Last Sunday, Reuben Abati (in his CROSSROADS column) used the embedded lessons in one of the standard readings at the Aspen Institute Nigerian Leadership seminar to drive home a point about the Nigerian condition. As a Fellow of the Nigerian Leadership Initiative myself, I am not surprised that the writing which caught the attention of Reuben is Leo Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need?
Last Sunday, Reuben Abati (in his CROSSROADS column) used the embedded lessons in one of the standard readings at the Aspen Institute Nigerian Leadership seminar to drive home a point about the Nigerian condition. As a Fellow of the Nigerian Leadership Initiative myself, I am not surprised that the writing which caught the attention of Reuben is Leo Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need? Because in a classical way, the story exposes some of the failings in our society which, according to Tunji Lardner, has enough for everybody’s need but not enough for everybody’s greed; a society where the greed (of the elite) most often surpasses the need (of the populace). I am not surprised that Tolstoy’s thesis fascinates
Reuben because as a practicing journalist, I had also interrogated the place of greed in our national life, using the same thesis. But now, from the vantage position of someone who can see both sides of the divide, I think there are some lessons being ignored. Because it would seem that for all the greed, which ultimately led to the death of the central character in the tale, we cannot be too sure that there were no other motivations beyond his control. For those who did not read Reuben last week on the ‘primitive acquisitiveness of the Nigerian Leadership elite’ and who may not be familiar with Tolstoy’s writing which informed the essay, How Much Land Does a Man Need? is the story of a poor but seemingly contented farmer who eavesdropped on a conversation between his wife and her sister married to a city merchant. While his evidently contented wife defended the family honour, he was more persuaded by the arguments of his sister-in-law. He also wanted to be a ‘big man’ in the society, a dream he believed he could achieve if only he had more land.
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From here, let’s take a little bit from the book: Pahom, the master of the house, was lying on the top of the stove and he listened to the women’s chatter. “It is perfectly true,” thought he. “Busy as we are from childhood tilling mother earth, we peasants have no time to let any nonsense settle in our heads. Our only trouble is that we haven’t land enough. If I had plenty of land, I shouldn’t fear the Devil himself!” The women finished their tea, chatted a while about dress, and then cleared away the tea-things and lay down to sleep. But the Devil had been sitting behind the stove, and had heard all that was said. He was pleased that the peasant’s wife had led her husband into boasting, and that he had said that if he had plenty of land he would not fear the Devil himself. “All right,” thought the Devil. “We will have a tussle. I’ll give you land enough; and by means of that land I will get you into my power.” The Devil granted Pahom’s wish. He got a chance to acquire as much land as he wanted by marking out its perimeters on foot but the catch was that he had to be back to where he started before sunset.
He however got greedy such that by the time he felt he had acquired enough land, there was no time for him to return and he was already exhausted. He couldn’t make it back to where he started. He slumped and died and was buried like any other mortal on a piece of land not exceeding six feet! What Reuben sought to illustrate with Pahom’s story is the greed in public office and the evident rot in our society which he ties to that greed. While I agree to the extent that we can see a direct correlation between the opulence of a few elite and the poverty of our people I fail to agree with his summation that many of the otherwise good people who join government only to come out with serious moral deficit simply do so on account of personal greed. Unlike Reuben, I think the Devil may have its fair share of blame and the Devil in this instance is in the society itself. Incidentally, there are two literary works, also very popular with the Aspen Leadership series, which I consider important to interrogate this issue.
The first is No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe which tells the story of a brilliant young Nigerian of Igbo origin who was given a scholarship by his community to study Law in the UK during the colonial days. He went, bagged his degree in English rather than in law and came back home to secure a top job in the civil service. Obi Okonkwo came back home to meet a decadent society in which corruption was seen as a way of life and decided he was not going to be part of the rot. For a while, he resisted the pressure but a combination of unpleasant circumstances forced his hands. First, he had problems paying back the loans he took from his community and there were implacable foes. Then he had problem with a woman he wanted to marry who happened to carry a societal stigma. To compound the situation, his mother was dying and he needed money for her medicals. On the weight of all these personal conflicts, Obi Okonkwo succumbed by subverting the lofty ideals he had espoused.
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The issue here is the kind of pressure public office holders are subjected to and this is where Reuben’s thesis comes in because it is almost as if the society expects a public official to go and steal given the kinds of demands that are made of them. From Obi Okonkwo’s experience, we can see a complete dissonance between his personal conviction and the public expectation and why the latter prevailed. Before I share my own experience, I will use another literature which Reuben avoided but which is also a compelling reading at the Aspen Institute Nigerian Leadership series. It is George Orwell’s classic, Shooting an Elephant, generally regarded as reflections on his time while serving his country in Burma. In the tale, Orwell recounted an incident where a young colonial police officer was summoned to a provincial village to kill a “rogue elephant” which had injured one of the local people.
However, upon his arrival, the elephant, far from being wild and on a rampage, was now calm. But the British officer had a gun and a huge crowd had gathered expecting him to kill the elephant: I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd - seemingly the lead actor of the piece; but I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the “natives,” so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. I had got to shoot the elephant. From the narrative, the officer had a moral dilemma in that he did not want to kill the elephant. But because the mob wanted him to, he eventually shot the elephant to please them.
The point of the story is that we are all sometimes forced into actions, which we know to be wrong, to meet the expectations of our friends, our family members, our community, political peers and several other ‘crowds’ that we daily engage in our lives. I have been in government for about 17 months now and I cannot recall a day when I have not received about five text messages from persons seeking financial help. The messages are often similar and usually end with details of the bank account I am expected to pay certain sums of money into. I have since discovered it is the same with virtually every public official. These solicitations come from family members, long-term school mates whose names and faces you may not even remember; church members; distant relations and some no relations at all; people from the village, neighbours and casual acquaintances of the spouse. All they request is that you do ‘something’ to help them. The stories are usually the same: they need money to pay school fees of children sent out of school; to settle hospital bills of dying relations, to feed after days of hunger.
They paint pathetic pictures of themselves and their circumstances that one would seem wicked not to want to help. They would remind you of tales from the past and may even refer you to Biblical passages that it could even be because of them that you were placed in the position of trust. They don’t ask you to steal but then you ask, where is the money with which you are expected to help supposed to come from? Unfortunately, this is the kind of pressure public officials are exposed to in our society. Here, I must make a clarification because there are many politicians who seek public office as a form of investment on which they expect to receive a bountiful return. I am not talking about such characters who loot public treasury without any pang of conscience here. My disquisition is on those who go into public office with the intent of making positive contributions yet come out with their integrity battered.
I believe that in some of such cases the society must share part of the blame. In his must-read column in Daily Trust, Al-Ghazali recently cited the example of someone seeking employment into the Immigration Service in whose presence a list of other applicants was brought in from a senator seeking favourable consideration from the Immigration authority. Of course, it is easy to blame the Senator for influence peddling or attempting to subvert the process but if one would be honest, the senator himself must be reacting to the pressure from his constituency. What Orwell’s elephant story teaches is that there is a form of complicity from the society in some of the primitive accumulative tendencies we have seen over the years. That explains why some of our big time crooks still draw huge crowds from their people comprising mostly those who benefited from their perfidy.
The lesson from the foregoing is that when you are placed in a position of responsibility, like the man leading the orchestra, you must have the discipline to back the crowd. You must also be able to see beyond the mob urging you to “shoot the elephant” not because they love you but rather to satiate their appetite for free elephant meat at the expense of your integrity. You must recognise that there are bigger crowds out there whose interest is more important than the immediate crowd ready to mislead you. The final lesson is that the ultimate responsibility for one’s actions and integrity rests with the individual.
In Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant, while the young British officer may have found himself in a difficult situation, he clearly had a choice between following his own inclinations or that of the crowd of natives. In the end, he chose to play to the gallery by killing the elephant. My view is that if we all remember, like Tolstoy tells us and Reuben reinforces last Sunday, that “whichever way a man goes, he is destined for no more than six feet of land or worse, the crematorium”, we will think twice next time we have that elephant within our shooting range. That to me is the message for everyone. Adeniyi is Special Adviser to the Yar'adua on Media and Publicity
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of SaharaReporters
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