ANALYSIS
Perspective
Addressing the elected 47 governors of the newly created counties in Kenya, Kayode Fayemi explains to his audience the imperative of raising a trans-generational leadership for a dream African
The creation of gubernatorial offices at county level was clearly meant to bring governance closer to the people; to reduce the sense of alienation that people feel regarding their representatives and to widen the opportunities for civic engagement at the grassroots. One criticism of the process of democratisation in Africa has been that in our attempt to clone western-style liberal democracy, we have ended up importing some of its less salutary aspects that do not transplant well and so cannot thrive in our socio-cultural soil. It has been argued that the bipolar of the party in government ranged against an opposition party seeded an unnecessarily adversarial dynamic into African politics.
The setting that best portrayed the dynamics of governance in pre-colonial Africa was the village square where the community gathered to thrash out issues of common concern. The challenge of democratisation in Africa is that in adopting western style democracy, we have forgotten the village square setting that characterised pre-colonial governance. Our formal democratic institutions are exclusive in nature, often depicting politics and governance as a winner-takes-all craft for an exclusive specialist class of politicians.
The effect of this is that ordinary people feel alienated from government and their governments feel alienated from the people they claim to represent. The people rarely have any input in the policy-making and implementation processes. This distance between government and the governed is highly inimical to democracy. It creates a lack of trust which simply sabotages ab initio, any good faith efforts to govern effectively for the benefit of our people.
Reclaiming the Trust Upon my assumption of office, we discovered that our biggest challenge was gaining the people's trust. Their previous gloomy experiences with our predecessors had calcified considerable cynicism in and about government. Generally, a trust deficit between the government and the governed plagues public life all over Nigeria. People simply do not believe what their politicians say. Indeed, the prevalent notion is that politicians come into office to simply line their pockets. While this is an understandable sentiment, it holds adverse implications for the deepening of our democracy. It was immediately clear to us that our first task was to rebuild trust in public governance as a service delivery mechanism through practical and symbolic ways.
To be truly effective, the design of policies has to emanate from the people's perception of their own needs. In this sense, the limitation of African democracy is our emphasis on the conduct of elections often at the expense of the democratic relationship between the government and the governed. We have not yet come to see that democracy means participatory governance which in effect means that policies are generated from the bottom-up not imposed from the top-down.
There is a hubris which leads us to presume to know far more about ordinary people about their problems than they themselves do. This paternalistic attitude causes us to prescribe solutions that often have no relation to the challenges on ground and devise strategies that are consequently unworkable.
The foregoing ethos has informed my administration's mainstreaming of grassroots participation in our policy and programme development and implementation. We do this through regular town hall meetings across the state during which we share details of our milestone achievements as well as challenges. We also consult broadly in the development of our annual budget and have become a model for participatory budgeting in Nigeria.
Freedom of Information and Responsible Statecraft One of the ways in which we can enhance participatory governance and engineer high stakeholder involvement in public affairs is by entrenching a culture of freedom of information. This begins with the freedom of information act but extends beyond this to creating a climate in which our administrations are truly open to the people. Too often, the affairs of government is classified, veiled in secrecy and kept away from the people.
This culture offends the democratic spirit which is all about openness and transparency, and is one of the ways in which governors alienate the governed. By entrenching a culture of transparency, we create an atmosphere in which people feel truly closer to their governments; thus, we as political leaders benefit from the intellect and the energy of our people that we can tap into. This is why the Government of Ekiti State, Nigeria is the first state to have domesticated the Freedom of Information act at the sub-national level in the country. Indeed information and communication management is crucial to the deepening of a democratic culture. The responsibility of ensuring the content of our communications is within the confines of civility is as important as the rigours of information dissemination. This is particularly relevant considering the fact that we all as holders of elective political offices are products of adversarial elections that have the tendency to be divisive. We therefore have to be magnanimous in our victories and strive to elevate the art of statecraft above crass and uncouth communications aimed at undermining opposition. In the same vein, a spirit of cooperation is necessary if you are to succeed. Many of the challenges you face are cut from the same cloth and transcend county lines. They will require concerted effort. That is why I was happy to hear that you have quickly put in place the "Council of Governors". Such a forum where you can gather as peers to pool ideas and learn from each other is highly commended, and is a great platform by which you can all access the collective wisdom of the group.
In this regard, I recommend that you understudy the workings of the Nigeria Governors Forum founded in 1999. The NGF consists of all governors of the 36 states in Nigeria irrespective of political party. The widely publicised leadership crisis currently facing the forum is a passing phase that would further strengthen our role as a frontline pressure group and unifying entity in my country. The good work done over the past 14 years cannot be discounted on account of the current crisis; neither can it undermine our prospects for the future. Entrenching a spirit of cooperation also extends to the tenor of executive-legislative relations. Given the differing mandates of both sets of political actors, the relationship between them is bound to be marked by a certain degree of tension. This residual tension will be compounded by party differences. What is important however is that we do not let that tension degenerate into outright conflict that paralyses governance. Rather, we should aim to make it a creative tension that gets the best out of all of us.
It is in the overall interest of our democratic projects to create a strong executive-legislative regime. In the spirit of robust Cooperative Federalism, all tiers of government in Kenya have to interact cooperatively and collectively towards solving common problems and avoiding waste by the duplication of efforts.
Ultimately, democracy is about the accommodation of various shades of opinion. The ability to disagree without being disagreeable is a vital political skill. We do ourselves no credit if every political dispute or difference of opinion leads to a loss of life. This is why it is absolutely imperative that you instill a culture of civility in your interactions with each other as peers and with the higher authorities in the Central Government. Necessity of Service Delivery and Meritocracy Considering the central reason for creating your positions is to shift governance closer to the people, it is natural that you would bear the greater burden of the people's expectations for a better life. Devolution of governance is effectively devolution of service delivery. But you can also devolve corruption, lack of transparency and other negatives. How meaningful democracy is to the people depends to a large extent on how honourably you carry out your duties.
Democracy, in the final analysis, is not just the right to vote and be voted for; it is the equalisation of access to public goods - education, healthcare, basic infrastructure and jobs. It is expanding the range of opportunities available to the people to live creative lives and achieve upward mobility. The question of service delivery therefore is inescapable and it is the plumb line by which you will be measured and judged.
Naturally, because you are the nearest representation of governance to the people, you will feel the brunt of the anger and their disappointment should you fall short of their hopes. But you will also know the joy of their affection and affirmation when you make their dreams come true. It is such joys that make a political career so rewarding - the notion that your leadership is tangibly affecting lives for the better.
Improving service delivery means changing the dominant paradigm of public service in Africa. Our onerous development challenges are not for want of brilliant policies and programmes or even dedicated leadership. The fact is that most African countries simply lack the institutional capacity to execute and pursue their developmental goals.
This deficiency is readily discernible in the condition of civil services across the continent. The task of creating an efficient public service is inseparable from the calling of political leadership to motivate, inspire and rally a corps of public servants with whom they will jointly seek to actualise the people's aspirations for a better quality of life.
No matter how gifted a politician may be, his ultimate success lies in his ability to strengthen institutions so that they can function optimally independent of his own exertions. The public service is the designated site of this success. The reforms that we need call for political leaders to set the right tone in terms of professional and public conduct, in their approach to the task of governance and the sanctity they accord to the people's mandate.
Leading with Legacy in Mind It may seem strange and even premature to be talking about succession planning when you only just got here but this is a critical and much neglected facet of leadership in Africa. And it dovetails neatly with the theme of institutionalising our successes and building durable institutions. However noble our motives for going into politics; however accomplished we may be as administrators, one truth stands unimpeachable: No man is indispensable. We serve by the grace of God and at the pleasure of the electorate who put us in office and have the right to remove us as well. We must lead with one eye on today and the other on the future.
As political leaders, this involves mentoring a corps of young leaders to carry on from where we stop. This has not particularly been a strong point of African leadership. Too often we are suspicious of the young. We marginalise talented youth that we should be grooming, seeing them as threats instead of nurturing them as successors. Archaic Paternalistic attitudes still dominate African leadership models and have aborted countless opportunities for positive change and innovation to move the continent forward. As a new generation of leaders in Kenya, you have an opportunity to change this negative dynamic which is impeding progress in our societies.
As James Freeman Clark said, "A politician thinks of the next election, a statesman, of the next generation". Leadership is a continuum and for our leadership to truly stand the test of time, it must be driven by a trans-generational perspective.
Consider Singapore - a story of development success much admired in Africa. Many of us are familiar with the tale of how the sterling leadership of Lee Kwan Yew steered the small island from a pacific backwater to a first world city-state and one of the best run nations in the world today. But Singapore's success story also owes much to adequate succession planning in which leadership has been taken up by a corps of younger leaders that were initiated into the governing party very early. They now constitute the second generation of leaders charged with consolidating the success story of Singapore.
What we can learn from this and other examples of national success is that nation-building is a trans-generational task. It is not about gifted individuals; it is about leadership traditions based on ideas and values shared across generations. This is what ensures that leadership is continuously refreshed and society is continually renewed. This is how we can create a national success story that can endure for the ages.
-Fayemi, the Ekiti State Governor, delivers this lecture at the International Republican Institutes (IRI), Africa Regional Governance Best Practices Conference in Mombassa, Kenya
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