Nigeria is blessed with individuals whom nature prepared for leadership. The people of Nigeria, unfortunately, find it difficult to create room for these leaders to display their talents. At most of our elections, we end up with leaders who administer incremental failures that pass for leadership.
Fortunately, Election 2023 has thrown up three prepared leaders as frontrunners for the Presidency.
They are Atiku Abubakar, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Peter Gregory Obi, in that age order. Abubakar is 75, Tinubu 70, and Obi 61. Nigeria will, therefore, be electing a senior citizen next year. We shall also elect a tested politician, no matter who triumphs in the end. This means someone conversant with the cunning work of civil servants and jaywalk of political actors. Atiku was elected governor of Adamawa State in 1999, before Olusegun Obasanjo chose him as running mate and eventual Vice-President. Tinubu and Obi both served out a mandatory two terms as governors of Lagos and Anambra states, respectively.
Come to think of it, these three excellencies struggling for leadership of Nigeria appear to be sewn from the same cloth. Unlike the past where impulsive generals, dark horses and unwilling candidates were thrust into leadership by the powermongers, all three frontrunners bear what I call the burden of leadership preparation. We, the people, impose this burden through our tendency to sacrifice capable leadership on the altars of ethnicity, religion and sheer opportunism. Fortunately, we are now in a position where the frontrunners are those who have prepared for leadership.
Take Atiku. We know, from his biography, that his father drowned in a river while returning from a market where he went to sell trinkets. He built the first proper house for his mother when he started working as a public officer. His lowly background was such that he could only manage a certificate from Ahmadu Bello University before joining the public service of Northern Nigeria as a sanitary inspector. But fate destined him for great things, despite his chequered career. Nothing dramatizes this more than the case of 53 missing suitcases, which brought him in conflict with Major General Muhammadu Buhari, then a military head of state.
Buhari clashed with Atiku when the Wazirin Adamawa was comptroller of Customs at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport. Atiku leaked the story of 53 suitcases to my late friend, Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo. The military resolved to prosecute Ojo under the infamous Decree 4, while Atiku was to be quietly eased out of service. Finance Minister Onaolapo Soleye, was given the job of firing Atiku. But he was astounded by what he found in Atiku’s personal file. He saw not only an outstanding officer but also a creative one who gathered commendations for excellent performance at every post he held. Soleye could not sacrifice such an officer for any reason. To defend his position, he took the file to Buhari to explain why it would be a shame to fire an upstanding public servant. Buhari’s ethnic pride took over, hearing a southerner extolling a fellow northerner, and Atiku’s sins were forgiven.
I worked for the Atiku campaign in 2007 and can attest to his capacity for work and his coalition-building skills. What was fascinating during this brief period was the way he took decisions. He is a stickler for excellence and likes to surround himself with competent people, no matter where they come from. If he met with any challenge at that time, he would assemble the leadership of the different teams he constituted to interrogate the problem and come up with recommendations. There was the media team where I worked. He had a political team, and an economic team as well. When the inputs are in, he invites the relevant team or the leadership of the teams for a final discussion. This was how I met with him in close quarters. At the end of it all, he studies the recommendations and takes a decision without reference to anyone else but based on his assessment of the prognosis and recommendations from the teams.
I thought it was a shame that in 2019 Nigeria preferred Buhari for a second term in place of Atiku, an urbane gentleman who is a friend of all and an accomplished businessman. It was just sheer bad luck, coupled with the dubious exertions of opportunists who saw better prospects of looting the nation with an absent-minded Buhari presidency.
As for Bola Tinubu, I am not one of those who talk about his past with a snigger. Even though he has not thought it fit to expose his background and origins, I am interested in how he overcame adversity and met with the sort of good fortune that propelled him to study in the United States. And how he could have ended with a job as treasurer of Mobil Nigeria. He was able to correct the mistakes he made in his two-term tenure by steadfastly ensuring that only capable successors occupied the Alausa seat after him. And those outstanding choices are what make his admirers and publicists trumpet the lie that “Tinubu made Lagos.” In 2014, Tinubu was in his element and could have made a better choice as Vice-President than Yemi Osinbajo. For one thing, he would not have been a pushover.
In 2022, Tinubu appears incapacitated with obvious infirmities. This is the only question mark on his quest as many fear that these will not assist him perform the onerous tasks of a President at similar optimal levels as the governor of Lagos. Otherwise, Nigeria would have had in him a President that would not only be a pride to the Yoruba but equally also admired nationwide.
Like Atiku, Tinubu also promotes excellence and rewards loyalists in every imaginable way. He is also a democratic leader. I was witness, although not a beneficiary, of how he empowered journalists who worked underground to promote his image. He left critical journalists like us strictly alone but his minders made sure we were not invited to scheduled media dinner outings where the attendees regaled us with stories of how his generosity of spirit overflowed in a natural largesse. The largesse did not matter to us so long as we were given the latitude to criticize without a violent pushback. Today, some of my former colleagues have land, houses, and other material things because they did their “job” well.
And many of them have gone on to establish media outfits that are regarded as roaring successes. The reason that we talk about his relationship with the media is to advertise his democratic credentials. He never interfered with the work of those who did not promote him, and those that were downright critical.
As for Peter Gregory Obi, he is a different kettle of fish. He comes from a region where Nigeria missed two opportunities to adopt a leader that would have made a difference. The two were Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Dr. Alex Ekwueme. They were both a hair’s breadth from becoming President when Nigeria rolled out its ethnic, religious and opportunistic windmills to block their surge, one at the polls and the other at the crucial party convention.
The stick with which Nigeria flogged Zik and Ekwueme is still hanging in the rafters. Every attempt is being made to bring it down and lacerate Obi’s back with it. And they would have succeeded too were it not for youths who took a hand by investing him with a persona that makes him the preeminent frontrunner, at least in popular perception.
Ironically, Obi happens to be the candidate among the frontrunners that I am least familiar with, being in Lagos when he was performing his wonders in Anambra State as governor. Consequently, what I know about him today are the things everyone has read about his projects, his penny-pinching, and his capacity for taking bold decisions after careful consideration of the issues. Watching him perform as a public speaker is a delight, even though he might get too excited and sometimes mix his beloved statistics in his head. But as I argued elsewhere, the lessons from the statistics he reels out are as germane and as authentic as can be.
Only the intervention of the youths can save Obi from suffering the same burden of leadership preparation that eclipsed Zik and Ekwueme. Both Zik and Ekwueme had better education and were accomplished in business. Unlike Obi, they articulated their vision of Nigeria and how to make it great.
Unlike Obi, Zik and Ekwueme wrote books, engaged in political activism, and garnered a national coalition of patriotic citizens for the prized job. However, the advantage Obi has over them is this keen sense of when to strike while the iron is hot. But will this enable him to win the prize? Only February 2023 will tell.
Whatever the outcome, all three candidates as we have pointed out bear the burden of leadership preparation hitherto rejected by Nigerian voters. This time round, however, voters have no choice but to vote one leader who prepared for office. Some may say that in the end it matters who wins among them, but I take the position that it does not. Why? Each of the three frontrunners knows that they have a date with history. They also know that the worst thing they could do is to follow in the footsteps of the current administration.