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Home Opinion The Rise of Ethnic Racism and Bad Leadership in Nigeria (3)

The Rise of Ethnic Racism and Bad Leadership in Nigeria (3)

by Tom Chiahemen
0 comment 11 minutes read

By Prof Iyorwuese Hagher –

My views about capitalism and neo-liberalism should not label me as a socialist or communist. I am neither. My playwright colleague from East Africa, Ngugi Wa Thongo writes committed good plays. He is listed among the socialist or communists. So also are many of our intellectual colleagues in Nigeria. I am merely a humanist resisting the twin devils of ethnic racism and neo-liberalism that have made Nigeria the heaven for the rich, and hell for the poor, the weak, down trodden workers, peasants, and students.

Ethnic racists seek out easy ways of categorizing their tribes as good while other tribes are bad. They long to push arguments to become wars. Wars give ethnic racists some meaning in life. Ethnic racism is based on mutual hatred. This racism negates and rejects the community of common humanity. It erects boundaries between friends and creates enemies on the basis of tribe. The ethnic racist mentality is a warrior mentality, which sees life as a battle for scarce resources which must not be shared. The Ethnic racist upholds competition and dispossession rather than sharing.


Nigerian politicians are all mostly made of detached individuals. They are de-rooted individuals who see their constituents not as persons but as votes to be subdued and cajoled for support. This is why the legislators and other elected politicians instead of visiting their constituencies invade them with the aid of a military campaign with a full complement of military officers who are battle-ready for the big man. Our politicians are big detached people who have been turned by capitalism into monsters. They have turned politics into wars, fighting for existential survival where every evil is permitted and where if you do not belong to his party, then you are a stranger and enemy. Our democracy has turned many friends into implacable enemies.

Some of the present Nigerian leaders come into ethnic racism through the detribalization process of colonial education which created the imbruted black skins with various white masks which entitle them to pillage, exclude, categorize, denigrate, the citizens “under” whom they “serve” as elected officials but instead play God and lord over them. While studying English at Ahmadu Bello University, I made some great friends; Isa, Umar, Nasidi, Abdul, Alfa, Mohammed, Abdullahi, Umaru, Lantana, Yelwaji and got to know many Yorubas and Igbos as well as minorities. We did not think in ethnic racist terms then. We were young post-civil war Nigerians. I had been taught to be an Ethnic racist against the Hausa Fulani in my primary school days. The UMBC rhetoric for rejecting the NPC was that they were going to make us all Muslims and then we would have to wash our behinds five or more
times a day. This washing part was the grossest thing and people would scream “no we don’t want to wash” Our image of Muslims was the dirty kola nut sellers and butchers and their henna-covered women. At ABU, my roommate at Akenzua hall in the first year was a Muslim, Abdul Usman from Bauchi state. He was neat, polite, studious, courteous, humorous, and pious. We shared the same space without offending each other with our religion nor tribal ways. I knew he washed. I didn’t take offense. It was rather cute. I realized that I also washed.

Everybody washes when we bathe. I was an English major and he was in political science. We always sat together in our political science and sociology classes. (my minor subjects). Then we did not think about religion nor tribe. My life-long friends Isa Ahmed and his sister Lantana, have been friends for decades. They were and are Muslims and I a Christian protestant. Our children are friends to this day. We imbibed all we could from our lecturers who taught us critical thinking. Unknown to us we were being programmed by the U.S. and the West to be the haters of our people and lovers of the Western culture and systems and taste. My own indoctrination in the department of English to wear white masks through language and literature was quite exerting in this regard. But we were also now suffused with Marxism and Socialism. Yakubu Nasidi describes it, as “In the department of English, where intellectual colonialism was most concentrated as the place where we shifted paradigms due to the arrival of Marxism (noisily).

For most of us who studied in the Nigerian universities or abroad, we were taught to be lovers of western traditions and assimilated anti-black racism that undergirded their educational and acculturation systems. Some of us were lucky to escape from both anti-black racism and the thinking that somehow, we belonged to the white race. I am an antiracist in all forms. I am Tiv. I love being Tiv and I know that I am not in any way inferior or superior to any other person whether white, yellow or blue. I believe we are all equals before God and if Nigeria is a republic, then we are all equal citizens.

Toxic Leadership
Nigerian leaders are products of nurturing from different backgrounds. Some come from bloodlines of slave traders whose parents bequeathed to them an unhealthy contempt of other ethnic groups and an exaggerated and bloated image of their identities. Many have found cruel grounds to inflict on others fearful trepidation in the pretext of leading them. It is my belief that leadership can be learned and we could all become better leaders for everyone wins and is happier when the leadership gets better. There is more knowledge today about what makes leadership more effective, responsive, responsible, and better. Nigeria is presently, unfortunately, trapped with toxic leadership in politics, in business, in government, in the universities, and in the village communities. This month, Nigerians were made painfully aware of the horrendous kidnap and murder of Pa Dariye, the father of Joshua Dariye, the former governor of Plateau State. The leaders of the gang and the gang memberswho killed him were paraded by the Nigeria police in a self-congratulatory fashion as one of the very few cases of assassinations and kidnappings when the police have arrested the perpetrators.

The scene paraded on the television and on social media exemplifies, the emergence, bloom, and escalation of the toxic leader in our mist. In this macabre scene, the kidnappers confessed to the kidnapping of the nonagenarian because they claimed they were jobless and poor and were neighbors of the Dariyes’ whose son Joshua had been governor and senator for many years, without improving their social conditions. When it was the turn of the leader of the gang, Mr. Jethro, to speak, as a good leader, he took responsibility for the kidnapping and affirmed the reasons for the kidnap. He regretted the killing of Pa Dariye which he said was done by his boys, but he said he was responsible as the leader, then he said “they should not have killed him after they received the ransom money of eight million naira.” Really? I asked myself here is a good leader who takes responsibility for the action of these followers but who is totally toxic because he is leading his followers to commit crimes. Kidnapping for ransom is the new
lucrative business in Nigeria. On the one hand, it is perceived as a legitimate business and an act of revenge against the rapacious elite; on the other hand, it is the pathway for the capitalization of criminal gangs across the country. It is a new form of the slave trade where the slavers re-sell their slaves to his or her family. It has gone beyond the revenge of the oppressed. It is a palpable dystopia and the ultimate chaos and breakdown of national security, law, and order due to leadership collapse and leadership toxicity.

As to the millions of definitions of leadership, there seems to be an agreement that the leader chooses a particular course of action and then gets others to go along as followers. Leaders motivate followers to do what followers need to do to meet their needs, wants, and expectations. Good leadership is relational, collective, and purposeful towards the achievement of the common good within ethical standards. Good leaders exercise power in an objective manner and for positive objectives in satisfying the needs of the followers.

Bad leaders are toxic leaders. They are consumed with the control of things. They lead their followers like animals to slaughter. The leaders of criminal gangs are leaders too. So also are religious leaders of extremists who lead their followers to death and then flee to safety. Bad or toxic leaders exercise power by coercion and in disregard of followers’ needs and motives. Bad leadership is power-mongering and control of people for personal brute power; to do things because they can be done and not because they are right. Bad leaders are imbruted, selfish, and controlling. Bad leaders fall into two categories: they may be ineffective or they may be unethical. Bad leadership is toxic to the followers.

Mr. Jethro who kidnapped Pa Dariye is effective in leading his group to desired evil goals, kidnapping for ransom. This is toxic leadership. The goals of his leadership are; unethical, cruel, brutal, lawless, and savage. Nigerians have suffered from toxic leadership among our political leaders too. These leaders have weak skills, bad strategies, and bad tactics. The toxic leader generally falls short of his/her dreams and intentions. Toxic leadership is unethical, corrupt, evil, lawless, and autocratic. These leaders use their position to do things because they believe they have the power to do these. Might is right. They are unable to differentiate right from wrong. It is this type of leadership power that Lord Acton felt “corrupts absolutely.”

Nigeria’s leadership toxicity can best be summarized by Barbara Kellerman who puts bad leadership as “incompetent, rigid, intemperate, callous, corrupt, insular and evil,” and this view is similarly shared by Joanne Ciulla in her collection of essays, Ethics: The Heart of Leadership, that “leaders who do not look after the interest of their followers are not only unethical but ineffective.”

How can a majority of our presidents, governors, and legislators since the advent of democracy in 1999, be anything other than toxic leaders when they have made themselves richer and the people poorer? They have secured themselves in bulletproof wagons and opened the people to be slaughtered in a lawless political ecology. They have destroyed our institutions like the police, military, judiciary and corrupted the universities, and refused to provide health services and to pay our highly skilled doctors living wages. Nigerian-trained doctors and nurses are running away. The Minister of Health Dr. Chukwu has announced that there are at least 5000 Nigerian trained doctors in the U.S. Similarly, there are 5400 Nigerian doctors in the United Kingdom, and in many other places like Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Asia. Don’t ask me what the toxic leaders are saying about this. Nothing positive.

Toxic leaders do not love the people they claim to lead. They do not try to uplift them, people, through education, health, social welfare, and lifting out of critical needs. They love only themselves and their spouses and close family members and their coterie of friends. The rest of the followers are mere irritated until the next election circles when they become objects to be manipulated for more power. These toxic leaders unleash unlimited sadness, terror, and
pain.


Adam Kahane correctly looks at power as generative and degenerative; “Power has two sides, one generative and the other degenerative. Our power is generative and amplifying when we realize ourselves while loving and uniting with others. It is degenerative and constraining when we recklessly abuse, deny or cut off others.”

The toxic leaders of Nigeria have unleashed their bad leadership through evil and ineffective policies which have made Nigeria a fast under-developing state rather than a developing one.

Politicians at all levels have heightened tensions and quarrels instead of resolving them. Power has been used in a degenerative manner and has led to massive corruption, unprecedented poverty, and ignorance, and the collapse of safe spaces for citizens to pursue their livelihoods.

TO BE CONTINUED

Being a Distinguished Public Lecture by Prof. Iyorwuese Hagher, President, African Leadership Institute, USAPresented @ University of Mkar, Nigeria

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