How educated should political leaders be?
Do educated leaders make a country prosperous or do prosperous countries have electoral systems in place that ensure that there is a de facto minimum educational requirement? Is there a correlation between the prosperity of a country and the pedigree of its leaders?
The Nigerian constitution, in addition to an age threshold, prescribes secondary school education as the minimum anyone aspiring to executive or legislative office must attain in order to be eligible. It is sometimes argued that the bar should be higher, to improve the ideas that are put forward and the intellectual rigour applied to the discussions that underpin our statehood.
One might assume that we copied this standard from the British and American models that we have adapted over the years, but the American constitution only requires that a person running for the office of President is a natural born citizen who has been resident in the US for at least 14 years. Similarly, in the UK, there is no reference to a minimum educational requirement. A person wishing to stand as an MP simply needs to be over 18 years of age, be a British citizen or citizen of a Commonwealth country or the Republic of Ireland.
However, the last 4 Prime Ministers of the UK have had the following qualifications – Theresa May has a 2nd Class BA degree from Oxford; David Cameron has a 1st Class in Philosophy, Politics & Economics from Oxford; Gordon Brown has a 1st Class degree in History from the University of Edinburgh and went on to get a PhD as well; and Tony Blair had a 2nd Class BA in Arts from Oxford and went on to become a barrister. In the US, Barack Obama went to Columbia and Harvard Law School, George Bush went to Yale and Harvard Business School, Bill Clinton went to Georgetown, Oxford and Yale Law School. Angela Merkel has a PhD in Physical Chemistry. Francois Hollande has a degree in Political Studies and Nicolas Sarkozy has a law degree. Justin Trudeau has 2 bachelor’s degrees. Lee Kuan Yew, who both leading political parties tried to appropriate during the last elections, had double-starred first class honours in law from Cambridge.
A great many African countries, on the other hand, have mostly been ruled by much less educated persons, many of whom have been mutinous men of the military. Civilians have not exactly covered themselves in glory, either. Jacob Zuma, for example, received no formal schooling, and the South African economy has not seen its best days under him. Is there a case then, for advocating that the bar be raised for those who aspire to lead Nigerians and perhaps Africans, generally? Africa is home to some of the world’s poorest and least developed countries, in spite of its abundance of mineral wealth and human capital. It is also home to some of the world’s most enduring conflicts and in spite of the optimism a few years ago, most of Africa isn’t rising.
Perhaps though, the problem is with literacy rates generally and not just the ruling elite? In Nigeria, literacy is at 59.6%, compared to 99% in the UK, 99% in the US, 99% in France and 96.8% in Singapore. Perhaps we still have too many unlettered people to filter up the best for public office? Does the success of Cote D’Ivoire’s recent years under President Ouattara, who has masters and PhD degrees in Economics from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania add further weight to this hypothesis?
And why does education matter anyway, in the grand scheme of things? Well, our constitution suggests that we are a liberal democracy. The preamble to our constitution says its purpose is “…promoting the good government and welfare of all persons in our country, on the principles of freedom, equality and justice…” The constitution separates the powers of government into three arms, also suggestive of our subscription to the underpinning philosophies of the separation of powers and of social contract – social contract, where citizens hand over certain rights and powers to the State in exchange for the protection of the State.
If both the leaders and electorate in a liberal democracy are not aware of the relationship that should exist between each other or have no compunction in turning democratic institutions on their head and substituting developmental infrastructure for a nutritional one, maybe what you end up with is what we have on our hands.
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2 Comments
If I am right,Goodluck Jonathan Had a Phd and his governance was questionable. I really don’t think its about how educated the Leader is on paper but how educated and enlightened such a person is practically amidst other qualities
Re: How educated should political leaders be?
The question asked by Rotimi
Fawole in “How educated should political leaders be?” The Guardian, Tuesday,
November 8, 2016, on page 20, is “Do educated leaders make a country prosperous
or do prosperous countries have electoral systems in place that ensure that
there is a de facto minimum educational requirement? Is there a correlation
between the prosperity of a country and the pedigree of its leaders?
The answers to all the questions
above are yes! Yes, educated leaders make a country prosperous; prosperous
countries have electoral systems in place that ensure that there is a de facto
minimum educational requirement before one can contest and there is a
correlation between the prosperity of a country and the pedigree of its
leaders. But there is a caveat in the definition of education as applied to
governance.
Education in governance is not
having a certificate or a degree issued by an approved institution of higher
learning either in Nigeria or abroad but ability to analyse and solve the
masses’ problems which are the bases of service. These problems include but not
limited to food, shelter, transport, health, education and security. The
Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) based in Paris,
France, stated that all leaders must aspire to achieve all these. Some leaders
are educated but are not knowledgeable about public governance.
All past Nigerian heads of
government are educated up to secondary school level with the least educated being
Shehu Shagari, a teacher. Though he did not perform well, but he was better
than G. E. Jonathan who has Doctor of Philosophy in Zoology from University of
Port Harcourt. The difference between leaders in developing and developed
countries is that there are structures on ground that makes leaders in
developed countries to perform.
In Switzerland, Germany, United
States of America (USA), United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Australia and so on, not
all the matured people can register and vote. In United Kingdom, for example,
any citizen of a commonwealth nation who is educated and who has registered to
vote by writing the Registrar of Electors in the local council where his or her
house is located can vote. A voter must be able to read and write because in
some situations, two candidates will vie for different posts and their
pictures, names and part logo will appear on the A4-sized ballot paper. In USA,
they use Electoral College system and the number of Electoral College votes
ascribed to a state depends not on the population of the state but on
civilization. How do we equate 2 million votes in Lagos, Ogun and Anambra
States with the same number of votes in Zamfara, Kano and Borno States?
A nation deserves the type of
leadership it gets. Most electorates in Nigeria do not know why they vote for
whomever they are voting for. It is either “I voted for him or her because he
or she is in so, so and so party” or “I have collected his or her money and I
must vote for him or her”. Nigeria does not have structures on ground that will
make it prosperous, democratically. If UK, USA, Canada and other prosperous
nations can state and monitor how elections are financed and run, I do not see
any reason why Nigeria cannot peg election fund.
In a country where you need
millions of naira to contest as the chairman of a local government or
somebody/people to finance your aspiration, what will one expect of whoever
becomes the president? It is either the chairman embarks on how to recoup his
finances before attending to the masses light or he dances to the tunes of his
financiers. Our judicial system is not strong enough to instill good democratic
norms. The highest bidders win court cases and the masses do not know how
elections or who becomes the chairman affect their well beings because they are
partly educated illiterates and partly uneducated illiterates.
Professor Attahiru Jega, the
award-winning Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman,
succeeded in office majorly because he knows the implication of collecting bribe
and putting the wrong person in leadership position and because he used his
colleagues, professors in Nigerian universities, who have fewer propensities to
take bribe and compromise their position, as Returning Officers for
Gubernatorial elections. Corruption has double whammy effect on the masses.
One, it depletes the public purse and leave little money for the masses in the
form of public expenditure through enriching the corrupt, and two, it
encourages the poor masses to join the bandwagon since the corrupt are having a
field-day and can oppress the poor.
Lee Guan Yew, a former Prime
Minister in Singapore stated that “Human ingenuity is infinite when translating
power and discretion into personal gain… We allowed the courts to treat proof
that an accused was living beyond his or her means, or had properties his or
her income could not explain, as corroborating evidence that the accused had
accepted or obtained bribe or had stolen money. If we can practice this in Nigeria and go the
way of accountability, we would definitely have a good leader and our country
will rise. If we can have God-fearing and upright leaders, no matter their
academic qualifications, Nigeria will be great. A leader is just there to give
directions. If he is not corrupt and can read and write, he is fit to rule this
country. There are enough university graduates that can serve as technocrats to
a fairly educated leader.
Thanks.
Olufemi A. Oyedele.
We will review and take appropriate action.