Leadership And Governancea

Being a lecture delivered at the Home
Coming Event of the University of Port Harcourt Alumni Association at the
Ebitimi Bamgo Hall, recently.

This lecture may well be the most difficult
I have ever delivered. Speaking before one’s alma mater, one’s teachers, and
one’s classmates is harder than you can imagine. There are former professors
here who might withdraw my degree certificate if I misbehave. There are ex-classmates
who might kiss me goodbye if I fall short of their expectations. There are also
those who have come to see this man who they say graduated with a first class
honours degree in economics in 1984, but who is no better than those who
graduated with third class honors this year. My least concern is with this
third group. They are right and I have been praying for the past 28 years for
them to be right. There is an African saying that the children, the latter
generations, must be better than the adults of earlier generations.

Aha! I have just realised that I don’t have
any problem with the first two groups either. My former teachers will be
cheering for me even if I am not making sense. Their own reputations are on the
line; I am a product of their collective judgment. My classmates know that the
worth of their own certificates depends on not only one individual, but also on
the joint impact of the whole 1984 graduating class, and indeed all alumni of
this great University. My success is their success and their successes are also
mine. Their credibility is on the line and they must be praying for me to
deliver a good lecture today. Now I can exhale!

About 35 years ago, this unique
institution, unique Uniport, started something new: to forge a new kind of
renaissance human being for Africa. When I first came here in 1980 I knew
immediately that I was part of an experiment, part of a programme to raise
intellectual giants, activist intellectuals, and intellectual activists who
would focus on developing Africa and putting it on the map of global
respectability. We were made to understand that the University of Port Harcourt
was educating us and not just training us; educating us to draw out our
potentialities for scientific, technological, economic, and political
development of Nigeria and Africa. It was drummed into us that the paramount
goal of our education was the preservation, promotion, and progress of our
community, which transcends our personal and ethnic boundaries. Now you
understand why I am not concerned with what my professors and classmates think.
I am because they are!

Those of you who are familiar with the work
of Kenyan theologian John Mbiti might have guessed that I have implicitly
quoted him in the last sentence to pepper my talk. You are wrong. It is not
because this is a common saying in Nigeria, but because it was, and still is,
at the foundation of how we understood community and living together on campus.
From the classroom, to the lecture halls, to the sites of community work in the
forests of Choba, we were animated by how Nigerian groups can live together and
live well, and how we can use human intelligence to support this goal. As we
learned from our ancestors and Aristotle, the key task of all political and
ethical thought is how to enable everyone in the community to live well in the
appropriate human ways.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are already
talking about leadership and governance. The Greek word for leader, arkhon,
comes from the verb arkhein, which means to begin, to rule, to command. The
leader begins something new and he or she commands, governs. In the mid-1970s,
Nigerian men and women—supported by a few well-meaning foreign
scholars—gathered here to begin something new in Nigerian education. They
embarked upon the experiment of helping young men and women acquire the most
important human capabilities of thinking, feeling, and desiring in order to
bring Nigeria into the conditions of economic and political eudaimonia. They
set up the institutional framework, ideas, rules, and practices that not only
sustained that new beginning, but made room for the new to emerge. This is
leadership and governance.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have not come
here to hear the history of Uniport. But it is important for me to begin there.
Leadership involves taking a person, group, or institution along a path or
journey. The leader may not know the final destination, but must assuredly know
the starting point. There is little wonder then, that as I prepare to lead you
on an intellectual journey we start from my Uniport roots. It is from this site
of my existential engagement with the world that I must endeavor to make sense
of the topic that has been assigned to me by the Vice Chancellor (Professor
Joseph Ajienka) and the Alumni Association.

By the way, I will know that you have
understood me well if at the end of this lecture you are able to relate my
intellectual musings to my unique roots. Now put on your thinking bowler hats
if you intend to keep pace with me as I decipher the title of the lecture. Just
kidding, relax and enjoy yourself! But please note that as I playfully
deconstruct the title I am also seriously characterising the nature of
leadership and governance in Nigeria.

Definition of Key Terms in the Title

(1) Seven faces of “And”

The invitation to give this lecture was
signed by the Honourable (Chief) Ike Chinwo and Professor Ajienka, the VC of
the University. It says: “we have the honour and pleasure to request that you
present a Paper on Leadership and Governance . . . .” The whole phrase first
struck me as if they were asking me to sit for the horrific comprehensive exam
again. They put “Leadership and Governance” in bold letters and “paper” was
spelled with a capital P. Then I laughed. I asked myself: you mean Nigerians
still set tough exam questions like this? Leadership and Governance, discuss!
Since I know that it is almost impossible to get an “A” in Uniport, especially
when the question is set by Ike and the VC, I decided to turn the tables on
them and to offer them seven meditations on “and.” You think I’m kidding? I
hope some of you still remember the joke that when you enter an exam hall and
you can’t answer a single question, you make up one for yourself in the hope
that the lecturer will give you a “let-my-people-go” grade.

Let us start in a very simple way, by
examining the title of the lecture, one that the Association and the VC have
given me as a measure of their reading of the pulse of this country. I will
start from the middle term of the title. What does “and” mean in the
combination of leadership and governance? Does “and” represent an illegal and
adulterous relationship when we look at Nigerian history? Do people just govern
and not lead? Is Nigerian leadership raping the concept of governance of all
its meaning as it is understood beyond our shores? Your answer will depend on
what we mean by leadership and governance. Some of you may be thinking:
Professor, there are children or holy men here and you should not be talking
about adultery or rape. I hear you! But what does “and” mean?

Maybe “and” does not signify adultery or
rape, but a marriage of convenience. There is no longer any passion in the
matrimony of leadership and governance; both parties are just keeping up with
appearances. But was there a time our national leaders took the
interconnectedness between leadership and governance seriously? The fact that
they were called leaders and governors does not mean that the meanings of
leadership and governance co-mingled in their hearts and minds. When I survey
the darkling cross on which the glory of this nation died, what I see from the
hands, the heads, the feet of the people are sorrow and pain mingled together.
Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast in the leadership and governance of
Nigeria. May the good Lord help us to resurrect and raise the glory of this
nation.

As an economist when I see “and” between
leadership and governance at least two things immediately spring to mind:
transaction cost and profit/loss. Anytime we bring two entities together in a
(trade) relationship there is a cost of friction to the exchange goods between
them. Is the cost going to be offset by gains of interaction or is the cost
going to increase?

What is the economics of leadership and
governance in Nigeria? The economics of leadership and governance has been
vitiated by the absence of trust between leaders and the governed, between
oligarchy of power and polyarchy of disorganised citizenry. The “and” between
leadership and governance is a loss center, representing the abyss into which
our resources disappear. Men and women are elected, selected, or appointed to
lead and . . . they steal us blind. “And” is the recurring nightmare inflicted
by our leaders on the governed, subjected, dominated, hoodwinked, bamboozled,
raped, and exploited people who are bedazzled by the razzmatazz of democratic
penkella-messi (peculiar mess).

In the Uniport of the early 1980s, no one
was just trained as an economist, but as a Marxian economist. All the students
in the School of Social Sciences were drilled in Marxian analysis, and since
many of you are here today I will do a Marxian analysis of the title especially
for you. The “and” in the title is indexed to class, to the hegemonic bourgeois
class. Ask yourself, why not “leadership and revolution”? Your answer will
depend upon the correct class analysis of the power structure in the country,
the university, and the Alumni Association.

There is another angle by which to examine
the meaning of “and” that will also be instructive. The three-letter word is
not there for the historical factualness or coherent logic of the social
practice of leadership and governance in Nigeria. “And” in the joining together
of leadership and governance has only emotional and psychological appeals. In
Nigeria we co-join the two words because it creates a passion in which our
feelings of greatness are aroused. There is a certain resonance we feel in our
breasts when we hear both words in one breath. “And” here taps into a
sympathetic vibration and invokes emotions of rhetorical familiarity harkening
back to the independence struggles that preceded the birth of this country on
October 1, 1960. But we have since lost the active sense of life that such
times promised and we are only left with a mythologized sense of how we used to
imagine the desired condition of our country. It is futile to dwell on this
nostalgic meaning of “and.”

Let us now proceed to our sixth meditation
on “and.” I wonder why they did not write, “Leadership is Governance,”
“Leadership for Governance,” “Leadership of Governance,” or Leadership with
Governance”? But they boldly wrote “Leadership and Governance.” For instance,
if they had written “Leadership with Governance” I would have thought of those
books with two or more authors where the senior author, to emphasize his
superiority or to indicate that his partner did not really do the heavy
lifting, will not use “and,” but “with.” The lead author shows all this by
putting his or her name first and attaching the demeaning “with” to the name of
the poor junior scholar. “Leadership with Governance” will not satisfy the ego
of Nigerian leaders who want to show that they are equally invested in both
leadership and governance, and that they govern by leading. This is why my
lecture is not titled “Leadership with Governance” or “Governance and
Leadership.”

Those who invited me to speak have read
their tea leaves well, so they wrote “Leadership and Governance.” The “and”
here means equality, “equals to.” It is a mathematical “and.” This is what our
so-called leaders want us to believe. Do not believe them. There is no
correspondence between leadership and governance. It is an ideological “and.”
The social practices of Nigerian leaders lack the necessary norms and values
that ensure that leadership is a democratic way of life for the common good of
the governed. Their regnant ideas of leadership and governance are not founded
on the premise that everyone is both a leader and a governed, every citizen has
the right to rule and be ruled, and that citizens are to take turns in the public
offices. This rejected premise is the only viable base for the mathematical
“and” and it is only this understanding that can help us to unfold, actualize
the latent human potentials of the country in the context of an emancipatory,
liberatory, and deliberative democracy.

If the authorities that invited me had
written, “leadership is governance,” then we would be put on a different
trajectory of inquiry. But they did not; instead they wrote “Leadership and
Governance.” In a sense, “leadership and governance” implicitly asks: what is
the relation between leadership and governance? This question presupposes that
the meaning and commitment to leadership can be assessed apart from governance
or impact on the governed. For the couplant that is the “and” between the two
terms gestures to an afterthought, not as an identity or sympathetic
identification. But “leadership is governance,” at least, suggests that the
significance and truth of leadership is explicable only in terms of governance.
In my next meditation on “and” as participation I will attempt to bridge the
gap between “leadership and governance” and “leadership is governance.” In that
meditation or philosophical analysis of “and” I will argue that any theory of
leadership that does not properly link it to governance is both incomplete and
deficient. Any theory of leadership is inadequate if it fails to suggest how
genuine leadership provides and requires that leaders have the skills,
competence, capability, and values to govern and to govern well in the name of
the common good.

What do you think the VC and the Alumni
Association had in mind when they coupled together leadership and governance
with the glue of the all-powerful “and”? You say: “You are the economist,
ethicist, and philosopher, figure that out.” With that permission, let me
venture a guess. You better pray that I get it right. If I don’t, then the
press will say our great VC and the Alumni Association cannot formulate a good
topic for discourse. If they did not get it right, my coming here is useless,
and so is your gathering. More than that, we are found to be false witnesses
about Uniport, for we have testified about this University that it has raised
great men and women.

The “and” between leadership and governance
points to participation. “And” here symbolises the intimacy and unity that are
meant to exist between leadership and governance. Participation is the thread
that weaves not only the texture of sociality, but also the logic and dynamics
of leadership and governance. It is through participation that products,
objects, ideas spread out, influence (in-fluent, flow in) one another and
combine into a general product, object, or idea. (In our case, the development
and flourishing of Nigeria.) This unity can provoke or attract reactions to
itself—further producing new fusions. When leadership and governance are made
to participate in one another in the social practice of democracy, they lead to
formation of large-scale structures, systems, or complexities. The combination
of leadership and governance enables the citizens of a polity to participate in
the life of one another and in so doing build and sustain great civilizations.

What is participation? One participates
when one draws (gives) resources, energy from another being. This relation can
take three forms. First, one participant is active at the expense of the other.
The Kalabari say, buko pa agala fififi, agala buko ye fifiyaa (the monkey
always eats the mangrove tree and the mangrove never eats anything of the
monkey). The monkey is the active participant here, actively exacting itself at
the expense of the mangrove tree. If we turn this relationship around and
examine it from the vantage point of the tree we get the second type of
participation. The tree is participating but it is mainly passive, contributing
its resources, but not necessarily getting something in return and essentially
not taking any action. The monkey is doing all the eating and the tree is not
eating from the monkey. Do these forms of false participation remind you of the
relationship between the leaders and governed in Nigeria?

Third, participation can also be
conceptualized as a form of relation that leads to mutual exchange of
properties such that both parties are transformed and become a new being. When
the female egg relates to the male sperm, they are both changed and by the
change become a new whole. Here the two par-take, “take a part of” each other
to create an organized whole, a higher structure. They both give something of
themselves and simultaneously take on something of the whole.

The Kalabari word for participation is
ye-mie gboloma. This encompasses the meaning of participation in English but
goes further, deeper. There is the idea of giving, receiving, possessing,
incorporating, and fellowship. When we do things together (yeye) we are not
only both giving and receiving properties (energy, materials, ideas, etc.) from
each other, we incorporate (fi, “eat”) them into our being; ye-mie gboloma is
constitutive of our very act of interaction and also creates a communion,
community.

When we view participation from the wide
angle provided by the Kalabari word, ye-mie-gboloma, from the perspective of
the sperm and ovum forming the zygote, participants in the process of
participation create a unity (not merely an interaction field) and identity. To
the extent that the communion formed is something that was not there before is
something achieved which was not possible without the sustained interaction.
This “something” has new identity, a new identification. Something new has been
created from the unity—even if not ex nihilo.

If every new participation is a new
creation, or the positing of a new possible world, then it is an invention of a
possible set of new possibilities. Possibility is built into the “being” of
participation. So what the VC and Alumni Association have in mind is for me to
examine how leadership and governance can be understood or reconceptualised so
as to create new possibilities for Nigeria’s development. But we are getting
ahead of ourselves. First of all, we must define (de-fine, limit) what we mean
by governance or leadership.

(2) Governance

Governance refers to the practices of
command (coordination or control) in an organization or polity. It is the set
of institutional forms of control for maintaining and destabilizing order
necessary for human flourishing in an organisation or polity. Why have I
combined maintenance and destabilization? Claude Ake taught us that the problem
of Western social science is that it is too enamored with maintaining order. I
took my lessons very well. So I believe a governance process must construct and
deconstruct, for as Ake once told us, reality is full of contradictions and to
grasp it we must think dialectically. At any rate, no institution can survive for
long if its practices of command make destabilizing forces or internal creative
destruction impossible.

Control can be unilateral or multilateral,
democratic or non-democratic, or monocentric or polycentric. By control I have
in mind the regulatory structures and norms that produce, function, and
reproduce the mechanisms of management and accountability in an organization
(state). These could operate without an overarching political authority (an
open process of negotiation and decision making) or with one that limits
collaboration between the hegemonic top and plebian bottom of the organization.
The question that usually suggests itself with this understanding of governance
is this: is all authority deriving from a single center of power or from
heterogeneous decision-making networks? Historically, this question is decided
on a predetermined measure of effectiveness in governance. Do the functions and
structures of authority facilitate the organisational goals? This is a question
that has to wait until we define the telos of “leadership and governance” in
Nigeria. At that point we will also come to the understanding that good
governance is the institutionalisation of leadership in the polis or
organisation.

Wariboko is the Katherine B. Stuart Professor
of Christian Ethics, Andover Newton Theological School, United States.

To Be Cont’d

Nimi Wariboko