Rishi Sunak is a 42 years old British politician born on 12th May, 1980. He is currently the leader of the Conservative Party since 24 October 2022 and has served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 25 October 2022. The Prime Minister is the Head of Government, the highest political office, in a parliamentary system of government. Sunak was born in Southampton to parents of Indian descent who migrated to Britain from East Africa in the 1960s. He was educated at Winchester College, studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Lincoln College, Oxford, and earned an MBA from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar.
Rishi Sunak is the first politician of Asian origin to become a Prime Minister in Great Britain. One can even add that he is Asian-African British Prime Minister because his parents migrated from East Africa. It is a herculean task for any politician from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland to become a British Prime Minister, talk more of a brown man from Asian-African descent. The post of the Prime Minister is often deemed to be the exclusive privilege of a White, English, Caucasian politician from England. No Scottish, Welsh, or Irish politician has won the post of the Prime Minister in a direct general election by the British people since my adult life. The few that emerged came through a stop-gap measure by the votes of only their parliamentary members. Sunak joined politics just seven years ago and climbed rapidly to become Prime Minister. Emerging as Prime Minister under such circumstance with such great speed for a politician with immigrant parents of Asian origin is both historical and very revealing.
The first observation to make is the instability and unsuitability of the parliamentary system of government for a developing and evolving economy like Nigeria. Within three years, Britain has produced four Prime Ministers with Sunak being the fourth after Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss. You can imagine carrying out presidential election in Nigeria for four times within three years. Not only that our resources cannot carry it, our patience and apathy cannot carry it. Same instability is going on in Israel. Those countries are barely surviving the instability because they have become rich and advanced in science, education and art of governance. Even with their sophistication, Scotland is increasingly becoming restless in their quest for political independence because of perceived marginalization in political policies and appointments which will entail complete separation from Britain. So is Northern Ireland who wants to join their brothers in Ireland.
We must evolve our own democracy that will fit into our culture and ways of life rather than copying verbatim the democratic culture of foreign countries that are rooted in their cultures and ways of life. In Britain, for instance, the Head of State is a Monarch not subject to the vagaries of democratic manipulation and this provides some stability to the polity because the Head of State is completely apolitical. But in African Countries and in Nigeria, when we practised the parliamentary system, the President was also a political post who gets elected and openly wants to influence government for his own people that he represents. This sometimes leads to political turmoil between the Prime Minister and the President and even leads to an overthrow of the government like it happened in Uganda during Obote’s regime as Prime Minister where he simply sacked the President and assumed full powers of the country. Also the African Countries and other developing countries cannot afford to support the pomp and pageantry associated with maintaining two Heads of State and Government at the same time. The British Monarch is very costly to maintain but they yield a lot of income to Britain from tourism. African Presidents in a parliamentary system of government are equally too expensive to maintain but yields no income in tourism for the people.
The rise of Prime Minister Sunak has also revealed that whenever a nation is at the edge of the precipice, it forgets every primordial sentiment in the procurement of its leaders and unites together to search out for men of character, capacity and competence to lead them. There’s no doubt that Sunak suffered some racial and ethnic backlash in his contest for the post of Prime Minister with Liz Truss. He presented the best policies to tackle the free fall of the British economy which is now constituting a threat to the stability of the pound. He resisted the populist temptation of promising to reduce tax in order to gain the support and the votes of the members of his Conservative Party. Liz Truss capitalised on the current economic hardship in Britain to make bogus unsustainable promises to reduce taxes for the British people. Coupled with the fact that she is white, She defeated Sunak in the election for the post of the Prime Minister based on those utopic promises. Immediately she was declared the winner, the stock market and the pound went berserk in disarray. Her cabinet was scattered. She fired the Minister of Finance in a failed attempt to assuage the tempestuous feelings of the market to no avail and after 45 days of uncontrollable chaos in her cabinet and the British economy, she ended up firing herself and went down in history as the shortest serving Prime Minister in British political history.
Immediately Liz Truss resigned, the Conservative Members of the Parliament of his party, within three days of the resignation of Liz Truss, chose Sunak as their Prime Minister, irrespective of his Asian-African connection. He is youthful, brilliant, resourceful, experienced, having occupied the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) under Boris Johnson. He is a man of content, creativity, credibility, commitment, consistency, capacity and character. The market on hearing the name Sunak started appreciating in value because they understood that the policies and promises he made to the British people, though will be tough on them, but will eventually bring solution to their economic woes. It was a survival strategy for the British people. They understood that a Sunak is better than anyone else to save the British economy from being debased from its giant height especially after quitting the European Union.
The lesson here is that a leader is one who tells his people what they should hear not what they want to hear. Campaign promises should not only be about winning elections but also about what happens a day after winning elections. It should principally be about governance. Nigerians should be wary of politicians and political parties who make bogus promises that they will make the value of Naira to appreciate to one naira for a dollar but eventually ended up making a dollar to approach a thousand naira. That they will give Nigerians steady electric power but ended up collapsing the national grid for 8 times in a year. That they will secure Nigerians but ended up creating insecurity in all parts of Nigeria. 2023 election should provide an opportunity for Nigerians to go for the candidate with competence, character and capacity irrespective of his ethnic, religious or linguistic origin. The market does not understand Hausa or Fulani or Igbo or Yoruba, it only understands good governance. They should also be wary of politicians who are ethnic and religious bigots who, because of desperation for power, will not condemn the burning alive of an innocent Northern Christian girl whose only offence was that she rejected sexual advances from some murderous males who trumped up blasphemous religious charges against her and composed themselves as prosecutors and judges in their own cause and set ablaze the innocent Deborah Samuel. Such Politicians who will encourage their own ethnic stock to vote for their own ethnic stock and not consider other candidates from the other ethnic stocks in a desperate move for religious and ethnic profiling are dangerous to our democracy and should be voted out. If Britain considered the religious and ethnic background of Sunak, they would not have voted him and they would have been worse off for it.
We must note, however, that whereas the British Parliament has risen above ethnic and premodial sentiments in their choices of Prime Ministers in the past, from time to time, the British people have not. Some Prime Ministers of Scottish origin who gained power through internal arrangement of power transmission within their political parties were rejected at the general elections just because of their ethnic background. I recall how Tony Blair handed over power to Gordon Brown, a Brilliant Scottish Politician, in the Labour Party, who served him as the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) after resigning from the position some months earlier before the general election. At the general election, the candidacy of Gordon Brown was inexplicably rejected by the British people powered by the overwhelming majority of the English people from England in favour of an English Politician named David Cameron. It was not coincidental that after that, the cry for independence for the Scots grew louder which culminated in a referendum for independence for the people of Scotland. Although the referendum result was in favour of a united Britain, the cry for independence for the Scots is growing louder and louder everyday and as long as the marginalization of the other ethnic groups in Britain in the ascension to the post of Prime Minister is not redressed, the cry will not stop. It is important to note that Britain, under the leadership of David Cameron’s Conservative Party has been witnessing instability in governance till date. Time has come for adequate enlightenment of the British people to follow the footsteps of their parliamentary representatives in looking out for the right leaders with the right qualifications, irrespective of ethnic origin or religion, who will guarantee them good leadership.
In Nigeria, a fulfude speaking Fulani Northern Muslim was overwhelmingly voted for by Nigerians in 2015 to lead Nigeria on the understanding that power will rotate to other sections and other religious, linguistics and ethnic groups at the end of his regime to ensure that no section or ethnic or religious group dominate others in accordance with Sections 14(3)(4), 15(1)(2)(3d)(4), 16(1b)(2c) and 17(1)(2)(a) of the 1999 Constitution as amended. The major political parties have similar provisions in their Constitutions. Nigerians must therefore reject any candidate or political party which disrespected the provisions of these Constitution in fielding another fulfulde speaking Fulani Northern Muslim as its candidate which will create an unbroken record of 16 years of the leadership of a particular ethnic, religious, sectional and linguistic group or a ticket which is completely dominated by only one religious group. We are fighting for the survival of Nigeria and everyone must be carried along.