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Author: Dimgba Igwe
Posted to the web: 7/8/2005 5:46:45 AM

It might have happened to you. You are trying to hide a precious possession from mischievous fingers and then suddenly you can no longer find it. You have finally hidden it away from even yourself! I don't know if this has ever happened to President Olusegun Obasanjo. But the way the 2007 business is going, I won't be surprised if this eventually comes to pass. To management and leadership gurus, the first responsibility of a good leader is to groom a successor. Depending on your level of security and insecurity, some leaders leave this assignment dangling until the last minute. Then, a wide scramble begins at the last minute when it becomes obvious that the leader can't continue in the office. We have gone through this ignoble route so many times that it is a surprise we are still on the same spot, unable to grasp the truism that it is the ultimate conceit and folly for any man to consider himself indispensable in a country of so many people. Take the case of the past military dictators that shot themselves into power. When Buhari and Idiagbon kicked out Alhaji Shehu Shagari's regime, the duo were so consumed with their messianic mission of salvaging the nation, to use their favourite lingo, that they dismissed talks of return to civilian regime. In other words, they were indispensable. They were still so consumed with such divine hubris when General Ibrahim Babangida led a putsch against them. After eight long years, it became obvious that Babangida had no plan of handing over power to anyone else even though he had also convinced every other presidential aspirant to run for presidency, promising to hand over to each one of them. Ultimately, more than a dozen potential candidates left Babangida's Aso Rock then convinced that 'it was people like you we want to hand over power to.' Of course, Babangida wanted to hand over to himself. But where Buhari employed bare-knuckle tactics that spared no politicians, convinced that they deserved several lifetimes in jail, Babangida employed what the Bible calls cunning craftiness. After over N40 billion thrown into an interminable transition programme, Babangida's regime ended up in the curse of June 12. Part of the fruit of that curse is a man called Ernest Shonekan who was sneaked into power by a desperate Babangida, now losing his grips on the reins of power he thought was under his control before. And so, as Babangida staggered home on August 27, 1993, handing over to Shonekan, Nigeria once again lost the chance for a planned succession and therefore, stability. Yet, crafty General Sani Abacha, who took over from Babangida's marionette, should have learnt a lesson. According to Brigadier General Buba Marwa in his recent interview with us in The Sun, Abacha had planned to stay for between 18 months to a maximum of two years. He sent Marwa to give that assurance to American government. But then, some sycophants, including power hungry presidential security guards, contractors, political conmen and shamans imported from all the dark corners of Africa, convinced the reclusive and self-imprisoned Kanuri man that he was destined to rule forever. Well, that was not to be - some apples saw to that. Enter Abdulsalami Abubakar, a smart fellow who needs his retirement in comfort and peace of mind. Next, comes Obasanjo with Bible in one hand and promises of restoration of lost glory on the other hand. First, Obasanjo was touted as a one-term Mandelaic transitional figure. But, as events have shown so obviously, Obasanjo wants nothing transitional. He wants permanent order in which he is in charge. Which explains why we need a question from the World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz to extract something firm from the President on 2007. I have heard it said that the question is not an accident but a well-contrived plot by the American political high command to literally squeeze water from the rock. For nearly two years, the question of whether Obasanjo would leave office in 2007 or scheme for either an extension of his tenure by two years as some of his lapdogs were canvassing or another six-year term which some believe is the real goal of the political reforms conference, has been a subject of intense speculations, despite the president's denials of such intention. So, would Obasanjo leave office in 2007, as Paul Wolfowitz, a former number two man at Pentagon, asked? Obasanjo's answer that he was ready to return to his lucrative farming - and I should add, educational and multi-billion library - appears comforting on the face of it. We certainly ought to believe our president when he says he was returning to Otta in 2007. But watching his foot-works belies such response.First, the president appoints a new INEC chairman, allegedly without due consultation with the National Council of State and by some account, thereby ruling out potential Igbo candidates for presidency since lNEC chairman and the president hardly ever come from the same area. Meanwhile, all potential presidential aspirants who ought to be on the hustings nationwide ventilating their views and agenda to the nation, are hounded by the presidency into hiding, awaiting the president's pleasure. When the president's former errand boy in the Senate, Adolphus Wabara mooted the idea of a presidential ambition, he was reportedly scolded first for such effrontery and ultimately made a scapegoat of the anti-corruption crusade. And, the much-vaunted candidates like the Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Ibrahim Babangida, Marwa and others are said to be on the president's list of those who must be stopped from getting to the presidency at all cost, contrary to other things you've heard or read. But this then, is coming at a time the president and his tiny cabal have taken over the entire machinery of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, replacing the national party organs with cronies and yes-men. So, where are we going from here? Otta or Aso Rock? It seems to me that despite all the protestations to the contrary, we might well be back to the starting bloc. Otherwise, where is the successor generation? The president points to technocrats who obviously had no political clout whatsoever as if these officials are substitute for tested political leadership. My real fear in all these is that history may be repeating itself. At the end of the day, after all the dribbling and scheming, by the time it becomes obvious that such schemes would not work, the nation would once again be stampeded into an emergency leadership arrangement. But the danger of such contraption is that not only are we denied leadership of those who are prepared for office, we are in their stead, offered a contrived leadership solution birthed out of crisis. And just like in the past, such transitional contraptions always unravel at the expense of the nation. That's why we ought to put our acts together now, before it is too late, once again. It is perhaps in this light that I recommend what I call here Dr. Christopher Kolade's leadership model, especially because he is now one of the president's anchormen. 'I usually say to people,' Dr. Christopher Kolade, one of Nigeria's foremost managers noted in our book, 50 Nigerian Corporate Strategists, 'that the day you enter a job as head of a unit, head of a function or head of a company, the first thing that must hit your consciousness is that that is the first day of your journey towards leaving the job.' Kolade then built a personal philosophy around this principle: 'My philosophy about leaving a position is that we are passing through this life and we are hoping that when we have passed through life, whatever part of this life we have influenced would actually be better than when we entered it. If you apply that philosophy to a job you are doing, if you are hoping that the day you exit from the job you are going to leave a better position than the one you found, then it makes eminent good sense for you to start looking for the people who are going to create that better situation you are looking forward to. And so, I start very early in any job to say: 'If I were to leave this job in the next six months, who will I put in place?'' Although some cynics occasionally whisper that even the great Kolade was reluctant to leave Cadbury at the time he left as the chief executive, but in my view, he lived by his credo. For one, he left Cadbury in better and younger hands of Bunmi Oni who had since taken the company to greater heights. Kolade himself moved on to greater things: From pioneering role at the Lagos Business School to heading a presidential task force on contract review, perhaps, the forerunner of the current Office of Budget Monitoring, Implementation and Price (alias, 'due process') headed by Oby Ezekwesili, which saved the nation billions. Now, as Nigeria's High Commissioner to United Kingdom, Kolade is certainly on the rise, despite the blight of his involvement in the tainted presidential library scheme which is now a subject of litigation. Kolade's example is a moral lesson that our leaders, including the president and the final term governors, ought to pick from.