It may appear on the surface that these appointments are on merit. What could demonstrate merit more than a professorship! A closer look at the conduct of the appointee and appointer as well as their respective expectations regarding performance will show that merit is barely a consideration. Ministers and directors are not selves, they are ciphers. They are personifications of their states of origin, their respective sponsoring factions of their parties, their national group, and so on. When they perform and when they don’t, it does not much matter.
If you are the appointer, how can you fire an ethnic group personified in your minister; if you are a minister, how can you resign a position that you are not occupying in your own meritorious self but as a representative of your people? Resigning is an irresponsible course that leaves your people without a place at the relevant feeding trough. So, it does not matter how many insults to your personality and professionalism—a la Keshi—the latter are not under attack because it is not you in the office; it is your people. Your professional integrity could not be under attack because it was not the principal reason that you were picked to be a minister, director, or coach in the first place.
To round up. In modern society, public office is open to talent and merit. Although it does not always work the way it is intended to, this is the standard. We are not there yet, as a people. Central to getting there is developing robust selves that would consider certain acts to be beneath their dignity and would equally own their successes as well as their failures. That robust self is built on self-respect and self-respect is what will make you not to continue in a position in which you have recorded a spectacular failure, even if the appointing authority wants you to stay on.
To conclude, having failed to advance the cause of peace in Vietnam and witnessing the divisions in American society occasioned by this foreign misadventure, the then president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, took responsibility and placed country before ambition. With an eye on any American equivalent of the dubious Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria, Johnson declared to his nation in an address that our president might do well to watch and study: “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” Wish that Goodluck Jonathan had enough self-respect to be an LBJ!
In a decent society, the debacle of the Chibok kidnapping and other atrocities committed by Boko Haram in areas the security of which is superintended by the federal government of Nigeria should have been enough for a president to be hounded out of office. But, remember, for Jonathan to concede this way would be for the forces for which he is the embodiment to be dismissed from their seat at the top of the power totem pole.
By the way, no one doubts LBJ’s high standing in the annals of the American presidency, in spite of his taking responsibility and resigning to save his polity from further damage from his continuation in office. Given all the accomplishments that have been touted by the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria or is it Youths Earnestly Ask for Goodluck Jonathan! In his name, why not leave the stage when the ovation is loudest? If, indeed, he has achieved those things, his place in Nigeria’s presidential annals is already assured.
POSTCRIPT: I wrote this piece before the latest shenanigans by Stephen Keshi and his Nigeria Football Federation employers. The latest events confirm everything that I wrote above. But that is beside the point. I have merely used the Keshi saga—that is what it has become—to make a point about our public life. What I have applies with equal force to our commissioned officers in the armed forces who take no responsibility for defeats, however humiliating; to governors who think that being out of office and becoming ordinary citizens are beneath their dignity; and so on. I am sure that we can do better and a place to start is for those of us who see things differently to open conversations with our fellow citizens on how not to assess or embrace our public officeholders.
Professor Olufemi Taiwo teaches at the Africana Studies and Research Centre, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
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