E Tu! Gowon
BY
Like Caesar may well be Nigeria’s response after being betrayed and stabbed by a succession of her leaders, including General Yakubu Gowon who recently declared that his administration is the best ever. A keen observer will see Gowon as being too honest and gentlemanly to engage in such self remarketing except to spite the administration of the man he probably refuse to forgive for kicking him out of office 26 years ago. One would have thought that his long exile in Britain to take top flight university degrees would have exorcised him of his unrepentant spirit.
Adolescents indifferent about governmental affairs 26 years ago are today men and women the future of this great nation rests upon. The near extinction of noble professors of history in today’s Nigeria must not be used as a licence for distorting Nigeria’s yesterday by anybody. It is on this hallowed grounds that one feels impelled to do a qualitative analysis of Gowon’s place in our nationhood.
A survey of Nigerian leaders today will put Gowon as about the finest gentleman groomed in high quality honesty, simplicity and incorruptibility. Alhaji Tafawa Balewa is the other leader who might contest with him for the top position in these refined human qualities. His application of these qualities as the head of state however suggest he would have been better on the pulpit and not the leader of a large boisterous nation like Nigeria. The way and manner the code of good leadership traits of sound vision, tested executive capacity and hard headed character to take no recalcitrance was breached is the purveyor to the ills plaguing the society today.
He did play the nice guy in him extremely well by welding the nation politically together at the end of the civil war. But he failed woefully to use that same Mr. Nice Guy leverage to put the economy on a sound foundation in the midst of enormous financial resources mother luck put at his disposal.
Gowon’s administration for analysis purposes can be structured into two phases. These are plus and minus phases which cover the period Chief Obafemi Awolowo came from prison to join his administration in the number two position and when the chief left to play politics. The plus Awolowo phase was the golden period of Gowon’s administration. The war got executed with largely internal resources and balanced budgets. The positive economic arms financial index of stable exchange rates, inflation level, high investment in the real sector and high employment level are a clone of an economic management guru Obasanjo should borrow a leaf from to shore up his lack lustre economy.
The minus Awolowo phase exposed Gowon’s economic management naivety and ineptitude. He got so overwhelmed with the gushing inflow of petrol dollars that Nigerians were told that money spending was the main problem but not the availability of money. That the lowest in the top 50 companies on the London Stock Exchange managed a hundred times more than the total dollars Nigeria was making and our leaders were boasting about tells the quality of mind Gowon was.
To assuage the problem of spending the money many silly development projects were taken up at the same time without the enabling executive and management capacity to plan and execute any successfully. Large airplanes runway airports were built in several major cities whether or not the traffic capacity exists. Most are today flying practising fields for birds. Seaports were built to handle thoughtless and needless imports. An armada of cement loaded ships besieged our seaports as it was more profitable for shipping companies to queue on our waterways to charge demurrage on daily basis than to embark on an efficient short shipping turnarounds. Trade Fair Complex, National Theatre and Festac Town projects were executed at cost in excess of the normal rates.
The gridlock in multiple projects execution at the same time caused financial constipation in the cities to draw more people from the rural areas. Merely witnessing a single contract signatures in the Trade and defence ministry was worth in earnings several years labour in the farms. The immediate social consequence is the drift into the cities by the farming population. Farming knowledge and skills were ignored or forgotten. So food imports at whatever outrageous price became our way of life. The dynamics of our social change became dictated and driven by the dictum of money is not ours problem. If this actual scenario is part of what Gowon referred to as his best government then ours must be a real sick society.
If Balewa’s administration seed of corruption is natural, Gowon's is IITA improved seed variety which Babangida genetically modified to resist all weeds and pests to yield more bountiful harvest for practitioners. Most top government officials at federal and state levels exploited this money spending problem to wreak on society the most open edged and uncontrolled corruption practices never before witnessed. Super permanent secretaries bought over prime properties for cash not related to their legitimate income. Governors built and bought properties that will make professional property developers green with envy on our major cities and abroad with on the spot cash payments.
Behaviourists would find Gowon’s position in the midst open-ended looting and stealing from the treasury under him a great deal of puzzling riddle. The man simply looked the other way when he found things going wrong. Kicked out of office no trace of any property in Lagos, Kaduna or Jos can be attached to him. He stayed clean and unsustained. But why he never stopped the nonsense for the whole nine years he ruled is something that needs to be found out from his brain for scientific analysis.
It is necessary to postulate that those who kicked him out of office did him more good than he imagined. This is so because the idea of what to do with the position which was just to be nice had run its full course and become dysfunctional. It is safe therefore to conclude that while Gowon was the best gentleman and most incorruptible leader we ever had, his self accorded best grade is least deserved. The benefit of hindsight however might just exonerate him of any real guilt as it was not his ambition to rule but for his recruitment through compulsory drafting. It is the society’s duty to lay appropriate standards and values against which a leader is elected and judged. We are yet to do that but we just must do that for a fair and better judgement.
April 2002