Origins and dangers of the messianic type of ruler

The adornment of President Buhari in the regalia of a messiah
THE words of Bishop Matthew Kukah, Catholic Bishop of the Sokoto Dioceses, in his writings on corruption in Nigeria, carry a lot of weight. He writes as follows in a Paper published in the Vanguard of October 4, 2015, titled “Hysteria, Euphoria and Amnesia : A nation’s long walk to freedom”.

“For years and, perhaps, out of deep frustration, Nigerians have raised up messiahs, hoping and praying that they would take away their sins and sufferings and usher in a new dawn…… I have listened to Nigerians sing the praises of General Buhari as a morally ramrod Muslim, God fearing, a disciplined officer, a patriot, an incorruptible man who is now adorned with a messianic regalia. He will take us to the promised land, Nigerians argue, by ridding our nation of the devil of corruption.”

Coming from Bishop Kukah, it may be taken to be true that Buhari is now being “adorned in a messianic regalia”.

It is not my intention in this write-up to undertake a critical examination of the qualities and credentials of President Buhari, such as listed by Bishop Matthew Kukah, and whether they truly qualify him to now adorn the regalia of a messiah. My purpose is simply to describe the origins of the notion of a messianic leader, and its dangers for Nigeria.
Origins of the messianic type of ruler

We, Nigerians, have a penchant or mentality to indulge in the servile flattering, hero-worshipping and fawning of our leaders. Every Nigerian President or State Governor, civilian or military, is surrounded by an army of sycophants and praise-singers, who, day and night, exploit and feed on his weaknesses, foibles and disposition to vain-gloriousness. The penchant is magnified by the danger that servile flattery, hero-worship and fawning sycophancy may, and usually do, overflow into the adulation, adoration or deification of the leader.

The Nigerians’ penchant for the adulation, adoration or deification of their leaders was carried to its most ignominious extent during Gen. Abacha’s rule. Considerable numbers of Nigerians from various strata of society, youths, women, traditional rulers, religious leaders and politicians jostled amongst themselves in an incredibly disgraceful and shameful exhibition of fawning indulgence towards the despotic regime and its self-perpetuation plan. The aspects of the exhibition most derogatory to our integrity as a people and our claim of ripeness to sustain democratic governance were: (i) the two-million-man rally, described by the regime as an “epoch-making event” and as a “spontaneous and sincere outburst of affection, solidarity and support”, which was staged in Abuja for three consecutive days by youths drawn from across the country under the aegis of an organization calling itself by the name The Youth Earnestly Ask for Abacha (YEAA); apart from the youths, the rally also had in attendance prominent businessmen and politicians, men and women, including the chairmen of the five registered political parties, all chanting their support for General Abacha as the only “person who could hold the nation together”; funded by the regime at the cost of well over N500 million, as admitted by the organisers, it also featured music by some 300 well-known musicians as well as soccer stars; (ii) the unseemly jockeying and rivalry between the five registered political parties to get the dictator to be the presidential flag-bearer of one of them only, and his eventual adoption by all five of them as a consensus candidate in the election slated for August 1998 which was, happily, aborted by the sudden death of Abacha on June 8, 1998; and (iii) other unashamedly blatant manipulations of the transition to democracy programme, with the lamentable acquiescence of the politicians.

The indulgent support for the Abacha regime by these groups of Nigerians is no less inexcusable because it was inspired and sponsored by the regime itself or because it was motivated by the belief that the regime had performed so well in terms of the peace, security, stability, progress and unity it has brought to the country which, it is said, justifies its continuance in power as the civilian government after the projected transition to democratic rule, and which, therefore, makes the regime “indispensable” or “irreplaceable”. The belief that the regime has performed so well in the respects mentioned above is palpably false of course.

But more tragically false is the belief that its good performance, even supposing it to be true, makes it indispensable or irreplaceable; the slogan propagating it was “No Abacha, No Nigeria”. The theory of an indispensable man was perhaps more effectively and unequivocally propagated in an address to the dictator at Abuja by a delegation of 74 traditional rulers led by the Sultan of Sokoto and claiming to have the mandate of all their subjects, meaning in effect all Nigerians: “Your Excellency”, they announced, “we have carefully looked around and with all humility we hasten to say that you are the only man capable of leading the country”. The Eastern States Traditional Rulers Council re-affirmed the above statement in a communique : “General Sani Abacha” they also affirmed, “is the only hope for this country”, the only person to lead it into “stability, security, peace, prosperity and lasting democracy”. Quoted from Olusegun Adeniyi, The Last 100 Days of Abacha (2005), pp. 69 – 70, 94. In Nigeria, with a population of 160 million people, and richly endowed with an abundance of men and women of outstanding intellect, competence and experience, the idea of Abacha as an indispensable or irreplaceable man is a fallacy, and the arguments by which it is sought to be rationalised are also a fallacy and untenable.

The main rationalising argument is the need for continuity to enable him (Abacha) to consolidate his good work. “There is strength in continuity” – so ran the slogan in the newspaper adverts. The advantages of continuity, such as they are, have to be weighed against the advantages of change. A change in leadership at reasonable intervals of time is an imperative necessity in any country in order to insure against sterility and complacency. Change may enable a fresh vitality and a fresh approach to be brought to bear upon the problems of government. “An untried president”, writes Professor Edwin Corwin, “may be better than a tired one; a fresh approach better than a stale one.” Edwin Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 4th edition, p. 37.

The seville flattery of the dictatorship of Abacha is nothing new in the history of Nigeria, and is therefore by no means untypical of Nigerians. It is indeed reminiscent of the kind of sentiments that had greeted the announcement of military take-overs of government six times since Nigeria’s independence in 1960. It is in the light of our well-attested penchant and mentality for the adulation of our political leaders that the hysteria and euphoria that greeted the victory of General Buhari in the presidential election of March 2015 should be viewed. It was true to type, and characteristically Nigerian.

Without in any way diminishing the danger portended by this kind of penchant or mentality, it is appropriate to say at this juncture that the adulation, adoration or deification of leaders is not unique or peculiar to Nigerians. It characterizes other African peoples to a greater or less extent, although the ignominious extent it attained under Gen Abacha was perhaps unique to Nigeria. Kwame Nkrumah, as leader of the Ghanaian people, had tried to rationalise or justify it. Speaking approvingly of the “inevitability of deification”, he told his audience “it was natural for the masses to think of their leader as a messiah, a god, likening it to the worship and deification of Jesus by Christians.” T. Peter Omari: Kwame Nkrumah: The Anatomy of an African Dictatorship (1970) p. 144.

The dangers of adorning President Buhari in the regalia of a messiah
THE notion of a messianic ruler gives rise inexorably to the evil of an all-knowing, infallible and indispensable leader. The evil lies mainly in the mentality, which it inculcates in the ruler himself that once he has decreed what is to be done for the deliverance of the people, then, his prescriptions, since they are believed to carry the imprimatur of God Himself, must be accepted by all without question. All dissent and opposition must therefore be ruthlessly repressed in the name ostensibly of progress.

A people deifying its ruler lose the capacity for criticism, for critical appraisal of his performance as ruler, not to talk of resistance to tyrannical rule. They would have bonded themselves to him, becoming mere slavish, obsequious followers, ready to invest him with infallibity, and to accept, without question, his idiosyncratic whims and caprices, even those destructive of their liberties, Such was the tragic fate that befell the people of Ghana under the dictatorship of Nkrumah as messianic ruler.

Ghana’s tragic fate is well portrayed by the sarcastic, if also witty, words of the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien, after Nkrumah’s overthrew. “It is”, he wrote:
“A joint achievement of the Tudors and the Convention People’s Party [Nkrumah’s ruling party] that in all Anglican churches in Ghana the congregation had prayed each Sunday up to last Sunday, that Kwame Nkrumah may have victory over his enemies ‘spiritual and temporal’. In accordance with a tradition which is as Anglican as it is African, it will be for the victory of his enemies that they will pray henceforward” – quoted from Omari, op. cit., p. 9.

Absolute power, which is the invariable armour of the messianic ruler, corrupts the values and virtues of a people in that the standards of integrity, probity, fairness and morality of the absolute ruler set the moral tone of the whole society. Moreover, absolute power induces indifference, apathy and passivity in the people, which is the inevitable result of the lack of popular participation in government. In a state of government-induced indifference, apathy and passivity, people concern and busy themselves, both in their thoughts and sentiments, only in their private affairs, in “the amusements and ornamentation of private life.” Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America (1835), ed. Richard Heffner (1956), p. 19

The idea of an indispensable man is really next door to despairing of the nation, which makes it imperative and compelling to exorcise it completely from our thinking. Furthermore, it is a recipe for a president for life. A president in office for life, or even for a continuous period of ten years, is a different kind of functionary from one who is constitutionally limited to two terms of four years each. His authority is bound to be greater, for after more than eight years continuously in that office he is apt to become an institution, attracting loyalties of a personal nature, and becoming a personal, authoritarian ruler sooner or later.

But the greatest danger of absolute power in the hands of one-man messianic ruler is its tendency to give rise to the privatisation of the state, as happens not infrequently. The privatisation of the state is a condition of things where the state is treated by the ruler as if it were his private estate – as if he owned it, with state affairs becoming practically indistinguishable from the strictly personal affairs of the ruler, with all institutions and powers of government being absorbed in him, and with impromptu decisions and actions based on his personal whims and caprices being substituted for regularised government decisions – taking procedures and processes.

What is more, state money and other state property are treated as if they were his personally, to dispose of and be dealt with as he likes, with little or no restrictions and with no obligation of accountability – with scant regard indeed to laid-down financial regulations or budgetary controls, breeding in the process utter indiscipline in the expenditure of public funds and of course corruption.

Life President Macias Nguema as sole ruler of Equatorial Guinea kept the state treasury in notes stored in a building near his house; Field-Marshal Idi Amin, the brutal dictator of Uganda kept a huge sum of American dollars, money belonging to the state, in his house; Gen Sani Abacha, absolute military ruler of Nigeria, had a small central bank office set up in the presidential villa to facilitate personal dealings with public money; President Mobutu, autocratic sole ruler of Zaire, kept with him the cheque books of the state bank accounts, which he carried along whenever he travelled and issued on the spur of the moment as pleased his whims.

The privatisation of the state under a messianic one-man ruler is thus an abuse in an extreme degree of absolute power, and a perversion of the concept of the state as a body of laws, not a body of men, as an organisation whose “activities are systematized, co-ordinated, predictable, machine-like and impersonal”. Poggi: The Development of the Modern State, page 75.

In conclusion, the dangers of President Buhari as Nigeria’s Messiah are real, not imaginary. The chances that they may materialise on us are not far-fetched either.