KEMI BADENOCH : NIGERIA AND ‘BOLEKAJA’ DIPLOMACY – Lanre Ogundipe

Leadership isn’t about power; it’s about influencing and inspiring others, fostering collaboration, and taking responsibility to guide a team towards a shared goal; true leaders empower their people rather than exerting control through authority – Laura Weakley

Why is it that Nigeria is regarded as a failed state? The strength of any country lies in its ability to utilize all of its endowments to create a niche for itself. In Nigeria’s case, the calculus of its potential greatness has always been its bountiful natural and human resources, which reasonable countries treat as capital assets, to create economic wealth that delivers higher living standards to her citizens. The first two determine the third. If a country can successfully harness its natural resources, using its human talent, it will prosper; if it can’t, it will fail. So uncommonly and generously endowed with both human and natural resources, why is Nigeria one of the world’s poorest countries?

Why is Nigeria so badly governed that it is utterly dysfunctional, verging on state failure? The commonest refrain people give is “bad leadership”. This view is problematic against the backdrop of the sustained superlative performance of many Nigerians in diaspora, especially those playing leadership roles in businesses and governments of the countries of their sojourn or global institutions.

The consequential question on many lips is, why can’t Nigerians run their own country well? How is it that Nigerians provide quality leadership abroad but not at home? Should we then argue that the problem is systemic and structural – is Nigeria systemically wired to fail and structurally conditioned to produce bad leaders? It may be right to argue that it is a combination of both factors and even more. A country reeling under the weight of corruption and held captive by a system that consigned her to poor leadership and gross moral bankruptcy. A country so encaged by greed and self – interest, it offers no space for the public – spirited. If values and patriotism guide your action, Nigeria is not your natural habitat; you must, if you are merit- driven and morally inclined, look for opportunities outside her shores. Nigeria’s brightest and best are crowded out by a political system and a culture that rewards self-dealing knavery over meritocracy, honesty, and integrity.

Thus, Nigerians who may never succeed at home go abroad and shine brightly there. Consequently, Nigeria is brain-drained and utterly denuded, thereby losing the critical ingredients it needs to construct a functional, well-heeled, and prosperous nation.

Recently, a British – born Nigerian woman hit the headlines worldwide for her outstanding feat. Kemi Badenoch was elected as the first Black leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, which has produced more Prime Ministers than any other party in the UK since the country had its first Prime Minister in 1721. Given the Conservative Party’s track record of producing Prime Ministers, Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch, née Adegoke, could soon become the UK’s first British-Nigerian Prime Minister!

Trust Nigerian government! Its officials are quick to celebrate and appropriate Nigerians abroad who achieve great feats. But what chances would such achievers have had at home? For instance, how far would Kemi Adegoke-Badenoch have gone if she were to be in Nigeria? This woman – Badenoch answered that question herself in one of the interviews she gave about her childhood. She was born in the UK but brought to Nigeria by her parents, late Femi Adegoke, a medical doctor, and her mother Feyi, an academic, for her early education. She later returned to Britain at 16 for her A – levels.

Badenoch, now 45, said she contemplated with the idea of returning to Nigeria at 25 to begin a political career. According to her, a Nigerian political figure “scoff at” her, “saying something about her being a woman and how she would never make it.” Hardly would any Nigerian consider that account outlandish given that there is not a single female state governor in Nigeria, let alone the remote possibility of a female president. Peradventure, if Kemi becomes the British Prime Minister, Nigeria might declare a week long public holiday and accord the highest honour of GCFR to celebrate her milestone achievement, pretending ignorance of how the system in Nigeria would have debarred her. Were she to be in Nigeria, she couldn’t even become a state governor. Perhaps and more probably, a Local Government Chairperson.

Those trying to curry government’s favour had criticised Kemi for rebuffing the ‘Bolekaja’ gestures of the hypocritical government and its officials. They have quickly forgotten the inhuman treatment meted out to Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala shortly after her tenure as Minister under Goodluck Jonathan. Recall Buhari administration sent law enforcement agents to search her house for “illegal currency holdings” only to find “bags full of old newspapers!”

Hardly had she become the Director-General of the World Trafe Organizations- (WTO), the same Buhari was elated to confer her the honour of GCON, Nigeria’s second highest national award. As the old saying goes, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan! That was precisely why Abike Dabiri, the CEO of Nigerians in Diaspora Commission, NiDCOM, tried to reach out to Kemi Badenoch after her election as the Tory leader and was nettled that Badenoch spurned the overture. “It depends on whether she embraces her Nigerian identity. We reached out to her once or twice, but there was no response. We don’t force anyone to acknowledge being Nigerian,” Dabiri said petulantly. Kemi was smart enough to distinguish between hoax and genuine congratulatory offer and image laundering for a nation that has failed its citizens when it matters, ” nicodemously” sneaking in to claim credit for success not worked for.

It is obvious, contrary to the views expressed by the Vice-President, Senator Kashim Sheittima, that, Kemi Badenoch, honestly does not deny her Nigerian lineage, rather, it is the systemic rottenness of a country, held hostage and underdeveloped by kleptoracy, clientelism, and grand corruption of unimaginable magnitude. She said one of the books that shaped her worldview was Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, the Economics Nobel laureates, and she claimed she sees Nigeria’s through the prism of that book. Whenever any British politician did something that she considered unacceptable, she would say it’s a “Nigerian thing.” Conceed that to her, she ran on the values of truth, honesty, and integrity and won over the overwhelmingly White Conservative Party membership.

By contrast, such a commitment to personal ethics is utterly lacking in Nigeria’s self-serving political class.The angry reactions by many Nigerians to her comments are a reminder of how often we hold on to pride rather than dignity. The truth is that there is hardly any passing day, that Nigerians would not say sleazy things about the country or such that could be construed as negative. The fact remains that some of these unsavoury comments are made out of genuine concern and are mostly true. Things are really bad in the country at the moment. But interestingly, the moment these same things are mentioned in the presence of foreigners, we get unduly defensive and offended as if the issues are family secrets that should not be divulged in the open. We strive vainly to conceal, what is already in the public domain, because it hurts. The truth is – the sore-full Nigerian situation, is self – advertisingly, even to foreigners.

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Our commitment to worshipping our egos to the detriment of the wiser parts of our minds has made it difficult for us to react to criticism productively. My reading of Kemi is that of a principled persona, intolerant of unethical politics and leadership. Badenoch pointed out the fact that she had seen what happens “when politicians are running for themselves, when they divert and convert public money as theirs and use as their private piggy banks while they promise heaven and earth but pollute not just the air, but the whole political airspace with their failure to serve others.”

Even though the reaction from Nigeria was visceral, is it not an honest truth that politicians in Nigeria use public coffers as their personal piggy banks? Not too long ago, we witnessed the faux pas of a former Ekiti State governor, Ayo Fayose, when he talked about “the use of Wike’s money” when referring to the failure of Atiku Abubakar to pick the former Rivers State governor, Nyesom Wike, as his running mate? Wike has been governor of his state for eight solid years and has lavished funds on his party. But there is no record that this former governor is from a wealthy family or ran any major successful business before he became a governor. To interrogate that, whose money has he lavished on the PDP ostensibly for personal political gain? Is that not a case of using state money as a personal piggy bank?

As a nation and people with conscience, should we not be more rational in our assessment of things and develop the habit of speaking truth to the power? The furor generated by Kemi’ s utterances is actually uncalled for- If we adopt a critical lense to sift her supposedly negative feedback, and prioritise dignity above ego.

Dignity comes from pursuing ideas and actions that align with ethics and proper behaviour. Dignity is based on principle and it provides people with the capacity to interact productively with unfavourable feedback and response, in a way that enables improvement. Pride, on the other hand, is about personality and ego. A sense of dignity is undeterred by praise or criticism because it is rooted in a commitment to the principles that are considered honourable. As pride and arrogance have failed us severally, is it not time we as a people try dignity instead?

This brings us back to the starting point,- Kemi Badenoch and other Nigerians who have achieved great feats abroad have shown that Nigeria’s problem is not the absence of talent or intellectual prowess. And those who say it is the absence of leadership are only economical with the truth. Of course, Nigeria has always come up with leaders who elevate self-interest above the common good. But it is a country’s political system that determines the kind of leaders that govern it. As it were, Nigeria’s broken political system cannot produce public-spirited leaders because the system favours crookedness and the highest bidder, and makes it easy for state institutions, notably the electoral commission, judiciary and security agencies, to be kneaded into delivering fraudulent elections that produce dubious leaders.

For instance let’s imagine for a moment that some of the Nigerians making waves all over the world, such as Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Akinwumi Adesina, the successful President of the African Development Bank, AfDB, or Hilaria Asumu a Councillor in Salford Council, emerged as Nigeria’s president, would they succeed? Well, your guess is good as mine. Without mincing words, they would most likely fail under this overcentralised political structure that lack effective checks and balances and riven with ethnic polarisation and zero-sum politics.

Look no further – the North-South divide and entrenched vested interests over the tax reform bills, clearly demonstrates Nigeria’s systemic and structural problem.Yet, the fact that Okonjo-Iweala, Badenoch, Adesina and other Nigerians succeed abroad is a unnerving indictment of the Nigerian state. For if Nigeria is so dysfunctional while its citizens rule the world, what kind of statehood is that? Simply! It’s a failed state.

In rounding up, my plea to those at the helm of affairs in Nigeria is to ensure that the same environment that enables Kemi Badenoch to actualize her dreams in the United Kingdom, becomes obtainable in Nigeria.Those who had JAPAed or JAPAing would be on their way back when the signals are clear that the return of Zion is imminent. The present clouds potend nothing good but evil. Let Kemi Adegoke-Badenoch breathe, please.

Lanre Ogundipe
Public Affairs Analyst;
Former President Nigeria and African Union of Journalists