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Powerlessness corrupts By IT should begin with the idea that a person who wears all he has and all he has is all he wears, does not care if the house burns down. He has nothing in it to make him fetch water to put down the fire. But the issue does not stop at this. Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola told the story once at a small dinner with Madiba and the leadership of the African National Congress in the days before the first democratic elections in South Africa. Bashorun was worried that Buthelezi's Independent Freedom Party was playing such a destructive role in the match towards freedom in the country. Bashorun was surprised that the African National Congress was not looking for a final solution for this problem. The story he told can be entitled "The Ant in your Pant!" You cannot look at the ant in your pant with scant attention. You must work from 'plan' to 'plant' to 'planet'. On an incremental level the ant in your pant undresses you whether you like it or not and in the process reduces your Goliath-strength to what little David can deal with using only his catapult. But the issue still goes beyond this level. Is it manageable that you are the one winner in a large hall full of losers? Perhaps if the losers accept that the process that made them losers is fair and just, the one lone winner in a hall full of losers might get away with his winnings. But even if the process was just and clear but the losers do not accept to be losers and you insist on keeping all your winnings to yourself, there is going to be trouble leading to everybody being a loser! Which makes the story of the African National Congress ceding Kwa-Zulu Natal province to the Independent Freedom Party of Buthelezi after 1994 elections a sacrifice to peace. The ANC gave something to the IFP to win!
Finally, in this long introduction to the subject of how powerlessness corrupts and how absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely, the University of Cape Town Graduate Business School asked me to hold conversations which have nothing to do with management with their senior students. The graduate school occupies the basement of a prison converted to a hotel, an interesting symbol in its own way. Our conversation that afternoon of the 10th of September had to do with the Iago syndrome "I like not that!". How do you manage someone who acts from what, in the case of Iago, has been dubbed "motiveless malignity"? How do you manage an inquiry that makes no sense? The students were managers and senior managers in government and the private sector, men and women of timber and calibre as we say in Nija and the Arabs would talk of those who tie and untie! So, of course they wanted to know what I was talking about. I could only repeat: how do you manage someone who hates you for no reason?
On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed predicting the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the victory of capitalism over socialism. From that date onwards, the government of the United States of America, and consequently, the peoples of the United States of America, walked and talked and crowed to say "na we only dey!". One of them declared the end of history and the American century would be not just the 20th century but also the 21st century as well. What about the rest of us? What about those whose futures are in the belly of tomorrow, in the innards of the history that still has to be made, what are we supposed to do? Take a look at the abyss and, like the Incas, shake our collective heads and say "to-o maa da llah" and commit communal suicide?
Fortune magazine has described the period between November 9, 1989 and September 11, 2001 "as an era of American frivolity and self-absorption. An era when many people in the US decided the outside world, the world beyond our borders, no longer mattered. It was the economy, stupid."
Statistics will show that between those two dates American citizens have become 20 per cent fatter and some have been demanding the right of one person to two seats wherever the person has to sit while others have to make do with one seat! I have seen it demonstrated on a flight from Lagos to Accra. The fat guy, a US citizen, reverend gentleman stormed the business class because the seats in the economy class were too small for him. But you do not have a business class ticket, countered the airline officials. It does not matter, was the gentleman's answer. He is US, he is fat and has a right.
A listing from Antigua to Zimbabwe of countries of the world has shown that virtually every nationality was represented in the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. In the category of dead five is listed for Nigeria and one for South Africa. Which simply means that the lessons of that day are not for the citizens and government of the United States of America alone. The government of the United States must realise that capitalism has not triumphed over other alternative forms of growing and distributing resources. There is nothing particularly to be proud of by Earthlings in an inter-galactic gathering of the creatures of the cosmos that millions of earthlings live on one dollar a day while you cannot buy a sweet with one dollar in the richest country on earth.
We need to adopt the words of the South African Freedom Charter and globalise it. The very first sentence in that charter affirms and we globalise that the earth belongs to all who live in it. December 2001
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