Being a lecture delivered at the Home
\nComing Event of the University of Port Harcourt Alumni Association at the
\nEbitimi Bamgo Hall, recently.<\/p>\n
This lecture may well be the most difficult
\nI have ever delivered. Speaking before one\u2019s alma mater, one\u2019s teachers, and
\none\u2019s classmates is harder than you can imagine. There are former professors
\nhere who might withdraw my degree certificate if I misbehave. There are ex-classmates
\nwho might kiss me goodbye if I fall short of their expectations. There are also
\nthose who have come to see this man who they say graduated with a first class
\nhonours degree in economics in 1984, but who is no better than those who
\ngraduated with third class honors this year. My least concern is with this
\nthird group. They are right and I have been praying for the past 28 years for
\nthem to be right. There is an African saying that the children, the latter
\ngenerations, must be better than the adults of earlier generations.<\/p>\n
Aha! I have just realised that I don\u2019t have
\nany problem with the first two groups either. My former teachers will be
\ncheering for me even if I am not making sense. Their own reputations are on the
\nline; I am a product of their collective judgment. My classmates know that the
\nworth of their own certificates depends on not only one individual, but also on
\nthe joint impact of the whole 1984 graduating class, and indeed all alumni of
\nthis great University. My success is their success and their successes are also
\nmine. Their credibility is on the line and they must be praying for me to
\ndeliver a good lecture today. Now I can exhale!<\/p>\n
About 35 years ago, this unique
\ninstitution, unique Uniport, started something new: to forge a new kind of
\nrenaissance human being for Africa. When I first came here in 1980 I knew
\nimmediately that I was part of an experiment, part of a programme to raise
\nintellectual giants, activist intellectuals, and intellectual activists who
\nwould focus on developing Africa and putting it on the map of global
\nrespectability. We were made to understand that the University of Port Harcourt
\nwas educating us and not just training us; educating us to draw out our
\npotentialities for scientific, technological, economic, and political
\ndevelopment of Nigeria and Africa. It was drummed into us that the paramount
\ngoal of our education was the preservation, promotion, and progress of our
\ncommunity, which transcends our personal and ethnic boundaries. Now you
\nunderstand why I am not concerned with what my professors and classmates think.
\nI am because they are!<\/p>\n
Those of you who are familiar with the work
\nof Kenyan theologian John Mbiti might have guessed that I have implicitly
\nquoted him in the last sentence to pepper my talk. You are wrong. It is not
\nbecause this is a common saying in Nigeria, but because it was, and still is,
\nat the foundation of how we understood community and living together on campus.
\nFrom the classroom, to the lecture halls, to the sites of community work in the
\nforests of Choba, we were animated by how Nigerian groups can live together and
\nlive well, and how we can use human intelligence to support this goal. As we
\nlearned from our ancestors and Aristotle, the key task of all political and
\nethical thought is how to enable everyone in the community to live well in the
\nappropriate human ways.<\/p>\n
Ladies and gentlemen, we are already
\ntalking about leadership and governance. The Greek word for leader, arkhon,
\ncomes from the verb arkhein, which means to begin, to rule, to command. The
\nleader begins something new and he or she commands, governs. In the mid-1970s,
\nNigerian men and women\u2014supported by a few well-meaning foreign
\nscholars\u2014gathered here to begin something new in Nigerian education. They
\nembarked upon the experiment of helping young men and women acquire the most
\nimportant human capabilities of thinking, feeling, and desiring in order to
\nbring Nigeria into the conditions of economic and political eudaimonia. They
\nset up the institutional framework, ideas, rules, and practices that not only
\nsustained that new beginning, but made room for the new to emerge. This is
\nleadership and governance.<\/p>\n
Ladies and gentlemen, you have not come
\nhere to hear the history of Uniport. But it is important for me to begin there.
\nLeadership involves taking a person, group, or institution along a path or
\njourney. The leader may not know the final destination, but must assuredly know
\nthe starting point. There is little wonder then, that as I prepare to lead you
\non an intellectual journey we start from my Uniport roots. It is from this site
\nof my existential engagement with the world that I must endeavor to make sense
\nof the topic that has been assigned to me by the Vice Chancellor (Professor
\nJoseph Ajienka) and the Alumni Association.<\/p>\n
By the way, I will know that you have
\nunderstood me well if at the end of this lecture you are able to relate my
\nintellectual musings to my unique roots. Now put on your thinking bowler hats
\nif you intend to keep pace with me as I decipher the title of the lecture. Just
\nkidding, relax and enjoy yourself! But please note that as I playfully
\ndeconstruct the title I am also seriously characterising the nature of
\nleadership and governance in Nigeria.<\/p>\n
Definition of Key Terms in the Title<\/p>\n
(1) Seven faces of \u201cAnd\u201d<\/p>\n
The invitation to give this lecture was
\nsigned by the Honourable (Chief) Ike Chinwo and Professor Ajienka, the VC of
\nthe University. It says: \u201cwe have the honour and pleasure to request that you
\npresent a Paper on Leadership and Governance . . . .\u201d The whole phrase first
\nstruck me as if they were asking me to sit for the horrific comprehensive exam
\nagain. They put \u201cLeadership and Governance\u201d in bold letters and \u201cpaper\u201d was
\nspelled with a capital P. Then I laughed. I asked myself: you mean Nigerians
\nstill set tough exam questions like this? Leadership and Governance, discuss!
\nSince I know that it is almost impossible to get an \u201cA\u201d in Uniport, especially
\nwhen the question is set by Ike and the VC, I decided to turn the tables on
\nthem and to offer them seven meditations on \u201cand.\u201d You think I\u2019m kidding? I
\nhope some of you still remember the joke that when you enter an exam hall and
\nyou can\u2019t answer a single question, you make up one for yourself in the hope
\nthat the lecturer will give you a \u201clet-my-people-go\u201d grade.<\/p>\n
Let us start in a very simple way, by
\nexamining the title of the lecture, one that the Association and the VC have
\ngiven me as a measure of their reading of the pulse of this country. I will
\nstart from the middle term of the title. What does \u201cand\u201d mean in the
\ncombination of leadership and governance? Does \u201cand\u201d represent an illegal and
\nadulterous relationship when we look at Nigerian history? Do people just govern
\nand not lead? Is Nigerian leadership raping the concept of governance of all
\nits meaning as it is understood beyond our shores? Your answer will depend on
\nwhat we mean by leadership and governance. Some of you may be thinking:
\nProfessor, there are children or holy men here and you should not be talking
\nabout adultery or rape. I hear you! But what does \u201cand\u201d mean?<\/p>\n
Maybe \u201cand\u201d does not signify adultery or
\nrape, but a marriage of convenience. There is no longer any passion in the
\nmatrimony of leadership and governance; both parties are just keeping up with
\nappearances. But was there a time our national leaders took the
\ninterconnectedness between leadership and governance seriously? The fact that
\nthey were called leaders and governors does not mean that the meanings of
\nleadership and governance co-mingled in their hearts and minds. When I survey
\nthe darkling cross on which the glory of this nation died, what I see from the
\nhands, the heads, the feet of the people are sorrow and pain mingled together.
\nForbid it, Lord, that I should boast in the leadership and governance of
\nNigeria. May the good Lord help us to resurrect and raise the glory of this
\nnation.<\/p>\n
As an economist when I see \u201cand\u201d between
\nleadership and governance at least two things immediately spring to mind:
\ntransaction cost and profit\/loss. Anytime we bring two entities together in a
\n(trade) relationship there is a cost of friction to the exchange goods between
\nthem. Is the cost going to be offset by gains of interaction or is the cost
\ngoing to increase?<\/p>\n
What is the economics of leadership and
\ngovernance in Nigeria? The economics of leadership and governance has been
\nvitiated by the absence of trust between leaders and the governed, between
\noligarchy of power and polyarchy of disorganised citizenry. The \u201cand\u201d between
\nleadership and governance is a loss center, representing the abyss into which
\nour resources disappear. Men and women are elected, selected, or appointed to
\nlead and . . . they steal us blind. \u201cAnd\u201d is the recurring nightmare inflicted
\nby our leaders on the governed, subjected, dominated, hoodwinked, bamboozled,
\nraped, and exploited people who are bedazzled by the razzmatazz of democratic
\npenkella-messi (peculiar mess).<\/p>\n
In the Uniport of the early 1980s, no one
\nwas just trained as an economist, but as a Marxian economist. All the students
\nin the School of Social Sciences were drilled in Marxian analysis, and since
\nmany of you are here today I will do a Marxian analysis of the title especially
\nfor you. The \u201cand\u201d in the title is indexed to class, to the hegemonic bourgeois
\nclass. Ask yourself, why not \u201cleadership and revolution\u201d? Your answer will
\ndepend upon the correct class analysis of the power structure in the country,
\nthe university, and the Alumni Association.<\/p>\n
There is another angle by which to examine
\nthe meaning of \u201cand\u201d that will also be instructive. The three-letter word is
\nnot there for the historical factualness or coherent logic of the social
\npractice of leadership and governance in Nigeria. \u201cAnd\u201d in the joining together
\nof leadership and governance has only emotional and psychological appeals. In
\nNigeria we co-join the two words because it creates a passion in which our
\nfeelings of greatness are aroused. There is a certain resonance we feel in our
\nbreasts when we hear both words in one breath. \u201cAnd\u201d here taps into a
\nsympathetic vibration and invokes emotions of rhetorical familiarity harkening
\nback to the independence struggles that preceded the birth of this country on
\nOctober 1, 1960. But we have since lost the active sense of life that such
\ntimes promised and we are only left with a mythologized sense of how we used to
\nimagine the desired condition of our country. It is futile to dwell on this
\nnostalgic meaning of \u201cand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Let us now proceed to our sixth meditation
\non \u201cand.\u201d I wonder why they did not write, \u201cLeadership is Governance,\u201d
\n\u201cLeadership for Governance,\u201d \u201cLeadership of Governance,\u201d or Leadership with
\nGovernance\u201d? But they boldly wrote \u201cLeadership and Governance.\u201d For instance,
\nif they had written \u201cLeadership with Governance\u201d I would have thought of those
\nbooks with two or more authors where the senior author, to emphasize his
\nsuperiority or to indicate that his partner did not really do the heavy
\nlifting, will not use \u201cand,\u201d but \u201cwith.\u201d The lead author shows all this by
\nputting his or her name first and attaching the demeaning \u201cwith\u201d to the name of
\nthe poor junior scholar. \u201cLeadership with Governance\u201d will not satisfy the ego
\nof Nigerian leaders who want to show that they are equally invested in both
\nleadership and governance, and that they govern by leading. This is why my
\nlecture is not titled \u201cLeadership with Governance\u201d or \u201cGovernance and
\nLeadership.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those who invited me to speak have read
\ntheir tea leaves well, so they wrote \u201cLeadership and Governance.\u201d The \u201cand\u201d
\nhere means equality, \u201cequals to.\u201d It is a mathematical \u201cand.\u201d This is what our
\nso-called leaders want us to believe. Do not believe them. There is no
\ncorrespondence between leadership and governance. It is an ideological \u201cand.\u201d
\nThe social practices of Nigerian leaders lack the necessary norms and values
\nthat ensure that leadership is a democratic way of life for the common good of
\nthe governed. Their regnant ideas of leadership and governance are not founded
\non the premise that everyone is both a leader and a governed, every citizen has
\nthe right to rule and be ruled, and that citizens are to take turns in the public
\noffices. This rejected premise is the only viable base for the mathematical
\n\u201cand\u201d and it is only this understanding that can help us to unfold, actualize
\nthe latent human potentials of the country in the context of an emancipatory,
\nliberatory, and deliberative democracy.<\/p>\n
If the authorities that invited me had
\nwritten, \u201cleadership is governance,\u201d then we would be put on a different
\ntrajectory of inquiry. But they did not; instead they wrote \u201cLeadership and
\nGovernance.\u201d In a sense, \u201cleadership and governance\u201d implicitly asks: what is
\nthe relation between leadership and governance? This question presupposes that
\nthe meaning and commitment to leadership can be assessed apart from governance
\nor impact on the governed. For the couplant that is the \u201cand\u201d between the two
\nterms gestures to an afterthought, not as an identity or sympathetic
\nidentification. But \u201cleadership is governance,\u201d at least, suggests that the
\nsignificance and truth of leadership is explicable only in terms of governance.
\nIn my next meditation on \u201cand\u201d as participation I will attempt to bridge the
\ngap between \u201cleadership and governance\u201d and \u201cleadership is governance.\u201d In that
\nmeditation or philosophical analysis of \u201cand\u201d I will argue that any theory of
\nleadership that does not properly link it to governance is both incomplete and
\ndeficient. Any theory of leadership is inadequate if it fails to suggest how
\ngenuine leadership provides and requires that leaders have the skills,
\ncompetence, capability, and values to govern and to govern well in the name of
\nthe common good.<\/p>\n
What do you think the VC and the Alumni
\nAssociation had in mind when they coupled together leadership and governance
\nwith the glue of the all-powerful \u201cand\u201d? You say: \u201cYou are the economist,
\nethicist, and philosopher, figure that out.\u201d With that permission, let me
\nventure a guess. You better pray that I get it right. If I don\u2019t, then the
\npress will say our great VC and the Alumni Association cannot formulate a good
\ntopic for discourse. If they did not get it right, my coming here is useless,
\nand so is your gathering. More than that, we are found to be false witnesses
\nabout Uniport, for we have testified about this University that it has raised
\ngreat men and women.<\/p>\n
The \u201cand\u201d between leadership and governance
\npoints to participation. \u201cAnd\u201d here symbolises the intimacy and unity that are
\nmeant to exist between leadership and governance. Participation is the thread
\nthat weaves not only the texture of sociality, but also the logic and dynamics
\nof leadership and governance. It is through participation that products,
\nobjects, ideas spread out, influence (in-fluent, flow in) one another and
\ncombine into a general product, object, or idea. (In our case, the development
\nand flourishing of Nigeria.) This unity can provoke or attract reactions to
\nitself\u2014further producing new fusions. When leadership and governance are made
\nto participate in one another in the social practice of democracy, they lead to
\nformation of large-scale structures, systems, or complexities. The combination
\nof leadership and governance enables the citizens of a polity to participate in
\nthe life of one another and in so doing build and sustain great civilizations.<\/p>\n
What is participation? One participates
\nwhen one draws (gives) resources, energy from another being. This relation can
\ntake three forms. First, one participant is active at the expense of the other.
\nThe Kalabari say, buko pa agala fififi, agala buko ye fifiyaa (the monkey
\nalways eats the mangrove tree and the mangrove never eats anything of the
\nmonkey). The monkey is the active participant here, actively exacting itself at
\nthe expense of the mangrove tree. If we turn this relationship around and
\nexamine it from the vantage point of the tree we get the second type of
\nparticipation. The tree is participating but it is mainly passive, contributing
\nits resources, but not necessarily getting something in return and essentially
\nnot taking any action. The monkey is doing all the eating and the tree is not
\neating from the monkey. Do these forms of false participation remind you of the
\nrelationship between the leaders and governed in Nigeria?<\/p>\n
Third, participation can also be
\nconceptualized as a form of relation that leads to mutual exchange of
\nproperties such that both parties are transformed and become a new being. When
\nthe female egg relates to the male sperm, they are both changed and by the
\nchange become a new whole. Here the two par-take, \u201ctake a part of\u201d each other
\nto create an organized whole, a higher structure. They both give something of
\nthemselves and simultaneously take on something of the whole.<\/p>\n
The Kalabari word for participation is
\nye-mie gboloma. This encompasses the meaning of participation in English but
\ngoes further, deeper. There is the idea of giving, receiving, possessing,
\nincorporating, and fellowship. When we do things together (yeye) we are not
\nonly both giving and receiving properties (energy, materials, ideas, etc.) from
\neach other, we incorporate (fi, \u201ceat\u201d) them into our being; ye-mie gboloma is
\nconstitutive of our very act of interaction and also creates a communion,
\ncommunity.<\/p>\n
When we view participation from the wide
\nangle provided by the Kalabari word, ye-mie-gboloma, from the perspective of
\nthe sperm and ovum forming the zygote, participants in the process of
\nparticipation create a unity (not merely an interaction field) and identity. To
\nthe extent that the communion formed is something that was not there before is
\nsomething achieved which was not possible without the sustained interaction.
\nThis \u201csomething\u201d has new identity, a new identification. Something new has been
\ncreated from the unity\u2014even if not ex nihilo.<\/p>\n
If every new participation is a new
\ncreation, or the positing of a new possible world, then it is an invention of a
\npossible set of new possibilities. Possibility is built into the \u201cbeing\u201d of
\nparticipation. So what the VC and Alumni Association have in mind is for me to
\nexamine how leadership and governance can be understood or reconceptualised so
\nas to create new possibilities for Nigeria\u2019s development. But we are getting
\nahead of ourselves. First of all, we must define (de-fine, limit) what we mean
\nby governance or leadership.<\/p>\n
(2) Governance<\/p>\n
Governance refers to the practices of
\ncommand (coordination or control) in an organization or polity. It is the set
\nof institutional forms of control for maintaining and destabilizing order
\nnecessary for human flourishing in an organisation or polity. Why have I
\ncombined maintenance and destabilization? Claude Ake taught us that the problem
\nof Western social science is that it is too enamored with maintaining order. I
\ntook my lessons very well. So I believe a governance process must construct and
\ndeconstruct, for as Ake once told us, reality is full of contradictions and to
\ngrasp it we must think dialectically. At any rate, no institution can survive for
\nlong if its practices of command make destabilizing forces or internal creative
\ndestruction impossible.<\/p>\n
Control can be unilateral or multilateral,
\ndemocratic or non-democratic, or monocentric or polycentric. By control I have
\nin mind the regulatory structures and norms that produce, function, and
\nreproduce the mechanisms of management and accountability in an organization
\n(state). These could operate without an overarching political authority (an
\nopen process of negotiation and decision making) or with one that limits
\ncollaboration between the hegemonic top and plebian bottom of the organization.
\nThe question that usually suggests itself with this understanding of governance
\nis this: is all authority deriving from a single center of power or from
\nheterogeneous decision-making networks? Historically, this question is decided
\non a predetermined measure of effectiveness in governance. Do the functions and
\nstructures of authority facilitate the organisational goals? This is a question
\nthat has to wait until we define the telos of \u201cleadership and governance\u201d in
\nNigeria. At that point we will also come to the understanding that good
\ngovernance is the institutionalisation of leadership in the polis or
\norganisation.<\/p>\n
Wariboko is the Katherine B. Stuart Professor
\nof Christian Ethics, Andover Newton Theological School, United States.<\/p>\n
To Be Cont\u2019d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Nimi Wariboko<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s alma mater, one\u2019s teachers, and one\u2019s classmates is harder than you can imagine. There are former professors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}