and women who served Britain well and were given life peerages, are sent to
while away their idle time until they died. The point is that British
institutions grew up reflecting the changes in British culture.
Institutions
that adapted to other people’s history and culture were transposed to Africa
and expected to work. They cannot work,
unless, of course, they incorporate African cultures. Hence imported European
political institutions bequeathed to Africans by the departing colonial powers
broke down everywhere, as they should.
Ali
Masrui believes that out of this breakdown of
imported political institutions that authentic African institutions would rise
up, institutions that reflect the African experience.
Since
contemporary African experience is inclusive of European culture, presumably,
the political institutions that would eventually emerge in Africa would be
Africanized Western institutions? For
example, African legislatures would be a synthesis of African law making
practices and European law making practices? (See Ozodi
Thomas Osuji, Convergence and Integration of African
and Western Organizational Psychology.
University of California. Doctoral Dissertation. )
In
pre-colonial Igbo society, the village and town were the extent of socio-political
organizations. There were a few exceptions to this general rule, such as the
situation in Onitcha and surrounding towns.
The Onitcha Igbos had chiefs, small and big chiefs;
their big chief was called the Obi of Onitcha. Before
we get carried away, however, let it be noted that pre-colonial Onitcha was no more than a glorified village with a few
hundred persons and could hardly qualify for the type of large scale social
organization that Westerners would call nation state. Further more, there is debate as to whether
the Onitcha institutions were indigenous to them or
were borrowed from non-Igbos.
Nnamdi
Azikiwe aka Zik, an Onitcha man, a man who
ought to know better, in his autobiography, My Odyssey,
argued, without convincing the reader, that the Onitcha
were descendants of Edo people, hence that their seeming more evolved political
institutions reflected the evolved political institutions in Edoland. Azikiwe seemed to accept the colonialists’ assessment that
the Igbos were primitive and tried his best to distance himself from the Igbos
and associate himself with what seemed to him a more civilized people, the Bini ruling class.
Mr.
Azikiwe tended to seem lacking in understanding of
the implications of what he was saying. By claiming Bini
origins for his people, in a misguided effort to seem as civilized as the Binis allegedly were, he, in effect, said that the Bini were better than the Igbos; and, more importantly,
bought the self serving nonsense propagated by the British that Africans were
primitive. I read Zik’s book in high school, and even
as a teenager recognized that Zik was not very
sagacious; that he was impulsive and not really thoughtful. Still untrained in
psychology, I recognized that Zik felt inferior,
perhaps, due to the alleged backwardness of the Igbos, and since Lugard claimed that the Bini were
more advanced than the Igbos, that Zik felt that he
could be seen as advanced by claiming Bini origin.
This is the usual compensatory reaction of those who feel inferior, those who
are not proud of their real selves. See
Alfred Adler, the Neurotic Constitution.
For
a long time, this observer detested Mr. Azikiwe
because of that instance of shame over his Igbo origin. This writer is very
proud of his Igbo origin and does not believe that any other tribe in Nigeria
or for that matter, any group in the world is better than the Igbos. Yes, the
Igbos did not develop large scale social-political organizations, but that does
not make them any more primitive than other peoples.
Let
us move on. Apart from the noted Onitcha exception,
most Igbo towns and villages were small scale affairs. See Elizabeth Isichia’s
historiography, her reconstructed history of the Igbos.
Generally,
the Igbos were governed thus: the entire free born, adult male population of
the village gathered and made the laws that governed them. This is pretty much
like the Greeks of Athens gathered at the Acropolis to make the laws that
governed them. Like the Athenians, (See Plato, Republic)
the Igbos excluded women and slaves from their political decision making. This
was unfortunate, for that meant that 50% of the population, women, were
excluded from giving informational input into how society was governed and, in
effect, excluded a significant source of knowledge in governing. The more
access we give to all the population, the better the input into decision
making. Leaders make decisions. Decision making requires examining alternative
courses of action and choosing one. The more alternatives the leader has to chose
from, the better his decisions. Thus, by excluding women and slaves Igbos
deprived themselves of a source of information that would have improved the
governing of their polity. Societies like contemporary Scandinavia, which give
women equality in politics tend to be better governed than feudal societies in
Arabia, that exclude women from governance. It is also sad that the slaves, Osus, were excluded from participating in Igbo politics.
Some of those slaves were probably smart and could have made useful input into
the proper governing of Igbo society. We must remember that some of the best
philosophers in the Western world were slaves. Epectatus,
a stoic philosopher, for example, was a Roman slave. Society must not exclude
any one from governing. (Romans were guided by the twin philosophies of
Stoicism and Epicures. See Zeno, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Pliny the
Younger, Ovid, Virgil, etc.)
For
our present purpose, the Oha, that is, the gathering
of the free born, adult male population of each Igbo village, ruled the
village. The Oha
(public) passed a law and it was obeyed. Ohanaka (the
people makes the law), Ohaegbulam (the people can
make laws that determine people’s life and death, hence they should not kill
one), Ohakwe (the people should agree, form
consensus, pass laws). The Igbos placed
enormous emphasis on what Oha said. In fact, every
Igbo is constituted in such a manner that if he did not obtain his village’s Oha’s approval, he felt like he was nothing and that he did
not exist. For example, the Igbo places emphasis on wealth and individual
achievement, Oha respects the individual if he is an
achiever. Thus every Igbo struggles to become an achiever so as to be liked and
accepted by the Oha. To be rejected by the Oha is tantamount to death.
Amala,
the collective free born of Igboland, and Diala, an
individual free born (Diala…the land’s husbands) of a
village made the rules that governed the Igbo village. Umudiala,
the husbands of the land, children of the land, made the rules that governed
their village. They were the
legislature, the executive and judiciary. They made laws and gave a few among
them temporary executive powers to implement specific rules. Amala gathered and acted as the judiciary; they gathered
and decided on issues that disturbed the peace of the village; they punished
deviants who disobeyed the laws of the village.
The
Igbo were extremely severe in punishing social deviants. For example, persons
who committed certain tabooed subjects were either killed or told to leave the
village, and never to come back to it. Incest was occasion for capital
punishment. Sex with another man’s wife was occasion for banishment from the
village. The Igbos ostracized whoever did not obey the laws of the village and
most Igbos, to the present, are afraid of being ostracized by their village. To
be ostracized was to become a non-human being, a dead person, really. Law and
order was so rigid that very little crimes existed in traditional Igbo
societies.
Law
and order, as everywhere, were supplemented with extra legal agencies like
religious institutions. No society relies only on legal institutions to
implement law and order. Morality is chiefly implemented through religious
institutions. It is doubtful that a human society can exist without such
religious institutions, even if the existence of God is doubted.
The
village's high priest and a coterie of religious functionaries, such as dibia, lolos etc, helped get the
villagers to obey the rules passed by Oha. These
religious agents were perceived as the intermediaries between heaven and earth,
God and man. Every society known to man
has mediators between man and his creator. In Christianity, Jesus Christ is
designated the intercessor and mediator between human beings and their creator,
heaven and earth.
The
Umudibia and Nnelolos (what
in the West might be called shamans, Dibia for men,
Lolo for women) were active in making sure that the people obeyed the laws of
the village. Disobedience to the law was construed as disobedience of the
ancestors and the gods, and was supposed to bring misfortunes to men and women
in the village. To avoid punishment by the unseen forces, people obeyed the
laws of their villages and to the extent that they erred and had misfortunes,
they went to the village high priest and dibias to
make amends, so that the gods would pardon them. Igbo society was totally
controlled and civilized; it was not the wild society that Lugard
imagined, just because he did not see familiar European apparatus for
controlling people and making them law abiding.
I
do not believe that it serves any further function to go on describing
traditional Igbo social structure. It was very basic, and, as anthropologists
say, the Igbos were stateless and we shall leave it at that. There was no Pan
Igbo political framework. As a matter of
fact, it was not until the Igbos began to go to other parts of Nigeria and
encountered those who did not speak their language, and, more importantly,
those who treated them as a class, that they began to develop Pan Igbo
identity. Peter Eke
made this point rather poignantly.
The
British established the Federation of Nigeria in 1914. Igbos subsequently
migrated to all parts of Nigeria. They began living among those who did not speak
their Igbo language. Those who did not
speak Igbo tended to refer to all those who spoke Igbo, even if the various
Igbo clans did not always understand each other, as Igbos. Hence the Igbos from different Igbo clans
came to see themselves as Igbos, rather than as just Owerri, Onitcha, Orlu, Nkwerri, Ikwerre, Agbo, Asaba, (Ika
Igbo), Bende, Ohafia, Wawa,
Ngwa and so on.
People
from different Igbo clans actually do not necessarily understand each other’s
dialect. The Owerri Igbo, for example, does not understand the Ohafia Igbo or
even Onitcha Igbo. And Onitcha
is only sixty miles from Owerri, an hour’s drive in a car.
In
the 1940s and thereafter, for any number of reasons, Igbos in other parts of
Nigeria, particularly in the Northern part of Nigeria, were discriminated
against and sometimes killed. The
apparent persecution of Igbos in other parts of Nigeria tended to solidify the
Igbo sense of being a people apart from their neighbors. By the 1960s there definitely was a sense of Igboness.
The
events of the 1960s,
particularly the Biafran war with other Nigerians, consolidated Igbo identity
as a group of people. As is well known in international politics, a history of
shared experience is implicated in developing a sense of nationhood. Thus, whereas,
until the beginning of the twentieth century there was no such thing as Igbo
nation, now, for all practical purposes, the Igbos are a nation-state.
Benjamin
Nnamdi Azikiwe,
an Igbo man, went to the United States in the 1920s. He studied at black
American universities (Howard, Lincoln) and obtained a master’s degree in
Political science. He also obtained some training in journalism and then
returned to Africa, first to Accra Ghana and eventually to Lagos, Nigeria in
the 1930s. Mr. Azikiwe
was the first Igbo man of note to obtain some sort of Western education. When
he returned to Nigeria, therefore, he was the pride and joy of all Igbo people.
Mr. Azikiwe was
later awarded an honorary DLit degree and
subsequently referred to himself as Dr Azikiwe. Thus
he started
the
annoying practice of Nigerians calling themselves Doctors, when they are not
so. Honorary degrees are not supposed to make one a Doctor. Moreover, academic degrees
are only relevant within Ivory Tower. On campus, it is appropriate for students
to refer to their teacher as professor (which in French means teacher and not
the prestigious title Nigerians tend to think that it means, an elementary
school teacher is a professor) or Doctor. But outside of the campus such men
ought to be referred to as simply Mr. Osuji. Only Medical Doctors have a right to go by
the term Doctor. This is so that we may know when a medical doctor is present
and when there are medical emergencies easily access their services. We do not
call them doctor to gratify their vanities, as is the case in Nigeria. In
Nigeria, people are so vain that even illiterates want to be called Dr
Professor, Chief Alhaji, Engineer and Architect this or that. Zik started this whole nonsense and must be faulted for
doing so. He ought to have known better, since he had some exposure to academic
nomenclature.
Azikiwe
joined forces with Herbert Macaulay, a returned ex-slave, in agitating for
human rights for Africans within the British colonial administration. Azikiwe, aka Zik, stood up to the white
colonial authorities, and the down trodden Africans of his time were impressed.
Add to it the fact that Zik, perhaps, smarting from
inferiority complex, tended to speak in convoluted and often non-grammatical
English, Zikism, as it was called, impressed his
largely illiterate Igbo audience with his seeming erudition. To the Igbos of
the1940s and 1950s, Zik was godlike, if not God
himself. This writer’s father, Johnson, saw Zik as
God and would literally kill any one who dared point out Zik’s
shortcomings. Zik gave his generation pride in
themselves. That generation was thoroughly humiliated by the white man. The
colonial agents impressed on Africans that they were sub human beings. Then
came along a chap called Zik, a man educated in the
White man’s land, a bold talking man who did not seem intimidated by the
swaggering colonialists, the various NwaDCs and NwaDOs and administrative secretaries at the Secretariat at
Lagos; this African actually talked back to white men and Africans were
impressed.
There
is no doubt about it, Zik uplifted dispirited
Africans and the people affectionately called him “Zik
of Africa”, even though he was not really a Pan Africanist
like Kwame Nkhruma, Modibo Keita, Sekua Toure, Marcus Garvey, Aimee Ceasier,
George Padmore, Leopold Seder Senghor (Negritude). No
matter, to the Igbos, Zik was like god and could do
no wrong.
Azikiwe
joined forces with Herbert Macaulay, H. O Davis, T.O.S
Benson, and other nationalist luminaries and agitated for civil liberties and
civil rights for Nigerians during the colonial administration. The man played a
significant role in lifting the color bar that separated whites into European
quarters and Africans into African quarters, shanty towns. (I was born in the
1950s “shanty town” Lagos.)
When
Macaulay died, Azikiwe inherited the mantle of “lead
agitator” against the British. He and
his eventual political party, the NCNC (National
Congress of Nigeria and Cameroon’s) made trouble for the colonial authorities.
Like all nationalists, Zik experienced his share of
persecution, but not as could be expected, such as was the case of Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Nelson
Mandela of South Africa.
In
the meantime, the Igbos, who by the 1940s and 1950s, had spread to all parts of
Nigeria, experiencing some persecution of their own, formed a Pan Igbo
association, called Igbo Union, to protect their interests. Igbo Union was an
Igbo interest group and was particularly strong in the Northern part of
Nigeria, the area where Igbos experienced the most discrimination and
persecution. That Union was less pervasive in Yoruba land, for Igbos were
seldom persecuted in Yoruba land.
Igbo
Union was organized as a self help organization and was not really a
government; hence, its structure is irrelevant as we attempt to reconstruct
Igbo political structures and organizations. The NCNC
would seem more germane to our inquiry, except that, strictly speaking, it was
not really a political party, read on.
Igbos
joined the NCNC primarily because it was led by Zik, not because they understood its ideology.
IGBOS, POLITICAL PARTIES AND INTEREST
GROUPS POLITICS
Up
to the present, one does not exactly know what the NCNC
represented. But, then again, this is a specifically unique Nigerian
phenomenon: Nigerian political parties do not stand for ideologies, or for that
matter, for any thing other than be instruments for serving their leaders
egoistic goals.
Nigerian
political parties are essentially extensions of the personalities of their
leaders. Mr. Olusagun
Obasanjo
essentially is the PDP; Ojukwu
is essentially the APGA. These so-called political
parties are really cults for worshipping the personalities of these leaders.
Ordinarily,
political parties are supposed to be associations of like minded persons,
persons whose ideas, as to how society ought to be governed, are alike. People who share the same ideologies are
supposed to join the same political parties.
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES
Currently, there are about six political
ideologies competing for man’s loyalty: communism, socialism, conservatism,
liberalism, fascism, corporatism and mercantilism. Briefly, communists believe
in common ownership of property and the means of production. In the Communist
Manifesto
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels tell us that
communists are people who “from each his abilities and to each his needs”. Karl Marx further explicated what communism
meant to him, in his ponderous book, Der Capital. Socialism is a form of communism where
democratic means of attaining power are accepted. Whereas Marx had dreamed of
the masses rising up and taking over power and forming government by the
proletariats, socialists participate in electoral politics of their countries
and hope to be elected to office and use the bourgeoisie instrument of
Parliamentary democracy to implement their essentially communist goals.
Karl
Marx built on Hegel (see Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit )
and believed that he stood Hegel on his head. Hegel had traced the path of
history and concluded that the nation-state was the “absolute idea”, and must
be obeyed. Hegel obviously was a propagandist trying to convince the several
German Princelings and their principalities to accept
a unified German state. He thought that by reifying the nation that the little
princes that fought tooth and nail to preserve their princedoms, hence kept
Germany divided and made her easy prey for France, would listen and work for a
unified Germany. Napoleon had just blitzed through German lands and conquered
them all. (Read Napoleon’s excellent military strategy at the battle at Jenna.
He outmaneuvered the much more disciplined Prussian army. Please develop interest in military
strategies and war in general, if you plan to be a leader. See Von Clausewitze on War).
German Nationalists like Hegel were seeking for ways to unify Germany,
including deifying it, to prevent other conquerors from easily defeating
her.
Machiavelli
had done the same thing when he appealed to the Prince of Florence to use guile
and force to unify the City States of Italy, so as to prevent their conquests
by Spain, France and Austria.
Marx
took from Hegel the idea that history has an end. Francis Fukuyama has taken up
this absurd idea, albeit in a different form.
Fukuyama believes that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph
of the USA meant the “End of History”. Apparently,
he believes that all the challenges to capitalism had folded with the
spectacular collapse of Communist Russia, and that America and what she
represents has triumphed over the world, forever. This Japanese-American
scholar, a lap dog singing praises of America, has not reckoned with the
inevitable rise of Africa. I believe that Africans will, in time, conquer
Europe and set the direction of human history. The West is morally bankrupt, is
about to implode and is no longer capable of leading the world.
To
Marx, society began in primitive communism, where all shared their property.
That society produced its opposite, slave society, and the two, thesis and
antithesis, struggled to produce a synthesis, a feudal society. The later
produced contradictions of its own, and a new synthesis, the bourgeois society,
emerged. Again, this society’s inherent contradictions led to a new synthesis,
the communist society, and, as Marx saw it, history ends.
Why
would the communist state not have its own contradictions? Hegel desired a unified Germany and saw its
attainment as the end of history. His student, Marx, desired a communist state,
and saw its emergence as the end of history. When one attains what one desires,
the world ends? These Europeans and
their infantile thinking never cease to amaze one.
Marx
was an authoritarian thinker. His economic hypothesis, the so-called communist
economics, is voodoo economics, rather than real economics. At any rate, we have seen the paradoxes of
the workers’ paradise, the various communist countries. Generally, a few, an
elite group, V.I. Lenin’s
Party Vanguard, seized power and proceeded to keep it to themselves and
oppressed the workers, on whose behalf they supposedly took power in their
violent revolutions.
Human
nature is aggressive and not the namby-pamby view of it that utopian communists
like Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Joseph Proudhon,
Karl Marx
and company told us. Human beings are necessarily condemned to wars of
aggressions and struggles for power. There is no such thing as a closure to
this struggle. Wars are inevitable in human society, until we change human
nature, which seems impossible. The next face of human struggle is the Africans
struggle to conquer Europe and rule Europeans, to finally put to an end the
shame Africans feel from having been dominated by a degenerate group of Homo
sapiens.
Conservatives
and liberals
are interesting creatures. Both accept
the basic political and economic arrangement of the contemporary West. Both
accept capitalistic and democratic polity. Both are the mainstream political
ideologies in the Western world. The difference between the two is their
attitude towards government.
The
conservative sees government as a necessary evil and wants to give it limited
power. He believes that a big government would become a tyrannical government.
Thus, the conservative wants to limit the function of government to essential
duties like national defense and law and order. He wants the people to be left
alone to fend for themselves or die. To
him, it is not the proper function for the government to provide for the
people. See Edmund Burke.
The
liberal believes that the government could be expanded and used to serve some
social good. He does not mind using the government to provide aspects of the
welfare state to the have nots. Liberals are closet
socialists and want to use government to redistribute goods from the haves to
the have nots.
Interestingly, whereas liberals tend to be liberal in social matters,
conservatives tend to be liberal in economic matters and conservative in social
matters.
Classical
liberalism, as defined by John Stuart Mill,
insists on government’s hands off from telling the people what to do. In fact,
libertarians do not want the government to tell the people any thing at
all. Conservatives want governments to
“hands off on economic affairs”, hence are liberal, whereas they do not mind
using the power of government to control the peoples social behavior, hence are
social conservatives. Conservatives want to use government to pass laws to make
abortion illegal and even homosexuality and pedophilia illegal. Liberals (the social Democrats of Europe, the
Democratic party of America) wanting total freedom, want to legitimize every
deviance they can think of. They want to legitimize abortion, homosexuality,
and, very soon, pedophilia (Mark my word, the next great battle of these
degenerate liberals is to legalize pedophilia.)
Fascists
tend to be extreme conservatives, just as socialists tend to be extreme
liberals. Fascists, like conservatives,
have negative view of human nature. They believe that man is lazy and evil and
that left alone he would harm other people. They want to use the power of the
government to civilize people. Fascists see the state as the most important
element in human society. George Frederick Hegel, in his seminal work,
Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind had seen the state as absolute the idea, the
culmination of human development, history, and urged people to worship the
state. Fascists tend to worship the
state. Thus, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, and
Mussolini and his Fascist party in Italy made the state god and had it
worshipped by the people. They also had
the leader worshipped, for fascists tend to deify the leader and the
state. Fascists tend to go to wars of
expansion, trying to extend the powers of their states. Fascists tend to be xenophobic, hate
foreigners, those who do not belong to their nation, read, their tribe and what
they call their race. (All human beings belong to the same animal species and
are genetically 99.9% the same. The concept of race is so much nonsense
propagated by mentally challenged fascists like Hitler.)
Corporatism
wants the state and private business to cooperate for the good of the economy.
A perfect example of a corporatist state is Japan. Here, the government pumps
money to segments of the economy it wants to develop and works in cahoots with
businessmen in that area to develop competitiveness with the West.
Mercantilism
is as form of corporatism. It existed in the past, when states used their
powers to prevent international trade. In fact, Adam Smith,
wrote his seminal book, Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, in response to
the ugly specter of mercantilism. To Mr. Smith capitalism, the free enterprise
system is the best economic system; for the blind forces of the market, the
laws of supply and demand, make sure that resources are efficiently
distributed, and go to areas where there is demand for goods and services.
Moreover, rational buyers, desiring cheaply priced goods and services, force
business men to find more efficient ways to produce their goods and services,
so as to sell them at cheaper prices. This way, capitalist economies produce
goods more efficiently and distribute them more efficiently, Mr. Smith
contends. (The Igbos historically practiced capitalism and republican
democracy. I am a believer in the free
enterprise economy and conservatism political ideology. Socialist hot heads do
not belong in Igbo society.)
Political
parties
exist to articulate the interests of like minded persons. Interest groups who
perform similar functions, but are not interested in governing, but merely
influencing the governors, while political parties want to capture government
and govern. Thus, in the liberal democracies of the West, political parties vie
for elected positions and those that win proceed to form governments. In government, they attempt to actualize
their party platform, what they campaigned for, their ideas of policies; they
translate public opinion into public policy.
Nigeria’s
so-called political parties do not perform many of the understood functions of
political parties and, therefore, are really not political parties, as noted;
they are extensions of their leaders’ egos.
The
Igbos joined the NCNC, where their man, Zik, prevailed. That was all that mattered to them, that Zik led that party, not what the party stood for. In so far
as ideology was concerned, there was no difference between NCNC,
Action Group and NPC. Each of those so-called
political parties merely appealed to persons from certain parts of Nigeria, NCNC, Igbos; AG, Yorubas; NPC, Hausa-Fulanis. Nigeria is yet to develop political
parties, as those who study polity parties understand them to be.
The
leadership structure of Nigerian political parties was, and still is, personalistic. That
is, the leader is the party and his whims prevail. However, on paper, each of the Nigerian
political parties has a leadership structure and a bureaucracy to boot. This structure
was, generally, modeled after the strong party systems of Europe.
In
America, political parties tend to be less rigidly organized and tend to be
weak. In Europe, the leadership of the party decides who runs for office on its
behalf; in America, any citizen may declare himself a candidate of a political
party and contest to represent the party during the party’s primary, and if he
wins he becomes the party’s candidate in the general election, usually held on
the first Tuesday in November. The effect is that European politicians tend to
be controlled by their political party hierarchy, whereas American politicians
tend to be, more or less, loose cannons. However, the independence of American
politicians’ tends to be overstated, for, in reality, they are as controlled by
the leaders of their parties as in Europe).
Because
they are cults for worshipping their leaders’ personalities, Nigerian political
parties tend to reward cowardly sycophants who sing the praises of their
leaders. Say something positive about Zik and you are
rewarded, but point out that he lacked vision and you are punished. This way,
Nigerian political parties remain mediocre syndicates, racketeering
associations for stealing money from the polity.
Political
parties are supposed to train their leaders in leadership and management
skills. They are supposed to train men and women on how to govern the polity,
in case they come to power. Western political parties are forever holding
weekend retreats, where experts in leadership and management come and train
politicians on aspects of governance, be it pure leadership or financial
affairs. Upon election as city counselors, in America, new counselors go on
retreat to learn about budgets and public finance and, in time, know how every
penny comes to their city’s coffers and how it is spent. (I have participated
in some of these trainings, so, I am not talking mere academics; I am talking
from experience. I have run agencies for three American cities and participated
in their budgetary processes.)
Ask
a Nigerian politician about the revenue stream of his government and he is
lost. Ask him to explain the budget, and its audits, and he stares at you like
he is a monkey.
Apparently,
Nigerian political parties have never heard the term training in leadership and
management, and do not consciously go out of their way to hire leadership and
management experts to train their members. The politicians presume to know what
leadership and management is, when, in fact, they have no clue what those terms
mean. One supposes that Nigeria’s so-called politicians know why they seek
office, as the criminal Adolphus Wabara,
said: to become rich.
(If that idiot wanted to become rich, and
there is nothing wrong with wealth, he ought to go into business, figure out a
good or service that the people want to buy, demand, and supply it. He could
then make all the money that satisfies his soul. Bill Gates sells the world
software and makes tons of dough. That is the way it is supposed to be in a
capitalist-democratic society. But in Nigeria, people go into government to
steal, to take bribes, so as to become rich. Nigerian politicians are
despicable and contemptible garbage.)
For
our present purposes, Nigerian political parties do not develop leadership and
management skills in their key personnel. These skills are crucial in managing
a modern economy. A political leader in today’s world ought to be as efficient
in management as the chief executive officer of a business corporation. (When
this writer was a CEO, he interacted with American politicians and was
surprised at their knowledge of finance and other aspects of management. The typical American politician is, in fact,
a CEO. This is the way it should be in Nigeria. Our leaders ought to be men and
women who can go into any business corporation, take it over and run it like
trained professional managers.)
Leaders
exist to study their societies’ needs, ascertaining their problems and coming
up with plans, goals, to solve them.
Leaders lead their people in solving problems. Leaders set goals and
objectives, attainment of which improves the people’s lives.
Nigerian
leaders exist to gratify their vanity, to give themselves useless titles, such
as chief, and to steal money from the public.
All that motivates a typical Nigerian politician is for him to be seen
as a very important person, a VIP. “VIP My Yass”, as Fela Anikulapo Kuti would say.
One
is a VIP because of what one does for the people, not because one occupies a
political office, in which one does nothing for the people.
Could
some one please tell us what Obasanjo has done for
Nigeria? Nigeria has over 50% unemployment and our manikin of a leader, a
clown, shuffles around the world spending over $50 million dollars a year in
his fruitless travels, while the average Nigerian makes a dollar a day. This
man is, in fact, so deluded that he thinks that other nations see him as an
important man. How can a leader with over fifty percent unemployment be an
important leader, please tell me?
Every
time the presidential jet takes into the air, tons of dollars are spent. Why
should a poor African president have his own plane? The British Prime Minister
flies in commercial planes. The head of state of a banana republic wants to
seem as important as the head of state of the world’s richest country, America,
hence indulges in the luxury of having his own plane. I say that Obasanjo, not only should not have a plane, but should not
have a limousine. He should be given a simple car, a Nigerian manufactured car,
and we should not have to close city streets when he drives around. He should,
perhaps, have one police attendant.
While
in London, I stood by 10 Downing street and watched as Mr. Blair got out of the
house and walked into his car, a British manufactured Jaguar, without escort
and the streets not closed so that he drive to parliament. He had just one
plain clothed police escort. Mr. Blair has a million times Obasanjo’s
intelligence. (Parliamentary democracies make prime ministers good speakers,
for they have to defend their policies in Parliament. It is a joy to watch Tony
Blair speak in the House of Commons; he shows thorough mastery of facts and
figures; he is a fellow policy wonk, not the wooden tongued, embarrassing
moron, we have at Aso Rock.)
Provide
jobs for all Nigerians who want to work, and then you are a very important
person. The perpetual tourist, Obasanjo, ought to
stay put in Nigeria, and work to provide all Nigerians with jobs and not leave
the country until Nigeria has zero unemployment (less than five percent).
To
call a Nigerian politician a leader is to abuse the word leader. Nigeria has no
political leaders; she has criminals in politics. Nigeria is ruled by kleptocrats, by thieves. A thief is not a leader. A thief
belongs in jail.
Most
Nigerian politicians belong in jail. Where is Joseph Stalin?
We need his type to round up the sub human beings who call themselves Nigerian
leaders and send them to a gulag, somewhere in Northern Nigeria, or in the
Sahara desert, and while there, put them to work, planting trees, and digging
canals to irrigate arid parts of Nigeria.
Within
pre and post independent Nigeria, Igbos sloshed around in whatever political
party their apparent leaders, belonged.
Before the civil war, it was Zik; after the
civil war, it was Zik and Emeka Ojukwu.
Mr.
Olusagun Obasanjo seems to
have undermined the phenomenon of Igbos following their leader into any party
he is identified with, irrespective of what the party stands for. Apparently, Obasanjo has learnt that Igbo pragmatism could be
manipulated and does so with gusto. He and his henchmen at PDP
co-opt any Igbo who are amenable to bribes. Igbos now, apparently, flock to PDP.
If
one wants to get anywhere in Obasnajo ruled Nigeria,
one joins his party. Igbos being a
pragmatic people, a people, many of whom are lacking in principled behavior,
have joined the certified criminal and his gang of thieves misgoverning
Nigeria. (Recently I went to an Igbo man’s house and he kept trying to impress
me that he is the local PDP president in his part of
the USA. So, I asked him: what exactly
does the PDP stand for? What is the party trying to accomplish for
Nigeria? This man starred at me, as if
he were a monkey. But he claims to have
a PhD in political science and is a professor somewhere. What a pity that a professor of political
science does not understand that a political party exists to do something, and
should not have joined the PDP until he had
understood what it stood for, and made sure that it was in accord with what he,
himself stands for. Perhaps he knew what he was doing? Perhaps, both he and his pseudo political
party stand for stealing money? Was our
professor invested in seeking political limelight and to be called president,
chief, Professor Idiot?)
To
recapitulate, I have said that it is impossible to say anything objective about
pre 20th century Igbo leadership.
Obviously, there were leaders in Igboland before the white man came to
Nigeria. We know that where there are two or more persons sharing the same
space and time that conflicts arise, and that politics must be attempted to
resolve those conflicts. Igbos therefore had political mechanisms for solving
their interpersonal conflicts.
We
know that where there are groups of human brings, that they have group goals.
Whereas, each individual has his personal goals and pursues them, there are
goals that are group related and must be pursued collectively. Leaders are
persons who identify group goals and organize the people in seeking to attain
them.
There
are leaders in every human aggregation. Therefore, there were leaders in
Igboland before the white man came to Igboland.
But since one does not have objective information on that Igbo
leadership, one must keep silent on the subject. Of course, there are
speculations on the subject, but conjectures are not facts. Moreover, since the Igbos were accused of
being stateless, read, primitive, they tend to be defensive and sometimes come
up with made up ideas of their glorious past.
Much of what passes for scholarship in Igboland is fiction. (Because I
am invested in the truth and attempt to say it, as I see it, many Igbos will
probably take umbrage with this paper. Apparently, some of them would like me
to say what appeals to their vanity. Knowledge does not kowtow to human
misguided pride. Knowledge seeks the truth, for only the truth, light, can
liberate us from the darkness that we live in.)
History
is the documentation of actual past events, not fantasies. One is not naïve not
to realize that much of what passes for history is make belief stories, written
by nationalists to present their people in positive light. Nevertheless, that
is not the way it ought to be.
I
know about twentieth century Igbo leaders such as Azikiwe,
Mbonu Ojike, Michael Okpara, Raymond Njoku, Jaja Wachukwu, Akanu Ibiam, Emeka Ojukwu, Jim Nwaobodo, Mbakwe, and Ekwueme etc. I know about our present crop of money crazed
politicians: Wabara,
Kalu Orji, Chimaroke, Nnamani, Ngige and others.
(As an aside, one is entitled to ask: what
exactly do these extant leaders stand for?
What do they do for Igbos? In Aba, Onitsha, Umuahia, etc roads
are so broken down that streams now exist where roads are supposed to be. One
must be brain dead to call our present chop-chop politicians, leaders. These
folks are nothing; it is gratuitous to mention their names in a paper on
leadership)
Leadership
is a social phenomenon. Leaders lead groups of men in pursuit of
organizational-social goals. One cannot be a leader unless one is, in fact,
leading men and women in pursuit of goal attainment. In as much as leaders operate in groups, to
study leadership, one must note the groups they are in.
Since
Nigeria’s so-called political parties are remiss in performing their functions,
certain quasi political groupings seem to have made up what the political
parties left undone. Ohaneze, MASSOB and other like
associations seem to perform the role of articulating the aspirations of the
Igbos, and for all practical purposes can be called political parties.
MASSOB,
while performing useful functions in articulating Igbo interests,
unfortunately, seems to have a goal that, if pursued, would dismember
Nigeria. For all her problems, it is not
advisable to fragmentalize Nigeria.
If
Nigeria was to balkanize and each of the constituent tribes became nations,
they would be too insignificant in world politics. Moreover, they could engage in inter tribal
wars. The Igbos resent that the Ijaws joined other
Nigerians during the civil war, and, in effect, stabbed them in the back, and
contributed to the death of 3 million Igbos. One could see Igbos gratify their
anger at the Ijaw by attacking them and taking over
their lands. The Hausa Fulanis, pursuing their dreams
of expanding the scope of Islamic lands, could attack the Tivi
and surrounding peoples.
We
must be realistic about the nature of politics: in real politics, the powerful
attack the weak and impose their wills upon them. If Nigeria breaks up, what is
likely going to happen is that the three dominant tribes would impose their
wills on their immediate neighbors, and we would wind up with three countries,
an Igbo dominated Biafra, a Yoruba dominated Odualand,
and a Hausa-Fulani dominated Arewaland. But before
this comes about, there would have been a prolonged period of wars and
suffering.
We
do not need to be sentimental here. Asari Dokubo and his rag tagged militia may make all the noise
they want; the fact is that they are not a match for the more war like Igbos.
The best bet for the Ijaws, and for all of us, is a
unified Nigeria.
In
politics, there are trade offs; you give up something to get something.
Politics is the art of bargaining and compromise; you do not always get
everything you desire, you bargain with other power brokers and win some and
lose some. In this light, the Ijaw will not get total
control over the oil resources found in their region. In as much as they need
the Hausa-Fulanis to prevent them from being
clobbered by the Igbos, they must give the Hausa-Fulanis
something in return. This is real life politics, not the childish drivel that
Mr. Dokubo spills out.
Dokubo,
in his arrested development like fantasies, does not understand that there are
those who would love to get their hands on him. Let us remember that three
million Igbos were killed during the civil war. That is correct, three million
people died from the conscious policy of starvation unleashed on the Igbos.
That is a lot of people. My brother, Eugene just got out of secondary school
when the war started and was killed. My mother, Teresa, was hurt by the bombs
dropped on our market at Umuohiagu, where over three
hundred innocent women were killed. There is awful lot of anger in the souls of
many of us Igbos. The suffering and
death that we experienced are not just statistics. The dead are people’s sons
and daughters. Some of us may have fled that hellish country, to go cool down,
but we have psychological wounds, and those wounds are still festering.
Asari
“Dokunbo” (as a Yoruba girl in Naija
Politics forum calls him) had better be a bit more careful before he starts
what he cannot finish. There are some of us itching for revenge of the death of
our loved ones. Let us leave sleeping dogs to lie, for the time being, any way.
Igbos need time to lick their wounds. But, by and by, if human nature remains
constant, some one must pay a price for the unnecessary wounds Igbos were
subjected to.
Nigeria
is a veritable powder keg. We need wise
hands to keep a lid on it. As I pointed out elsewhere, 25% resource control is
the best the Ijaw can get. Insistence on more could lead to trouble for
them and bring suffering to all Nigerians. Nigeria cannot afford another civil
war, not at this time, anyway.
Of
course, there will be wars in the future. What is man but a fighting machine?
Let there be just wars. I, a Pan Africanist, for example, would not hesitate supporting a
war to unify Africa into one federation, with each tribe a state. There are
plenty of wars in Africa’s future. The nation-state that the colonial powers
bequeathed us, will obviously disappear, and be replaced by more realistic
political arrangements.
In
the absence of real political parties training people for political leadership
roles in Igboland, other organizations now do so. We are grateful to these
associations for doing what our so-called political leaders do not do. Thank
you, Ohaneze.
Before
we go any further, let me address some unpalatable issues that those interested
in leadership studies wonder about. That
is the question of whether a people, such as the Igbo, who did not develop large
scale political organizations, and given their known character traits, are
capable of producing outstanding leaders in our generation. This question is
very pertinent and must be squarely addressed. There are those who believe that
given the totality of what we know about the Igbos, that they are not going to
be able to produce good political leaders, until a few generations have passed,
until they are acclimatized to large scale organizations and have learned to
care for social interests. I know that some Hausa Fulanis
doubt the Igbo ability to govern Nigeria. In their opinion, all that the Igbo
are good for is petty trading. The Yorubas are
supposed to be good as bureaucrats, while only the Hausa Fulanis
are supposedly good at political leadership.
I
will take these subjects head on, for, who is more qualified to answer them
than an Igbo man who has had leadership and management experience, and
disproved the assumption that Igbos lack those qualities?
IGBO INDIVIDUALISM
The
Igbos are individualistic, independent, industrious, republican, democratic,
pragmatic and less-diplomatic. These
traits are not associated with good leadership.
Individualism
is the tendency to see one’s self as separate from other people’s interests, to
see one’s self as not the same with other people, to see one’s self as not
equal with other people, perhaps, as better than other people.
Let
us acknowledge some facts, without pussy footing about them. The average Igbo
person sees himself as different from other people and believes that he exists
to pursue his self interests. He seldom thinks of other people’s interests. (If
you rely on an Igbo man to help you, well, you will wait forever before he
helps you. He is not going to help you. He wants you to help yourself.)
In
so far that Igbos join groups, they tend to do so because of what they can
individually get out of them. This trait
is antithecal to leadership.
A
leader is a person who serves social interests. A leader is a person who puts
public interests ahead of his personal interests. A leader is a person who is
capable of sacrificing what human beings value most, their lives, for other
people.
(Let us put aside our Igbo sentiments, and for
the purposes of academic discourse, ask some hard questions. I support Igbo
independence, yet, I must ask: Was Ojukwu a true leader? As a boy-child during
the civil war, we sang: “Ojukwu wu eze anyi, ndi
munso ana azoya”. So, was
Ojukwu our king? If so, why did he run from Biafra? Was his life more important than the life of
each of his soldiers? If he was a real
leader, in as much as he gave orders that led to the death of one Igbo soldier,
shouldn’t he have stayed to experience the fate of his soldiers? If he was a
heroic leader, he probably would have committed Hara Kari, killed himself,
instead of run away. He was, obviously, a lily-livered coward. A defeated Japanese military general would
cut off his useless head than live to see another day. A defeated German
general would put a bullet into his shamed head, rather than chicken and run,
as Ojukwu did. The Japanese and Germans
are probably the world’s two most warrior races? Those two alone probably can
take over the world. Was Ojukwu a leader?
I don’t think so. What do you think?
Do you respect the man even though he abandoned his soldiers to the fate
of the victorious Nigerians? Please remember that Ojukwu’s propaganda machine
had told the Igbos that Nigerians were going to kill all Igbos when they enter
Igboland. A day did not pass in Biafra when Okoko Ndem, Ojukwu’s Goebels, did not
tell Igbos that Nigerians came to murder all of them. Assuming that that was
not mere propaganda, and Ojukwu fled, to go protect his life and permit
Nigerians to kill the Igbos he left behind, what does that make him? I actually
do not see how Ojukwu carries his head high. He ought to live in shame. Look, Ojukwu’s death would have made him a
martyr for all Igbos and given Igbos a hero to rally around. As it is, some of
us see the man as chicken shit and as beneath contempt. )
The
Igbo is independent and individualistic. He does not rely on other people to do
things for him. He goes out and shifts for himself. He survives by his own
efforts. Make no mistake about it, the Igbos are capable of hard work.
The
war ended in 1970, and Igbo families were given twenty pounds each, that is,
they were pauperized by the Federal authorities. Yet these families managed to
return their children to schools. These children, my generation, completed
secondary schools, and immediately left the country that had just killed their
brothers. In a few years time, despite Nigerian leaders’ efforts to hold Igbos
back, some of our magnificent Igbo families have more educated persons than are
found in the best of American families. In one generation, all members of our
families are now university educated. What an astonishing accomplishment! No wonder my father used to say that the
Igbos have no match with any one else in the world. (My father felt absolutely
superior to the British that ruled his world. He considered them not worthy of
untying his Igbo shoes. This proud Igbo man was not intimidated by the
swaggering colonials in his world. In fact, he looked forward to the day that
the Igbos would dominate the British! As
an aside, let me tell you one thing about the Igbos. You see, proud as father was, he would
literally die if the Igbo Oha rejected him. The Igbo
fear rejection from his people. The Oha said that all
Igbo children must go to school, so father mortgaged himself, and all his
children went to university. That was accomplishment. But a price was paid for
it, the stifling of the softer side of humanity.)
The
Igbos are hard working; they are second to none in working hard. If you want to
know what hard work is like, come to my world, a world where fourteen hour work
days are the basic minimum.
Alas,
because the Igbo man fends for himself, he expects other people to fend for
themselves, and seldom cares about other people’s suffering. A leader is a
person who cares about other people’s suffering, even the suffering of what
Igbos might call lazy bums.
Igbo
independence is not suitable to leadership. This is a serious issue that Igbos
must address. Until Igbos start thinking
of social interests, rather than mostly personal interests, it is obvious that
they would not make good leaders. Zik, for example,
was more or less, a good business man, rather than he was a good political
leader. He invested wisely and became relatively well to do. But that is not
what a leader is supposed to be. Heard
of Mahatma Gandhi? Gandhi was penniless but is universally beloved as a leader.
Nigeria
has not produced a leader that even fellow Africans consider a leader, what
more being universally acclaimed as such. No one who studies leadership
considers Nigerians good candidates for his studies. They study leaders like
Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, The German barbarian,
Theodosius, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Tamarind, Charlemagne, Napoleon
Bonaparte, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Winston Churchill, Chaka Zulu, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X
and, oh yes , such evil leaders as Adolf Hitler and
Joseph Stalin. Nigeria has not produced one single leader seen as such by
non-Nigerians. (In Nigeria, Igbos call Azikiwe “Zik of Africa”.
Question: what exactly did the man contribute to Pan African politics?
Being a parochial and particularistic leader is not the same as being a
universalistic leader, fighting for the good of the universal man qua man.)
The
world sees mostly what Nigerians call leaders as thieves. That is all there is
to it. You do not go to a band of
criminals to look for leaders. Leaders are those who give of themselves to
mankind, not those who steal from people. Show me a Nigerian leader who is not
a thief and we shall start talking about him as a leader. But until you do so,
well, let us not waste our breath on nonentities that would not even merit a
footnote in history books, two hundred years from now. History does not remember
leaders because they have big egos and served their vanities, but because of
what they did while in office. Attaturk modernized
Turkey and all Turks are proud of him. What has a Nigerian leader done for
Nigerians, lately? They gave Nigerians worm infested water while they cart
Nigeria’s money overseas. I say, shoot and kill most Nigerian leaders. Get rid
of garbage.
PRAGMATISM
The
Igbos are a very pragmatic people. (See William James on the philosophy of
Pragmatism.
Michael Okpara echoed this philosophy in one of his
speeches.)
Igbos
do whatever they have to do to survive, and to make it big in this world. Each Igbo is bent on making it, whatever
making it means to him. He is ready to
form pragmatic associations with other people, in order to make it. In America,
for example, Igbos marry American women to obtain green card, so as to be able
to stay, work and secure the money to pay their school fees. They make it at
schools, obtain outstanding education etc. Generally, once they secure their
Green Cards they unceremoniously and heartlessly, discard their American women.
This behavior is called using people, it is called being exploitative. It shows
lack of concern for the welfare of other people. No one accuses Igbos of being
a sentimental people and of being socially interested persons.
Igbos
make it for themselves and their families.
They do not make it for the good of the whole of society. (If you are an
Igbo, you learn in childhood never to rely on other people to help you; you
help yourself. You grind your teeth and take whatever life gives you and do
your best without complaining. In a way, this is a heroic quality; it reminds
us of the Greek Tragic hero; of Sisyphus rolling that rock up that hill, fully
aware that it would roll right back down, and yet he never gives up. Life is
tough, so, toughen your self and deal with it, without complaining about it, my
father told me, and so I have done. Rely on other people? God forbid that
dependency and weakness. In my writings on psychological issues, I have pointed
out the damage done to Igbo boys by a culture that pushes them to excel and
does not recognize weakness in them. We succeed but deep inside, we are walking
wounded people.)
A
pragmatist, generally speaking, tends to be amoral. He is a coward because he
is willing to engage in immoral activities, if in so doing, he gets what he
wants. He lacks in principled behavior. The pragmatist is the typical American,
a moral coward, a man who enjoys himself while his brothers suffer, a man who
used black slaves to enrich his life and has no remorse for doing so. Let us
not even talk about white Americans, they are amoral sociopaths.
A
highly moral person would rather not go to school than use another person to do
so. It is immoral to marry for Green Card. In so doing, one is using another
human being for selfish purposes. Human
beings are ends in themselves and should not be seen as means to other ends. If
one dumps the person one has used, that makes one not different from white
slave masters, who used black people to procure wealth for themselves, and did
not care for blacks’ welfare. Those white racists are cowards and not any man’s
hero.
Igbo
pragmatists, like their white American counterparts, are no heroes of
mankind. As a matter of fact, if truth
be said, they are contemptible human beings. The hero of mankind is a person
who serves other human beings’ interests, a person who forgoes his self
interest to serve other people’s self interest.
You
see Governor Kalu Orji
positioning himself to become the president of Nigeria. You ask yourself: why
is this boy, for boy he is, trying to become Nigeria’s leader? If this boy cannot figure out a way to pave
the roads of Aba, and Umuahia,
his own people’s towns, how in the world is he going to pave the roads of Lagos
and Kano, areas of Nigeria that are not part of his
Igbo world? It appears that the boy is
motivated by vanity. He wants to be president. That would seem to make him seem
a very important person. Apparently, he has stolen as much money as he could
and money is no longer a motivator for him; now, he must crown his criminal
activity by becoming the head criminal of Nigeria.
If
one wants to be Nigeria’s president, one ought to be a leader, one ought to be
some one who works for the public’s good, and a person who does what helps
people improve their wretched lives.
I
believe that Igbos must reduce their tendency to excessive self-interest
seeking, if they are to make for good leadership material. Frankly, at this time, I do not see many
candidates for leadership in Igboland. I see those wanting to occupy Aso Rock, so as to seem important persons, but that is
neurosis, and it is not for me to collude with them and tell them that their
mental illness is the same as leadership.
Go gratify your narcissism and vanity elsewhere, not in politics.
Politics should be the arena from which men work for the common good. See
Harold Lasswell.
In
America, just about every Igbo person starts an Igbo organization, gets a few
of his friends to join it, and elect him its president. In doing so, his ego
and vanity is gratified. The day some one else is elected president and
replaces him, instead of supporting him, he works to tear that person and
organization down. He is unable to accept leadership from other people. He must
be the leader, even as he does nothing for the people he pretends to lead. He does not seem to understand that in a
pluralistic democracy that leadership must be shared. See Robert Dahl on Polyarchy.
In
Nigeria itself, just about every Igbo town now wants to become a state, The
State of Umuohiagu, my town, so that it offers the
people opportunity to masquerade as governors. It never occurs to these clowns
to ask where they would obtain the money to run their banana states. From the
federal account? Where did the
“Federals” get their money from? What is the state’s local stream of revenue?
What is the state’s tax base?
The
government of a state ought to support itself and not look to Abuja to steal
money from the Niger Delta and share it with the state.
They
say that every Indian wants to be a chief and does not want to work and develop
his people. We can say that every Nigerian not only wants to be a chief, and
not work, that he wants to destroy his people by stealing from them.
Apparently,
Nigerians feel inferior and erroneously belief that being in a high political
office would make them feel superior. Franz Fanon, Franklin Frazier, Albert Memmi. Omanini, Karon, Thomas Pittigrew, Gardiner
and Oversay and other psychoanalysts have informed us
that colonized persons tend to feel inferior and seek infantile ways to seem
important.
Nigerians
go into politics to gratify their vanity. Being governor, president etc makes
the clowns feel important. What the idiots do not seem to know is that it is
service to our fellow human beings that really, really give us whatever worth,
purpose and meaning there is in the world. See the writings of existentialists
like Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jasper, Heidegger,
Kierkegaard etc.).
IGBO SUPERIORITY FEELING
The
Igbo has a tendency to see himself as different from other persons, indeed, as
better than other people. I have
actually seen Igbos who fancy themselves superior to other Nigerians. I have had Igbos tell me that they are
superior to Hausas.
Imagine
a white man telling us that he is superior to black people, just because he has
wealth and blacks do not…that is what it amounts to, if an Igbo feels superior
to a Hausa. It is ridiculous for one human being to feel superior to others. It
is actually a sign of neurosis, a minor mental disorder, to feel superior to
other human beings.
The
fact is that all human beings are the same and are coequal. Whereas, there are individual differences,
ultimately, all human beings, white and black, man and women, Igbo and Hausa
etc are the same and coequal. All people
are members of God’s one family. There are no differences in God’s family.
I
believe that the Igbo tend to feel inferior and restitute with what Alfred
Adler
called false Superior self. The Igbo pursues the fiction of superiority and
that enables him to achieve some of the many great things that he is noted for.
In many ways, most Igbos are neurotics, ala Karen Horney,
because they reject their real selves and want to become mentally constructed
ideal selves. They work hard to attain material goods and social prestige that
suit the images of their ideal self. They pay a heavy price with personal
unhappiness and peace of mind and body.
Because
of the Igbo tendency to fancy him self superior to others, he is unable to
secure the loyalty of others. Why do you want others to follow you, if you
imagine yourself better than them? If
you see yourself as god and imagine that you are entitled to being followed by
others, as a birth right, there is a clinical name for that condition; it is
called narcissistic personality disorder (DSM).
The narcissistic personality is a neurotic.
Mental health is characterized by
awareness and acceptance of the sameness and equality of all human beings.
Igbo
supercilious sense of superiority tends to alienate other people, rather than
make them friends of the Igbos. As a
matter of fact, the persecution that the Igbos have experienced from other
Nigerians is contributed to by their sense of importance and superiority.
Considering that other tribes, such as the Hausas and Fulanis,
had large scale social organizations, one cannot understand why Igbos feel
superior to them.
Humility
is the sign of mental health. Igbos ought to learn humility.
IGBO INDUSTRY
The
Igbo is very industrious. This is good, very good. But a leader is not just
industrious; he draws the best out of those he leads. Most of the time, the Igbo just wants to shine, to
succeed, to be the star, but seldom wants to help others succeed.
All
Igbo men want to be super stars but resent it if others seem to exceed them. A
good leader brings the best out of people, including encouraging people to
exceed him.
Clearly,
Igbos have a lot of handicaps when it comes to leadership matters. I believe that these handicaps are rooted in
the fact that, they only had their villages and towns to lead, and historically
did not lead large scale social organizations, hence did not learn the
realities of leadership in such organizations.
If
you have pay attention to Igbo business practices, you probably have noticed
that Igbos seldom form corporations or even partnerships. They tend to form
sole proprietorships. This is because they find it extremely difficult to work
with others as co-owners of a business. As we know, each form of business has
advantages and disadvantages. Corporations tend to last long and have access to
larger expertise and capital; partnerships tend to have some pulled resources and
sole proprietorship, while giving the owner maximum sense of independence and
sense of boss, tends to have many disadvantages such as dearth of skills,
capital, and demise of the business with the end of the owner.
FOLLOWERSHIP
Consider
the issue of follower ship. You cannot
make a good leader, unless you are also a good follower. You must be prepared
to follow others’ leadership, if you want others to follow your leadership. If you do not like to take orders from other
people, what makes you think that other people should take orders from
you? Do you think that you are different
from them? Do you think that you are
special? Do you think that you are
god? If you think so, then, you are
deluded. In delusion, a mental disorder, one accepts what is not true as true
and behaves as such. The truth is that
all people are the same and equal and, as such, if you want to lead, you must
also follow.
If
you want to lead, you must first learn to follow. In fact, you must alternate
leadership with follower ship positions. For one thing, following teaches
humility. Humility is good for us; it gives us peace and happiness.
To
be proud, arrogant, vain etc, as many Nigerians are, is to be tense and lack
somatic and psychological peace, to be neurotic, and, to so arouse one’s body
that one died an early age. See, Igbo
leaders tend to die young, in their early sixties, when it is clear that people
can live to be a hundred.
IGBO NON DIPLOMATIC BEHAVIOR
The
Igbos are a vigorous and forthright people. They say things as they see
them. Their frankness is refreshing. (I
was once in my village and heard the old folks talking in a matter of fact
manner, using language and idioms that so-called civilized people would shrink
from, but saying it, like it is. Consider this expression: “Owu
manu na ara
otu ukwu?” I am too
embarrassed to translate that expression into English. However, it says that if
a task seems difficult to tackle, that one should remember that human beings
are meant to tackle it, and that one is that human being, so, one should get on
with it. Do not shrink from approaching the girl that you like, approach her,
and do so now, for eventually a man will…oh, you know the rest; there is no
need for “hoha”.)
Unfortunately,
for the Igbos, talking frankly can get them into trouble, lots of trouble. There are fighting words and if you use them,
you have literally attacked the individual’s psychological self, and he feels
as much pain as when you slap his body.
There
are words that when used could lead to wars, wars where tons of people suffer
and die. Therefore, leaders in
government must be circumspect in their language. You do not want to throw
petrol into fire.
This
is even more necessary in relating to people from other nations/tribes. International relations have a language of
their own. It is called diplomatic language.
This is necessary. It includes
the art of telling lies without seeming to tell lies. Consider George
Bush. He said that the American Military
smashed Iraq, an Arab country, first, to remove Saddam Hussein’s weapons of
mass destruction, and when he was called on that lie, since he knew very well
that Mr. pathological narcissist, Hussein merely bragged of having those
weapons and did not have them, he changed his tune, and now it is: we went to
Iraq to bring Democracy to the Iraqis.
That sounds nice, isn’t it? What is this? Americans giving Arabs
democracy, cute, indeed. Since when has
expropriators of Indian lands learned to give rather than take? Give us a break. The takers are in the Middle East to take oil
and could care less whether Arab Bedouins lived or died. Moreover, that Bush boy probably felt that
his father, Bush the first, was vilified for not going to Baghdad, when, in
1991, his army did not proceed north and get rid of Hussein, after smashing the
“Sadman”’s army in Kuwait. Bush the second probably
wanted to finish what his father started. Children of monarchs always do this,
complete their father’s wars. (This one reason why we should not have
monarchies: they are always at war; their idle children feel important to the
extent that they conquer other people.)
Attack
and conquer, if stated as the motivation for foreign policy, which it was in
Bush’s war, immediately would arouse Arab manhood into fighting back. Instead, the real purpose of the war was
disguised. Arabs were sang nursery lullaby and lolled into sleep. Of course,
the sleeping babies will, sooner or later, awaken to the reality of what the
big boys of the West were up to and kick the bastards out, as they should, if
they have any kind of pride.
For
our present purpose, Igbos tend to be brutally honest in their language
arts. This tendency creates problems for
them. I believe that the other tribes in
Nigeria hated the Igbos for many reasons and that one of those reasons was the
Igbo manner of speaking.
When
I was attending school at Lagos, a Hausa boy was the smartest boy in our class.
Bashiru always made first in our class. My father got
so frustrated that a Hausa boy was beating me, an Igbo boy, that one day, he
sat me down and said, and I quote: “Tom, how come you permit cattle (nnama) to beat you?”
He and his generation were so convinced of their superiority to all
other people that they did not hesitate calling other people derogatory names.
By the way, the Igbos extended their sense of superiority to Whites. I came to
America after high school and my father insisted on seeing my quarterly Report
Cards. In fact, the college sent them directly to him. He would then write or call me to remind me,
that no white boy should ever do better than me, an Igbo boy.
The
Igbo is arrogant and we need not deny that fact. I do not understand the origin
of their positive, and sometimes, grandiose, self assessment. All I know is
that as I was growing up, it was impressed upon me that I belong to the best
people in all of Africa and, indeed, in the entire world. Father used to say that the only possible
rivals for the Igbos are the English, the Jews, the Germans and the Japanese.
He had no use for the other groups of humanity, for, to him, they are not hard
working and productive.
Ah,
productivity. That was all I heard in my life: work, work, work and we did
work, so that the children of poor Igbo men are now found in the best
universities of North America.
Igbo
arrogance has its downside, it alienates non-Igbos. In fact, it infuriates them. As noted, I
believe that whereas no one has a right to kill innocent Igbos, Igbos bragging
about their alleged superiority contributed to their being persecuted by other
tribes in Nigeria. Therefore, the Igbos
must learn to be careful in their talking. They can begin by taking a leaf from
that most diplomatic of all Nigerian peoples, the Yorubas. Talk softly but carry a big stick and you
will do well in international politics, said Theodore Roosevelt.
(The Yorubas are
misunderstood by Igbos. Generally, the Igbos see them as not manly, as cowards,
really. Actually, this is a mistake. The Yoruba is very diplomatic and gets
what he wants through manipulation rather than force, as the Igbo is inclined
to do. And at war, the Yoruba is as good as any one else. We can bad mouth Obasanjo, all we want, what we cannot take away from him
was that he was an outstanding military general, after all, he “whipped us at
war, and whipped us real good”. Pride aside, the Yoruba is a formidable
opponent and Igbos must respect them. The Igbos ought to form an alliance with
the Yoruba, particularly when the struggle to right hell, Nigeria, begins. Of
course, in politics, there are no permanent friends and alliances, only
permanent adversaries.)
IGBO DIFFICULTIES IN THE BUREAUCRACY
I
have pointed out that the Igbos did not develop large scale social political
organizations. Large scale polities tend to have bureaucracies through which
the political decision makers implement their decisions. The bureaucracy is a
mechanism through which goals are implemented. Ideally, bureaucrats are
machines and politicians use them to carry out their goals. See Marx Weber, On
Bureaucracy.
In
the real world, however, top bureaucrats are repositories of technical
expertise and politicians rely on them in making public policies. In America,
we have a concept called the iron triangle. This says that decisions, laws and
policies, are made by the triangulation of congressional committees,
bureaucrats and interests groups. The
point is that bureaucrats are powerful and do make serious inputs into public
policy. (Public policy translates public opinion into policies.) Thus, some now argue that what we have is
government by technocrats?
Be
that as it may, the bureaucracy tends to attract and reward certain
behaviors. Bureaucracies reward
followers, and procedure bound people.
Here, one must keep quiet, work hard and climb the organizational ladder
and get to the top of it before one is permitted to make any kind of
noise. If a low level bureaucrat, office
worker, makes noise, rocks the boat, out the door, he goes. Thus bureaucrats
develop subservient personalities.
The
Igbo character is vigorous and rambunctious. Traditional Igbo societies were
republican and democratic. Igbo societies expected all male persons, above age
14, to participate in the governance of their society. Thus, Igbos thrive in participatory
democracies.
Alas,
despite the entire hullabaloo about making bureaucracies flat organizations,
less hierarchical, participatory etc, this is not going to happen. Why? Bureaucracies did not set the goals that
brought them into being. They exist to
serve some one else’s goals. They must, therefore, be servants, literally and
figuratively.
If
bureaucrats do not obey those who hired them, they are unceremoniously gotten
rid of. (Some years ago, when I was hired as the executive director of an
agency, the controller of that agency, a middle aged white man, apparently
could not stomach that his boss is a black man, an African at that, and decided
to rock my boat (so he had to be rocked out). From the first day I came on
board, this racist chap schemed to mobilize other employees against me. Boy, I
am a master at office politics and know that the first thing a leader does is
know what is going on in his organization, know who is for him and who is
against him. So, through my “spies”, I got wind of what this racist chap was up
to, and kept my hard eyes on him. When I had had enough of his shenanigans,
documented whatever needed to be documented, we live in a litigious society and
any one can be sued at any moment, even for frivolous reasons, I called him
into my office, and fired him, just like that. I took his key to the office and
kicked him out. I have let go lots of oppositional employees. The point,
though, is that bureaucrats are dispensable and know it, so, they trend to be
servile. Their personalities are decidedly different from political
personalities. Politicians tend to be more vigorous and assertive.)
Because
of the characterological make up of Igbos, they tend
to have a difficult time in bureaucracies. In America, I know many Igbo
professionals who could not make it in the large scale bureaucracies that carry
out the laws of America. Igbos resent
being mere cogs, spokes in the large wheels called bureaucracies. I understand their pain.
What
to do? Obviously, not every one is going
to be the boss, the leader who tells every one else what to do. We need
servants to implement public policies. The Igbo must consciously learn how to
be impersonal and take marching orders from other people, without letting it
affect their great pride.
No
Igbo man likes other men telling him what to do. (As my father used to say:
isn’t that man born from a woman’s vagina? Go deal with him, he is a mere human
being; you should never let a man born of woman scare you.)
The
worst thing that could happen to an Igbo is for him to accept intimidation from
other men…unless of course, the other man was not born of woman…even Jesus was
born of woman hence has to be challenged by the Igbo. Never mind that Jesus was
not conceived the usual way. But, then, so was Achilles, and the other heroes
of Greek Mythology. See Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad.
LEARNING THEORY
The
characteristics that we have identified as existing in Igbos are learned and,
as such, can be unlearned.
Social
psychologists have written a lot on classical and operant conditioning, on how
people learn their behaviors. See the writings of Watson, Pavlov, B.F. Skinner,
Bandura, Stanley Milgram,
Phillip Zimbado, Seligman and other learning
theorists.
Indeed, in a spirit of bravado, B.F. Skinner
boasted that if given any child, that through his behavior technology and
social engineering, that he could train him to become whatever he wants him to
be. In both Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and Walden 11, Skinner boasted that
through behavior modification technology, that he can change human behaviors.
Obviously Skinner overstated his case; he was the chief salesman for
behaviorism and exaggerated the advantages of his latest snake oil that fixed
all human maladies. Behaviorism is reductionistic.
Behaviorism has been supplanted by Neuroscience, which, itself is reductionistic, for it sees all behavior as rooted in our
genes.
I
am not going to get bogged down in technical debate as to whether behaviorism
is good or bad, all we need to do is take the idea that we human beings are
learning machines and do learn an awful lot of things. The Igbos can learn
whatever they need to learn to become good leaders.
It
took Hausas, Fulanis and Yorubas
generations (at least five hundred years) to learn follower ship behaviors,
hence make them good members of organizations.
Igbos
can learn to become good followers and in the process become good leaders. It
might take a few generations for this to happen. (A generation is 33 years.)
If
we identify the problem accurately, and accept it, we can then work to solve
it. But the worst thing any one can do is deny problems and pretend as if they
do not exist.
Those
in leadership studies tend to believe that Igbos, given their character traits,
as explained above, make poor leaders. I know people who flatly believe that
Igbos seek leadership positions for ego and vanity, but not because of their
burning desires to do something for the group.
It
is not for rational Igbos to deny this negative perception of them, but to
undertake efforts to change it.
Every
body knows that Igbos are hard working, but every body also knows that they
tend to work for their personal interests, not group interests. What real
leaders do is do something for the led.
IGBO LEADERSHIP GOALS
Leadership
entails perceiving needs and positing ideas on how to address these needs,
perceiving problems and seeking ways to solve them. The problem must be clearly
defined, the solution clarified and then pursued.
Igboland,
until the advent of the white man, was composed of disparate towns that happen
to speak different dialects of the same language. There has never been a
unified Igbo nation. It is the events in the British composed nation of Nigeria
that gave rise to the Igbos sense of oneness.
The
first problem that Igbos need to solve
is nation building. The Igbos must develop one Igbo state, one Alaigbo. This must
come to pass. There must be one Igbo state, a state that stretches from Ikwerre (Port Harcourt) to Agbo
(in present Delta state), from Arochukwu to Ika/Nsukka. Simply
stated, all those who speak Igbo, no matter what form its dialects take, must
be in one state.
It
is better that this end be accomplished peacefully, but failing that, by force.
Politics is war by peaceful means. When
talking fails, politics continues by violent means. Von Clausewitz
defined war as politics by other means.
When bargaining for power and control stops working, people shoot it out
and those better at killing their opponents, come to power. We have to use
peace or war to unify all Alaigbo. This is
non-negotiable. This is not for debate.
Every
Igbo man must be prepared to fight and, if necessary, die for the oneness of Alaigbo. Here I stand.
I cannot shift my position.
All
those Igbos who are clamoring for the making of their villages a state, so that
they would get their own share of Nigeria’s national cake, must grow up and
understand that one Igboland is in our best interests. Moreover, since,
historically, we have not had one unified state and the world thinks that we
lack leadership skills to unify a large swath of territory, we must disprove
them.
In
the past, a heroic leader would go on a war path and use force to unify large
areas. Napoleon did it in Europe. Chaka Zulu did it in South Africa, etc. We must show the world that we are capable of
having a large political entity, something more than our village based
governments. If necessary, force must be used to overcome atavistic and
retrogressive forces.
Please
get it into your head: real leaders see
war as an option in pursuing their goals. Leaders do not hesitate from going to
war and seeing millions of people die. What matters to them is the
accomplishment of useful social goals. Leaders are not sentimental liberals who
talk the talk and when blood flows chicken, panic and cut and run. Leaders do
not squirm at the sight of blood. See, George Bush had the goal of taking over
the oil of the Middle East, and he did not hesitate sending young Americans to
over there, to die fighting for oil.
This Bush boy has leadership skills. His Democratic opponents are afraid
of fighting and generally do not make presidential material. The president
ought to have marshal qualities, a general really. (Ex generals who have led men
at war make the best political leaders; the second best are businessmen.)
Alaigbo
must have one capital. Ideally, a
capital should be in the middle of a state.
Alternatively, the capital should be in a place the people believe is
their core place, their place of origin, real or imagined (it does not matter;
in politics myth is as powerful as reality).
All
things considered, Owerri satisfies the conditions to be the capital city of Alaigbo. So, Owerri, it must be.
Owerri
people have never denied their Igboness. Onitcha people used to insult themselves by claiming that
they came from Benin, hence not real Igbos.
My
father, Johnson, used to be furious at Onitcha people
for referring to him and his fellow Owerri people as “Onye
Igbo”. Apparently, they did so to indicate their sense of superiority to real
Igbos. They fancied themselves Bini people and from
that delusion looked down on real Igbos.
To the present, Onitcha Igbos tend to look
down on Owerri Igbos. I have tried to understand this nonsense. It seems rooted
in the fact that in material culture, the Onitcha is
ahead of the Owerri. White missionaries established a mission at Onitcha in 1857 and at Owerri in 1906. Thus, Onitcha folks were exposed to Western education fifty years
ahead of Owerri folks. The first batch of educated Igbos came from the Onitch area. These folks, therefore, dominated the
activities of the then Eastern Nigeria government. They somehow developed the impression that
they were better than the less educated Owerri folks. Let it be said that at
present the Owerri have actually exceeded the Onitcha
in matters education and soon in other areas too. Let it just be noted that
some of us, Owerri people, resent any Igbo looking down on us, particularly if
they are ashamed to be Igbo.
Well,
if you are not a real Igbo, Igbo capital cannot be in your land, can it? Currently, Ikwerrre
pragmatists want to have access to Delta oil and talk rubbish about themselves
not being Igbo. That rules Port
Harcourt, Egwuocha, out, as the capital of the
Igbos.
Owerri
is the capital of Alaigbo. Owerri is the core Igbo
land, Owerri is where all Igbos originally came from.
Whether
this is truth or myth is irrelevant. Is Ile Ife the origin of the Yorubas? Do you, for
a second, believe that Odudawa came down from heaven
at Ife, as Yorubas claim?
Of course, the man did not come from heaven. But if the Ife
myth serves useful function for the Yorubas, so Ife is their capital.
Igbos
speak many dialects of their language.
Some of them do not even understand what other Igbos speak. This problem can be solved by having a
central dialect that all Igbos can speak.
I
spent some time in England and found out that people from different parts of
that little island speak dialects that others do not understand. Londoners can
hardly understand cockney. The English
made the English spoken around Oxford their national language and teach it at
their schools.
In
the USA, people in different states speak differently. When I visited the
South…Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi etc…I could not understand what
the heck they were speaking. New York accent is different from Boston
accent. America deliberately made West
Coast English their official English and it is spoken on the radios and TVs,
even in New York where people speak funny English.
The
Igbo language spoken at Port Harcourt, of all places, is, in fact, the easiest
to understand and speak. Perhaps it
should be our official Igbo? That Official Igbo must be taught in all schools
in Alaigbo, so that all Igbo persons, despite their
dialects, can talk to one another. Language is one of the greatest tools for
unifying people.
Alaigbo
did not have written language before its encounter with the white man; hence
the white boy called Frederick Lugard would talk
about the pacification of the savages of the lower Niger. We shall let Lugard’s insult pass. Hold your anger in, my friend; we
have work to do before we deal with the men from Europe. Mark my word: we shall
eventually punish those who degraded our fathers.
Anger
is the most potent force in the world, if it is controlled. If insulted, feel
your anger but do not express it. Stay calm, take a deep breath, take a walk,
go exercise, run three times a week, at least one hour at a time, do every
thing you can to retain your composure, so that you do not pour excitatory
neurotransmitters like adrenalin into your central nervous system and they make
you shut down your cortex and you behave from your hypothalamus, the animal part
of your brain, hence irrational. Manage your anger and behave rationally. We
shall deal with the British, time, my friend, is needed for us to acquire the
technology we need to equalize the playing fields before we descend on our
abusers and oppressors like a ton of bricks. I do not forgive those who
insulted my people; I will get back at them, when I am able to defeat them. But
one must choose one’s battles carefully.
For now, let us do what we have to do to develop Africa.
What
do we need to do? We need to provide
every Igbo child with universal free education.
The adults must tax themselves and come up with the money to train their
children. All Igbo children must have access
to free six years of elementary school, free six years secondary school, four
years of university. Generally, at least 33% of all secondary school graduates,
one out of three, a third, have enough intelligence to do university work), and
another four years of graduate school for the top ten percent of graduates.
These would then take an examination for Doctor of Science degree, and if they
pass, leave school, and submit their dissertations when they are done.
For
those children who are not capable of university education, or, if capable, who
choose technical education; they must be provided with free technical
education. We need mechanics, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, electronic
technicians, machinists etc. At least, 50% of secondary school graduates ought
to go to technical colleges. The German
technical education system is the best in the world. Two years in
class/workshop training and two years on the job training as apprentices, then
sitting and passing of a national examination in the area of studies and
certification as a technical specialist (who should earn as much money as
university graduates). We need those who can fix things, as much as we need
those who talk about things.
About
10% of the population is not capable of much education. These include the
mentally retarded; 2% of the population has IQ under 70; the mentally ill: 2%
of the population tends to have psychosis, schizophrenia and mania; and those
with personality disorders and sundry other life skills deficits that rule out
their ability to do well in the work place. What we need to do for this unproductive
ten percent is train them to do menial labor and pay them something.)
The
Igbos are a realistic people and in that light we must approach people without
sentimentality. We must accept the fact that not every person is equally intelligent
and work with that fact. Distribution of intelligence breaks down in a Bell
Curve, as follows: 2% mentally retarded, IQ under 70; 90% average intelligence,
IQ 85-115; 5% above average, IQ 115-129; 2% mentally gifted, IQ over 130. People tend to end up in professions that
reflect their IQ level. Average persons tend to wind up doing average jobs.
Above average persons tend to be found in the professions, such as medicine,
engineering, law; and the gifted tend to gravitate to science, particularly the
research aspect of it. This is reality and being sentimental will not change
any thing. Embrace reality and work with it.
We
ought to test all children’s intelligence and send our gifted children to
schools that are specifically designed for them. Such children tend to feel
bored with the silly stuff taught at regular schools. Some of us found our
schools so boring that we simply studied on our own and ignored the
unchallenging stuff taught by our teachers. We can adapt Western Intelligence
and Personality tests like WISC, WAIS, Stanford Binnet, MMPI etc, into Igbo forms
of them.)
It
is the function of the government of the expected Alaigbo
state to find the money, by all means necessary, to educate all Igbo
children. No excuses are permitted. Excuses are for children. Adults make up
their minds about what they want to do seek the resources to do it and do it.
Where there is a will there is a way.
The
great German writer, Goethe (Faust) observed that when the individual makes up
his mind, and is committed to doing something that he believes is useful, that,
somehow, the entire universe comes to his aid, and all doors open for him. But
as long as one is not committed to doing anything one considers important, all
doors shut for one.
It
is time Africans make their minds up to develop their continent and they would
see the universe work with them. At
present, they are uncommitted and nature is uncommitted to them. At present
nature punishes Africans. Every disease, known and unknown to man, kills
Africans. Natural disasters like droughts etc kill Africans. It is as if
Africans do not matter to nature.
Of
course, we matter to nature. I believe that our past crime of selling our
brothers and sisters into slavery, angered the “gods” and they are punishing
us. To stop the anger of the gods we
need to start caring for each other and stop selling each other. Obasanjo needs to spend all the money he spends at European
hotels in Africa, educating our people. He must stop being a slave seller, as
he currently is.
I
consciously mixed facts and myths; leadership must mix reason and mythology.
One may not believe in God, but as Machiavelli observed, if God does not exist,
the Prince, a leader must invent him, and give him to the masses to believe in.
The leader needs God in controlling the masses. Fear of God is more effective
than fear of the hang man in getting people to obey the laws of the land. We
need both fear of God and fear of the executioner to get the masses to obey the
laws. As Karl Marx observed, the people need the opium of religion to deal with
the intractable issues of existence. Only a few, tough minded persons, those
who embrace oblivion and finitude as their future, upon their physical death,
can cope with life without the crutch of religion and its make belief gods. A
leader deals with the many, the masses, not the few, atheistic intellectuals,
so we need religion in society. Actually, a perceptive leader always keeps a
hard eye on intellectuals and quickly punishes them before they create mischief
by misguiding the masses, giving them the wrong ideas.
You
must get the masses to obey the laws and whoever talks nonsense about people’s
freedom to do as they like is an enemy of the state. This is realistic
conservative thinking, not childish, liberal idealistic feelings that we should
all do as we pleased, not realizing the anarchy that would result. Leaders must
use draconian laws to discipline the people. Society is organized human beings,
not a state of anarchy where people have the license to do as they pleased.
In
society, our freedom must be circumscribed, limited and restricted. This is the
fact of life. Liberals ought to grow up and accept limitations on human
freedom. In the West, pursuit of unmitigated freedom is bringing about immorality
and that will lead to the end of the West. These days, every perversion is
socially tolerated, all in the name of liberty.
The
West has been crying out for strong hands to crack down on the nonsense that
has become its society. And, sooner or
later, nationalistic fascists will take over and correct the mess liberals have
made of Western society.
Alaigbo
must provide free medical care for all Igbos.
This subject is non-negotiable. Health care for all is a human rights
issue. The situation in America where 45 million Americans are not insured is
an outrage against humanity.
The
free enterprise system is the most productive economic system in the
world. Communism, socialism and other
forms of planned economy are bankrupt.
Human
beings are competitive animals and if you stop rewarding the most competitive
human beings, you take away their incentive to work hard. Russia tried to
equalize society and killed her people’s incentive to work hard.
Socialism
delivers poverty, not wealth. Capitalism delivers wealth. However, where people compete, there must be
winners and losers. If ten kids get on
their marks, get set and go, there will be winners and losers, for not all are
good runners. Then, make accommodation for the losers in life’s races.
Provide
work that the losers can do. Pay them minimum wage. Let them clean city streets, plant trees in
reforestation programs etc, but do not give any one free welfare money, as is
done in the West.
There
is no free food in nature. If an orange ripens on an orange tree and you want
to eat an orange, you have to go pluck it from the tree. If you wait for it to
fall down before you eat it, well, only rotten oranges fall down, and so those
who depend on public handouts must eat rotten food. We must work for our daily
bread.
It
is degrading to give the individual handouts. Teach the child how to fish and
you feed him for life, but give him fish and you feed him for only a day. (The
Igbo in me is here speaking.)
Obviously,
the free enterprise economy has problems.
This is hardly the place to address the problems of macro and micro
economics. Begin your education in critical thinking by reading John Maynard
Keynes’ criticism of unchecked capitalism.
The
West has seen fit to regulate its capitalist economy, to prevent its
traditional cycles of boom and burst. Taxation, monetary and fiscal policies
are employed in balancing inflation and depression. Central banks manipulate
prime interest rates to prevent recessions etc.
This
is not a paper for professional economists, so we shall not go into discussion
of the problem with capitalism. Let us just say that a mixed economy is the
answer, provided that we do not tilt too much towards government control.
Government
workers are like fools, left unchecked, they kill the goose that lays the
golden egg; they over regulate the creative sectors of the economy and
stimulate depression. Conservatives thinkers do not like bureaucrats but we
need them as necessary evil.
Experience
teaches me that about 25% of each worker’s annual income ought to be taken away
from him in the form of taxes. We need taxes to obtain the money with which we
run the polity and provide those goods and services that we expect governments
to provide for the people.
Since
Nigerians want free goods and services and do not like to pay taxes, we must
figure out a way to arrest and jail those who avoid paying their taxes, and
expropriate their properties, too.
Alaigbo
government must be draconian in making sure that every citizen obeys the laws.
Criminals, for example, ought to be immediately arrested, tried and sent to
jail for a long, long time, and those who commit homicide be immediately
killed. You cannot afford to be sentimental with depraved human beings; if you
look away, they will do dangerous things to society, so the government must
find a way to get them to conform to the law or punish them.
We
need to industrialize our beautiful continent. We must, therefore, embark on a
single minded policy to industrialize every part of Africa, beginning with Alaigbo. If we
vigorously pursued this goal, in fifty years, we would meet the West and begin
to play on equal terms with them.
The
bane of Nigeria is corruption. There is
a simple solution for this seeming intractable problem. Arrest and punish those who take bribes and
steal from the public. One instance of corruption ought to merit the culprit
twenty five years in prison, with hard labor, too. We cannot afford to feed this detritus of
humanity, but must make them work for their up keep while in jails and prisons.
As for those who engage in more outrageous corruption, like Nigeria ought past
heads of state, from Obasanjo to Bagbangida,
their heads to be chopped off. Bring
back the Guillotine and do not hesitate in chopping off the heads of criminals,
in politics and everywhere else in the polity.
We
ought to make a public spectacle of decapitating the heads of our criminal
leaders. The Romans used to crucify
criminals and leave them to rot on the cross and make sure that people walked
by them. The idea was to use that horrific sight to deter future criminal
behaviors. You cannot coddle criminals. Arrest, try and execute them. Refuse
has no business hanging around. Hanging
around for what, so that they steal some more from hard working citizens? No, eliminate the unproductive elements of
society.
LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT TRAINING
We
know what leadership is: positing goals to meet perceived needs. We know what management is: training on how
to use men
and
material in pursuing goals.
I
believe that leadership and management can be trained for. I think that what Harvard University is
currently doing is ideal for training public managers. Harvard now has a four
year, combined MBA and JD program. The
students are trained as lawyers and business managers. I believe that this is the way to go. Leaders
are people who manage complex modern economies and must, therefore, understand
business management as well as law, for society is a system of laws.
All
those who aspire to leadership in Alaigbo ought to be
trained in law and business management.
If they have their education in other areas, they must be required to
take one year crash program in business management. This is doable. I have personally trained
people in all the courses required for an MBA, in less than a year. The critical point is for leaders and
politicians to be trained in managing modern economies.
I
do not think that any one with less than master’s degree level of education
should go into politics. I also do not
think that PhDs’ should go into politics.
The later ought to go into teaching and doing research. Of course, there will be exceptions to every
general rule, so that sometimes some PhDs with demonstrated administrative
skills wind up in politics, and persons without university education wind up in
leadership roles.
Posit
the goal that moderately educated persons should be in politics and leave
reality to decide what actually happens.
CONCLUSION
Leaders
are people who have good ideas of where the people around them ought to be
going. They perceive problems with
clarity of vision and posit realistic, not imaginary, solutions to them. They
do not just dream, dreaming is part of leadership, but work to realize social
goals. They mobilize those around them and obtain the material resources
necessary in accomplishing their goals. If they have the money, savings, they
use it to solve their problems. If not, they borrow it from banks, local and
international World Bank, IMF etc. or in the form of
bonds. (I will not discuss the process of issuing
bonds and or stocks, IPOs, here; those are technical
issues in public and business finance.)
Leaders
are people who see problems and set about solving them; they don’t just talk
about problems and analyze them to death, as academics do (analysis paralysis),
and do nothing about them. Leaders roll up their sleeves, get into the mud and
remove it.
Although
some persons seem born with a propensity towards leadership, the averagely
intelligent person can be trained to become a leader and manager. We need managers to mange the modern economy,
not just idle talking politicians. During the anti colonial era, we had need
for talkers, like our African nationalists, but now we have a continent to
govern and it needs managers, not idle politicians who talk the talk and do not
walk their talk.
We
must, therefore, set about training Igbo leaders. We must establish leadership and
management Institutes in every major Igbo city (at Owerri, Aba,
Umuahia, Onitcha, Orlu, Enugu, Abakaliki, Asaba, Port Harcourt/Egwuocha
etc). We must find a way to get our
people to work for the public, for Oha, and not just
for their egos.
A
human being is fully alive when he works for the public and not just his
self. Africans are too full of
themselves, and do not seem to realize that, to be so, is to be sick, to be
neurotic. It is time we began transcending ourselves. We best transcend
ourselves, as the Catholic Church of my upbringing tells us, by devoting our
lives to public service. Serve other people, Ignatius Loyola tells us, and you
become truly happy. (Hence he set up an order, Jesuits, dedicated to serving
humanity.)
Live
for your self and your family only and you are the most miserable human being
on earth. The narcissist, selfish person, who is what most Nigerian leaders
are, is miserable. Our narcissistic and sometime antisocial personality
disordered leaders lives are not worth living.
They live in hell and do not know it. As the good book, the Bible, said,
the wage of sin is death. (That is a metaphor, which I do not care to explain
here…see my metaphysical writings.)
Let
us get down to work and develop our beautiful Alaigbo. God saw it fit to place us where we are. We
must not run away from her problems. It is our duty to do our best for our land
and its people.
Now
let us get to work and don’t just talk about Igbo problems; let us do what we
can to solve an aspect of them. The individual alone cannot solve all Igbo
problems, only God can do that, but one, a part of the whole, can solve a bit
of the problems of our land.
*
This paper was prepared for an Igbo leadership Conference at New Orleans,
Louisiana, USA.
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