February 11, 2010
The pastime of our rulers — elected and appointed — is vanity. The pursuit of all things vain has trumped even the most elemental responsibilities of public service. The vocabulary of political power in Nigeria is steeped in a strange idiom of vanity and personal glory. Unable and unwilling to govern, many of our rulers choose the path of cheap attention-seeking, enlisting elaborate gimmicks that serve to boost their ego and, they hope, their standing with the public.
The pastime of our rulers — elected and appointed — is vanity. The pursuit of all things vain has trumped even the most elemental responsibilities of public service. The vocabulary of political power in Nigeria is steeped in a strange idiom of vanity and personal glory. Unable and unwilling to govern, many of our rulers choose the path of cheap attention-seeking, enlisting elaborate gimmicks that serve to boost their ego and, they hope, their standing with the public.
It is a culture of contrived honor that makes a mockery of African traditions of meritocratic distinction and recognition. The substitution of purchased glory for earned honor has become the single most recognizable and bipartisan symbol of our fatally broken political system.
The military were vulgar in their display of power. When they were in charge, no zone of life escaped the crude exercise of their power. Everything and everyone had to be disciplined and made submissive to the regime of crude force.
It was understandable even if it was unacceptable. The military is a regimented institution. Folks who pledged themselves to its norms and suddenly found themselves superintending civilian affairs could not understand why respect and recognition, the taken-for-granted ingredients of military life, didn’t come to them with the mechanical certainty of barracks life. If respect would not come to them, they would force it out of their civilian subjects. And they did — through vainglorious acts designed to underscore their non-negotiable supremacy.
Ibrahim Babangida’s way was to adopt and pay rhetorical homage to the language of civilian governance but stick fundamentally to the code of military life: visible display of proactive and retributive violence. Abacha’s method was cruder still. He preferred a less pretentious route to respect in an unfamiliar, civilian world: exemplary infliction of violence. Where violence proved ineffective, his answer was to increase its dosage. Violence corrected its own defects.
Military violence must be displayed for all to see, otherwise its function as a political stimulant would be lost. The satisfaction of being in charge came from seeing the crude public evidence of one’s power.
It was this mindset that spawned the personalization of power by Nigeria’s military rulers. The subtle acts that conflated the ruler and the nation and gave the ruler delusions of ubiquity and permanence were informed by a culture of vanity that permits crude political visuals as effective symbols of power. Abacha’s YEA and IBB’s Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) were organizational manifestations of this burgeoning culture.
The virus has since spread deep. And civilian understudies have upstaged their military mentors.
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Cast a backward glance to the Obasanjo first term. We witnessed a replication, perhaps an escalation, of the political vanities of the Abacha era. The so-called Obasanjo-Atiku Success Movement (OASM) and other ad hoc pro-regime groups mushroomed even as the regime groped from one disaster to another. This contradiction underscores the connection between political failure and the appetite for public display of power.
Abacha era campaigns of personal glory found expression through Abacha-branded wrist-watches and lapel pins. By the time of Obasanjo’s ascendance in 1999, unabashed personalization of power had taken on a frighteningly shameless character. Visual instruments included Obasanjo-branded caps, t-shirts, and intimidating vehicular murals. As a business, self-promotion became as lucrative as politics itself. It was an offseason vocation that occupied and enriched the political rank and file between elections. The peddling of branded political merchandize became an integral ritual of power. Political vanity was unleashed with unsparing fervor.
That’s how we ended up naming more public things after Obasanjo than we did in his first stint as Nigeria’s ruler.
While vain political indulgencies on the national level advertized themselves and offended the sensibilities of all discriminating political observers, governors of states worked in overdrive to etch their brands onto the social identity of their states.
In the days of Governor Orji Uzor Kalu of Abia State, the man’s name was a staple on project signboards, projects that sometimes were consumed by corruption. The irony of claiming ownership over a non-existent or corruption-truncated project never registered in the vain calculation of the former governor. Nor did he spare a moment to contemplate the arrogance of branding a public project with the personal image of a transient political operative.
Abubakar Audu, two-time governor of Kogi State, treated the state as a personal castle, and his personal branding effort bore the marks of his political delusions. He customized the state to visually conform to his outsized political ego. No public institution was too sacred to bear his name. He named everything after himself; from housing estates to government institutions to the state university. Audu’s hunger for personal glory defaced Lokoja with a system of self-promoting political billboards that assaulted the serene confluence landscape with irritating thoughtlessness.
In Kaduna, we currently have a governor whose personal glorification in unsightly billboards threatens to visually obscure the projects the billboards purportedly signpost. Every state-funded project — big, small, or inconsequential — is announced not by a descriptive signpost of its importance and conceptual origin but by the smiling face of the governor and the familiar slogans of his political ambition.
All over the country, this political disease has metastasized. And the governing imperative has receded in correspondence to the craving for awards and other vain affirmations. This was illustrated with compelling graphics by the collapse of the banking sector. As Ibru, Ikingbola and other megalomaniacal banking heads personalized and raided the banks they presided over, their chest of awards — local and international —swelled.
In the public sector, opportunists have cashed in on a growing thirst for vain awards by governors, ministers, and other political actors desirous of masking their deficits with adulatory noise-making.
Sule Lamido, Jigawa State Governor, recently bucked this fad when he turned the table on a human rights group which traveled to Dutse to give him an award. Lamido lectured them on the oddity of elected public officials being celebrated for doing their jobs. Because the organization claimed a foreign affiliation, Lamido found a window to comment on the cruel and patronizing tragedy of having distant and disconnected foreign bodies validate the performance of African political actors.
Dora Akunyili, whose political stock was ruined in the debacle of her rebranding shenanigans, has reemerged as a rebranded heroine of democracy courtesy of her courageous but opportunistic memo, which merely conveyed an obvious political endgame. Juxtapose this new image with the fact she is the queen of vain political theatre. As we speak, there is a picture of her on popular website saharareporters.com that is a perfect emblem for the marauding presence of vanity in our politics. It shows her in a pose of self-absorbed fantasy against a background of plaques of all sizes and shapes carefully arranged to cover her in glory.
And this picture, let’s be clear, was taken during her supposedly distinguished days as the Director-General of NAFDAC — in her office! How her media-massaged narrative of competence and effectiveness co-existed with such offensive political self-indulgence remains a mystery.
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The author can be reached at: [email protected]
It is a culture of contrived honor that makes a mockery of African traditions of meritocratic distinction and recognition. The substitution of purchased glory for earned honor has become the single most recognizable and bipartisan symbol of our fatally broken political system.
The military were vulgar in their display of power. When they were in charge, no zone of life escaped the crude exercise of their power. Everything and everyone had to be disciplined and made submissive to the regime of crude force.
It was understandable even if it was unacceptable. The military is a regimented institution. Folks who pledged themselves to its norms and suddenly found themselves superintending civilian affairs could not understand why respect and recognition, the taken-for-granted ingredients of military life, didn’t come to them with the mechanical certainty of barracks life. If respect would not come to them, they would force it out of their civilian subjects. And they did — through vainglorious acts designed to underscore their non-negotiable supremacy.
Ibrahim Babangida’s way was to adopt and pay rhetorical homage to the language of civilian governance but stick fundamentally to the code of military life: visible display of proactive and retributive violence. Abacha’s method was cruder still. He preferred a less pretentious route to respect in an unfamiliar, civilian world: exemplary infliction of violence. Where violence proved ineffective, his answer was to increase its dosage. Violence corrected its own defects.
Military violence must be displayed for all to see, otherwise its function as a political stimulant would be lost. The satisfaction of being in charge came from seeing the crude public evidence of one’s power.
It was this mindset that spawned the personalization of power by Nigeria’s military rulers. The subtle acts that conflated the ruler and the nation and gave the ruler delusions of ubiquity and permanence were informed by a culture of vanity that permits crude political visuals as effective symbols of power. Abacha’s YEA and IBB’s Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) were organizational manifestations of this burgeoning culture.
The virus has since spread deep. And civilian understudies have upstaged their military mentors.
articleadslinks
Cast a backward glance to the Obasanjo first term. We witnessed a replication, perhaps an escalation, of the political vanities of the Abacha era. The so-called Obasanjo-Atiku Success Movement (OASM) and other ad hoc pro-regime groups mushroomed even as the regime groped from one disaster to another. This contradiction underscores the connection between political failure and the appetite for public display of power.
Abacha era campaigns of personal glory found expression through Abacha-branded wrist-watches and lapel pins. By the time of Obasanjo’s ascendance in 1999, unabashed personalization of power had taken on a frighteningly shameless character. Visual instruments included Obasanjo-branded caps, t-shirts, and intimidating vehicular murals. As a business, self-promotion became as lucrative as politics itself. It was an offseason vocation that occupied and enriched the political rank and file between elections. The peddling of branded political merchandize became an integral ritual of power. Political vanity was unleashed with unsparing fervor.
That’s how we ended up naming more public things after Obasanjo than we did in his first stint as Nigeria’s ruler.
While vain political indulgencies on the national level advertized themselves and offended the sensibilities of all discriminating political observers, governors of states worked in overdrive to etch their brands onto the social identity of their states.
In the days of Governor Orji Uzor Kalu of Abia State, the man’s name was a staple on project signboards, projects that sometimes were consumed by corruption. The irony of claiming ownership over a non-existent or corruption-truncated project never registered in the vain calculation of the former governor. Nor did he spare a moment to contemplate the arrogance of branding a public project with the personal image of a transient political operative.
Abubakar Audu, two-time governor of Kogi State, treated the state as a personal castle, and his personal branding effort bore the marks of his political delusions. He customized the state to visually conform to his outsized political ego. No public institution was too sacred to bear his name. He named everything after himself; from housing estates to government institutions to the state university. Audu’s hunger for personal glory defaced Lokoja with a system of self-promoting political billboards that assaulted the serene confluence landscape with irritating thoughtlessness.
In Kaduna, we currently have a governor whose personal glorification in unsightly billboards threatens to visually obscure the projects the billboards purportedly signpost. Every state-funded project — big, small, or inconsequential — is announced not by a descriptive signpost of its importance and conceptual origin but by the smiling face of the governor and the familiar slogans of his political ambition.
All over the country, this political disease has metastasized. And the governing imperative has receded in correspondence to the craving for awards and other vain affirmations. This was illustrated with compelling graphics by the collapse of the banking sector. As Ibru, Ikingbola and other megalomaniacal banking heads personalized and raided the banks they presided over, their chest of awards — local and international —swelled.
In the public sector, opportunists have cashed in on a growing thirst for vain awards by governors, ministers, and other political actors desirous of masking their deficits with adulatory noise-making.
Sule Lamido, Jigawa State Governor, recently bucked this fad when he turned the table on a human rights group which traveled to Dutse to give him an award. Lamido lectured them on the oddity of elected public officials being celebrated for doing their jobs. Because the organization claimed a foreign affiliation, Lamido found a window to comment on the cruel and patronizing tragedy of having distant and disconnected foreign bodies validate the performance of African political actors.
Dora Akunyili, whose political stock was ruined in the debacle of her rebranding shenanigans, has reemerged as a rebranded heroine of democracy courtesy of her courageous but opportunistic memo, which merely conveyed an obvious political endgame. Juxtapose this new image with the fact she is the queen of vain political theatre. As we speak, there is a picture of her on popular website saharareporters.com that is a perfect emblem for the marauding presence of vanity in our politics. It shows her in a pose of self-absorbed fantasy against a background of plaques of all sizes and shapes carefully arranged to cover her in glory.
And this picture, let’s be clear, was taken during her supposedly distinguished days as the Director-General of NAFDAC — in her office! How her media-massaged narrative of competence and effectiveness co-existed with such offensive political self-indulgence remains a mystery.
articleadsbanner
The author can be reached at: [email protected]
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