SERVANT LEADERSHIP: LIVING THE PLEDGE

Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria October Lecture
By PROF. PAT UTOMI

Allow me to take advantage of this opportunity to wish you happy Independence Day. I ask that you kindly permit me to suggest a profitable way of celebrating our dear country’s birthday: deep reflection on why there is such a gap between the promise of 1960 and the ‘reality of 2007 regarding nation building and the quality of life of the average Nigerian.
I will dare to assume that one outcome of such a reflection would include thoughts about the crisis of leadership that has dogged our post-independence history. To say this, however, is to assume that there is a common understanding of what leadership means. Indeed, if the idea or concept of leadership has a problem it is the tendency for people to confuse being in positions of power or authority with being a leader. Position is not equal to leadership. Nigeria could have a president who is not a leader. It should not surprise us therefore that the promise of October 1960 may not have been achieved, as they are the fruits of leadership. If true leadership has eluded us, understanding why growth is slow should not be difficult. But as fads and fashions go in our country, the fancy of the moment is around the idea of leadership and it is centered on the pledge by the Umaru Musa Yar’adua team to be servant leaders.

I have to confess here that when I was asked to give this lecture of that title, I thought the organizers were motivated by the slight controversy on paternity of the idea in the lexicon of Nigerian politics. Most people will recall that I opened my interest in seeking to be elected President with a series of ideas at the core of which was the idea of the servant leader. In fact, I raised the idea in this very hall some three years ago; long before I made the final decision to run at the annual leadership lecture of The Week Magazine, on an occasion during which then Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar, spoke scathingly about the quality of leadership of the ancient regime of which he was deputy leader.

When friends of mine reacted angrily to the use of servant-leader by the Yar’adua/Jonathan campaign and called me to challenge their originality, I laughed it off saying the concept was two thousand years old and that a book titled Servant Leadership had been written 25years ago by a former AT&T Executive, Robert K Greenleaf. I was only a steward of an idea and if someone else found it attractive it should be reason for celebration, not lamentation. I was clear that the original servant leader who washed the feed of his disciples in Palestine two millennia ago was showing us an example to spread as good news.

What is important though is that people truly believe and live what they preach. Let me steal the words of another man, the Roman Pontiff, in saying that the world had had enough of teachers and preachers, what is needed now, are witnesses. If all those currently mouthing platitudes to the idea or Servant Leadership walk their talk a wonderful country my children will grow up in, will merge to my joy. I am persuaded Alhaji Yar’adua desires to be of that mould. The question has to be whether he can affect those around him to be so disposed especially given some of the people around him and traditions of his political party. Their attitude to the House of Representative Contract Scandal is a good signal of how they see these matters. So how do we build a world of servant leadership? To understand how this will happen, we must first understand leadership and the peculiar challenges of nation-building in Nigeria, which makes us require a new kind of leader to produce transformation.

WHAT IS LEADERSHIP?
I have written and spoken so much about this that I run the risk of just repeating myself. I do, fortunately have the privilege of experiencing leadership issues almost on a daily basis and draw from these to add variety and contemporaneity to definition. Certain organizational concepts are still best left to the masters, so we shall turn to them. One of the masters here is a man who served as president of the American Political Science Association, when I was a graduate student in that discipline in the United Stated, James MacGregor Burns. He is the author of the definitive political sociology study of the subject in the book; Leadership. Just as managers turn to the likes of Stephen R. Convey and Jim Collins for the current mantra on the subject, the typical social science scholar would acknowledge James MacGregor Burns contribution. I consider myself fortunate to come from a background in several disciplines that allow me to draw from these competing traditions of defining the phenomenon of leadership, which is much blamed for the unpleasant challenges of our age.

Much talk about leadership deals with goal setting, visioning a desired future, and motivating others to follow in a way that yields synergy of the participating members of the group. But is this all leadership is about? Clearly not. There are many different kinds of role players that have helped accomplish goals with differing consequences for stakeholders.

It is important therefore, to develop a typology of attributes for goal accomplishment. It is in developing standards of knowledge for making vital distinctions between types of leaders that MacGregor Burns excels. He starts out with the illustration of a man who called himself “The Leader”, Adolph Hitler, and concludes that Hitler, with his mobilisation skills, was a tyrant and that a tyrant and leader are polar opposites. This is largely because leadership seeks to advance the interest of the followership and to do so in a manner that is sustainable. Tyrants on the other hand crush the dignity of the followers and, like Hitler’s, Third Reich, tend to build castles that come collapsing not long after. You may therefore wish to ask yourself what kind of dominant traits we have found in those who occupy power positions in Nigeria, especially when we consider Robert Dahl’s famous definition of power from 1956 as “the ability of A to make B do what B would not ordinarily want to do”. The emphasis on power, rather than leadership skills, is the reason Nigerians often tend to show so much antipathy to the big men they pretended to show much adulation towards, almost immediately they are stripped of the instruments power.

But the key to the typologies of MacGregor Burns is not so much in the distinction between leaders and tyrants as in the basic types of Leadership being Transactional and Transforming Leadership. Burns says the relationship between leaders and followers is usually transactional. You vote for me, or mobilise votes for me and I give you electric power or water, when I am elected. In Nigeria, where there is a major disconnect between state and society; the power elite and the people of power make little effort at meet their side of the transaction bargain, especially since both of them and many of the cynical and apathetic voters believe that whether they vote one way or the other those who have power will manipulate the outcome to their favour.

If in its pure form of faithful transactions, the transactional leadership frame is perceived as deficient in moving society to a higher moral and material order; you can imagine why Nigeria persists in under performance with the dominance of a less than reliable transactions culture, in giving direction to society.

The second basic leadership form is transforming leadership. Burns says of it that “while more complex (it) is, more potent” “The transforming leader looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower. The result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents”.

It is clear therefore that many of the management schools, like Covey which emphasize the idea of a sense of service, in leadership, clearly see the place of moral authority or the leader as a moral agent.
Several years ago, I was influenced enough by the ideas of Stephen R. Covey and the obvious crisis of leadership in Nigeria to found an NGO: The Centre for Values in Leadership (CVL). The thrust of its work has been to build in undergraduates and young professionals, habits that make leaders, whether they be in industry, civil society, government and politics or in faith institutions.

Stephen Covey had proposed two dimensions to effective leadership – knowledge, and a sense of service. In the work of the CVL, we have sought to provide young people knowledge through a variety of vehicles; and to build in them habits of giving of themselves in a sacrificial giving of self in service that we chose was cleaning up poor urban neighbourhoods sunk into squalor. This has, in fact, led some to think the CVL is an environmental NGO.

The lesson here is that the moral agent dimension of leadership is present in the Stephen R. Covey dimensions of leadership. How many of us consider a lot of those in positions of power and authority in Nigeria today as moral agents? If they were, corruption would not be the cancer that it is in our country, neither would spending for prerequisites ostensibly ‘befitting’ the status of those who have gone to serve, be so large, that it is threatening economic growth in terms of the allocation between recurrent and capital expenditure. This is made even more horrific by the kind of rationalizations about why principal officers of the National Assembly should spend scandalous amounts renovating houses, and on their welfare, in a country with up to 70% of the population domiciled below the poverty line even with unprecedented revenue inflows from prolonged high oil prices driven largely by the economic upsurge in China and India. It reminds me so much of a paper I prepared last year for DFID with two colleagues from Oxford on the political economy of growth in Nigeria. We argued that the political system does not reward or punish politicians for how they improve voters living conditions for citizens but for loyalty to political figures. It was understanding that growth took a beating as real incentive for our policies to produce growth was low.

The servant leader is, in the main, a transforming leader steeped in a sense of service such that he stoops to connect to the followership and advance the best interest of those followers. Why then do we have a deficit of such people in the leadership arena, and how has this impacted performance and the promise of October 1st, 1960.

WHY DO WE HAVE A DEFICIT OF PEOPLE WITH A HIGH SENSE OF SERVICE AND HOW HAS THIS AFFECTED NIGERIA’S MATCH TO NATIONHOOD

The great tragedy of the Nigerian experience is that many of colonial era nationalists and immediate post-independence politicians had a high sense of service. This is why the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Premier of the Northern Region, his Eastern counterpart, Dr. M. I. Okpara, Dr. Akanu Ibiam and the Prime Minister, Sir Tafawa Balewa died with little material possession to their names. In the case of Chief Obafemi Awolowo who may not have served with the mark of pauperdom, the intensity of his commitment to the cause of his followers was such that immortality came to him while he still lived. It is instructive about servant leadership that these men have attained immortality in the consciousness of many Nigerian, are still reverentially remembered, but many of those from only a few years ago, in similar roles, are already lost to the memories of even people who knew them. So what went wrong? How did we go from the examples of these iconic servant leaders to politicians Nigerians are so cynical about?

Somewhere along the line a combination of factors, including collapsing education system that failed us in terms of values education; military rule, and oil, triggered a crisis of values that continues to torment Nigerians. Those in authority, lost moral authority and, without the strengthening of the moral agency, lost the hook to followership that is the anchor of social progress. Culture matters, and in Nigeria, culture has been in decay. Culture is, of course, not the only element in the quest for progress. In my book, WHY NATIONS ARE POOR, I have offered a framework identifying six interdependent sets of variables that determine national progress. They are policy choice made by government; human capital and venturing orientation. The inability to see the strong relationship between culture, leadership and institutions and how, these constitute the bedrock of social progress, is, in my view, the reason Nigeria has not provided the environment for the emergence of Servant Leaders who can perform the transforming role that the Lee Kuan Yew’s played in Singapore and others like Mahathir Mohammed, in Malaysia, and elsewhere.

It is noteworthy, for our discussion of servant-leaders that they were not lonesome heroes charging in to set the people free. They were part of teams of servant leaders, a strand, woven into a tapestry that became a carpet the ordinary people stepped on, to be elevated from poverty and ignorance. They just became symbols of that cultural revolution, as the tap leaders. Servant leaders come in bundles, brooms, not broomsticks that can be broken; but the breeze can start with one man, and then blow up a revival in the land.

Culture may be in decay but we still manage to find examples of servant leaders in this culture. I want to apologize about the example I am about to use, partly because it is drawn from a faith and people are sometimes sensitive to faith based examples. Even the man I will use as an example may be shocked to know that I drew this lesson from encountering him years ago.

He is better known from the high horse, pontificating and challenging political leaders to be accountable to the people, so many do not know this point of him.

Many years ago, the Parish Priest at the Church of the Assumption, Falomo, was on vacation. Every morning the catholic Archbishop of Lagos set out from his cathedral before 6 am to come and stand in for the Priest. I found it peculiar that he would take that kind of trouble instead of designating some young Priest to fill-in. One day, I asked him how come he was putting himself through that. He very casually indicated that his real role was that of an assistance Parish Priest. I discussed it with a colleague who reminded me that one of the prelate’s routine chores was saying children’s mass in one of the high density neighbourhoods on the Island. That is not the typical role imaged of the Catholic prelate. I never forgot it. It has shaped how I look at Anthony Cardinal Okogie, for many years.

THE SERVANT LEADER
The recent issue of a 25th anniversary edition of Robert Greenleaf’s book SERVANT LEADERSHIP opens with a well considered Foreword by Stephen R. Covey. In it, he establishes the character of the servant-leaders apart from others is that they live by their conscience – the inward moral sense of what is right and what is wrong. That one quality is the difference between leadership that works and leadership-like servant, leadership that endures. There is a mass of evidence that shows that this moral-sense, this conscience, this inner light is a universal phenomenon”.

The power of the servant-leader lies in his capacity, through empathy, to create a shared vision, inspiring the followership to stretch and reach deeper within, making available the varied talents and giftedness of each to attain synergy that yield quantum leaps in goal direction.

This is how miracle economics happened. Who in 1965 would imagine what Singapore became? But it requires a connectedness between the people and the leadership. That glue is usually provided by such regime legitimating attributes as free and fair elections and a governmental philosophy that place a premium on the dignity of the human person. On both of these, our post colonial history scores us extremely low.

Indeed the most striking, and frightening phenomenon of contemporary Nigerian life, for me, is the case with which we split into two nations in one country. Whether it be the powerful coalition of rent-seeking businessmen and a parasitic political class, against an impoverished majority, as the educated middle class desperately heads out to Europe, Americas and even elsewhere in Africa; or the yawning chasm between rural and urban Nigeria, I discovered while campaigning during the last year. I must admit that the greatest benefit I derived from being perhaps the only Presidential candidate that engaged in retail campaigns, traveling the length and breath of the country by road is the education on the injustice to the rural poor and a real discovery of the nature of the abandoned rural majority. Servant leaders bridge such divides so they may truly serve and lead towards the Common Good.

URGENT TASKS BEFORE NIGERIA’S SERVANT LEADERS

Should the imperative of grooming a generation of servant leaders dawn on us and we were to succeed at that, what could be the task before them? A sundry list can be very easily prepared for a country that has been afflicted by a recursive economy, a brain drain; youth despair, infrastructure deficit of great magnitudes, collapse of manufacturing, and agriculture in great need of revival. But there should be priorities.

Our new servant leaders must first be concerned with educating us into a mind set change. Nigeria is hostage of the wrong values and poor attitude to doing things right for effectiveness in matters of why a huge knowing-doing gap and poor attitude prevents effective implementation of policies, to building a work ethic, a new way is required in Nigeria.

The servant leaders need to inspire emphasis on finding solutions to such issues that crush the dignity of the human person as unemployment, healthcare and education, with massive development of infrastructure as one path to attaining the objectives of job creation. Reviving manufacturing, perhaps with enclaves (Industrial Parks), where the infrastructure challenges that have resulted in de-industrialization obvious in the drop of manufacturing contribution to GDP from nearly 14 percent to about 4 percent, can be contained, will have to be priority.

To do this will require tripartite partnership between government, civil society and the private sector with foreign partners as tonic, in a manner we have hitherto not managed. This should bridge the divide in the great debate between Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly on why growth has been slow in our part of the world.

THE SERVANT LEADER AND THE NEW NIGERIA

A habit of sacrificial giving, service for the good of others, may seem like extreme altruism by people so uncaring for themselves. That is probably not an accurate picture. People with a heart of service may just be people with greater sense of deferred gratification. In contemporary Nigerian culture that is obsessively instant-gratification oriented, and grotesque in its adulation of money the servant leader delaying gratification may seem unusual. Careful reflection may suggest that he or she is the wiser. So how is this deferred gratification harvested. I partially answered that question in a 1991 interview that appeared in Mr. Magazine in 1992; I talked about the essence of wise living being the pursuit of immortality. Material immortality belongs to those remembered fondly long after their time because of good they have done, accomplishments that remain evergreen or words they had written down that capture their creative imagination for all generations. The other, spiritual immortality, for people of faith, was about living life such that they see God face to face, enjoying forever, that beatific vision. The good ones attain both material and spiritual immortality.

The joys of the benefits of service re-echoes in a book I found much joy in writing about, twelve years ago. Enough has been said about my reluctance to accept the invitation of Dr. Chi Akporji to write an autobiography because many younger people desired insight into how I have conducted myself. Having chosen what I thought was the more modest enterprise of reflecting on Nigeria through my upbringing, I found the them of service as the central force of our humanity hard to resist. The book was, therefore, appropriately titled: To Serve is To Live.

In that book, I celebrate as one of my most preferred gifts from my formation experience, a practice of uttering as my first word, every morning, as I rise from bed, the Latin word, Serviem – I will serve. To serve is to Live and if Nigeria will find life, we must learn to serve and to raise a generation of servant leaders. In nearly two decades of service, every morning I have come to believe. Many more can do so even more passionately.

Servant leaders do not use up public funds in the welfare of self when society is in high need. Why does the country of the “big man” mark our public culture in Nigeria when our neighbours like Ghana manage a life of public modesty so that public resources are used where they count, the benefit of the most vulnerable of society and the advance of the Common Good.

I pray and hope that the Yar’adua example is not only a personal commitment to servant-leadership but the moral courage to rid from around him those not so concerned, and the passion to affect culture thus, for as Daniel Patrick Moynihan reminds us “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that is responsible for the progress of a society. But the central liberal truth is that politics, (leadership) can change a culture and save it from itself”. Let our leaders influence culture so, that we may see progress.

As for me, I have stood close to the edge of the cliff, seen the great deep and drifted into the future. I can imagine a Nigeria of servant leaders playing Nehemiah to prop-up the falling walls of Nigeria, erecting a society that is mainly just and fair, protecting the weak and providing abundant opportunities for the strong, to reach the highest heights, lifting Nigeria from the land of failed promise to one that inspires pride in its people. But first we must, all of us learn to serve, for to serve is to live and to truly live is to know the joy of service and the immortality that is its heritage.

I thank you for your kind attention.

PATRICK OKEDINACHI UTOMI, P.HD
2nd October 2007
Lagos, Nigeria

Mass Anger Against Corruption

Most Nigerians I know do not take corruption or corrupt people lightly. They come hard on them with all the weight they can garner. What with the angry ink flowing freely from newspaper editorials and their columnists! Below is one of them. It is published in the Punch newspaper of 2nd October 2007. The columnist, Azubuike Ishiekwene, counsels the Speaker of the House of Representative, Madam Olubunmi Etteh, that:

It’s time to go, Madam

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Patricia Etteh, said that the report by the Idoko Panel that investigated the award of the N238m contract to renovate her house was not an indictment. I do not doubt that the report may have read like a nice testimonial from a convent. But apart from the speaker and the few around her who will milk this mess till the very end, every single day that she spends in office from now on can only further damage the integrity of the House and compound her own shame. Her position is no longer tenable and she must now leave – not she alone, but also her deputy, Babangida Nguroje, and the civil servants who actively aided and abetted the disgraceful proceedings of the last few weeks.

When it was first reported that Speaker Etteh had approved a contract to renovate her house at 48 times the value of the same job four years ago and nearly 15 times its value in 2005, she was not even around to answer any questions. Shortly after the House was inaugurated in June, the speaker plunked down N70m from the purse of the House for a cross continental trip that began in South Africa, through London and finally ended in the US.

Her election as the first female Speaker in Nigeria’s parliament was a big deal and the world needed to know that this woman from humble beginnings, the stone that the builders rejected, had finally become the head of the corner. She marked her birthday in the US in such a grand, miliki style that the resonance drowned all the early stirrings of trouble in the House.

Of course, there was no shortage of acolytes quite happy to turn black into white. The Eziuche Ubani media committee tried to downplay the scandal, while the Office of the Clerk of the National Assembly bought acres of newspaper space in which it not only added salt to the public’s injury, but also shamelessly tried to confuse the issues by claiming that it wasn’t just the speaker’s house but a ‘cluster of houses’ that was involved in the renovation; and that, in fact, it was not a renovation, but an ‘upgrade,’ at a lower price than had been bandied in the press.

But now we know better. The Idoko Panel reluctantly appointed by the speaker and relentlessly under pressure from her office during the two-week investigations, has said, unanimously, that the process of the award of the contract was marred by serious procedural lapses. Contrary to the requirement of the Public Procurement Act, the contract was neither advertised, nor was a quorum constituted before it was awarded. The bill of quantities and the technical drawings that ought to have informed a rigorous and competitive process were not filed and some of the companies that got the contract were not even registered as required by the law. On top of this, the speaker’s personal aide, Iquo Minima, who gained notoriety in the last House for slapping a fellow legislator, Emmanuel Bwacha, won the N71m to provide the furnishings. The speaker had approved this sweet deal and other contracts for the renovation six days before she hastily constituted another meeting to ratify the decisions. Her defence that she was misguided is not unlikely, but is at best shallow and at worst irresponsible, given the fact that one of her personal aides benefitted directly from the contract. The whole thing was a sham by any standards, which the speaker, in her sober moment, would find hard to explain, even if it had been a contract she personally awarded for the renovation of any of the hairdressing salons in her two houses in Abuja.

The speaker has blamed her woes on legislators who were unhappy with her shuffling of the House committees. She has blamed implacable foes in the opposition, and even a few former and serving governors in her party. She has privately blamed it on chauvinism and a sinister ethnic agenda. She has blamed everything and everyone, but herself.

It’s not impossible that her enemies have got her where they wanted; yet her case strikes me like that of the man who doused himself with petrol and then sought warmth by the fireside. A little soul-searching might help.

Within days of her assuming office, she restored the full budget of the Speaker’s office, removing the 40 per cent cutback imposed by her predecessor. Her office now gets N125m quarterly, while each Rep gets between N10m and N12m. Six months before her predecessor left, the House had bought two S-Class Mercedes Benz cars for him. When Madam stepped in, she not only wanted a massage toy worth N98m, she also wanted two brand-new jeeps, each worth about N12.3m.

The speaker is not new to trouble. Around 2005, the House had asked her firm to supply laptops. She did but later tried to get the whole stuff out of the store through the backdoor. The Ethics Committee headed by Mohammed Bello investigated the matter, but could not finish its work because Obasanjo’s Aso Rock, through the Speaker, jumped in to save Etteh. The matter was swept under the carpet. We don’t know if she repented but recent events have shown that the demons have simply refused to let go. The female parliamentarians group, which she used to head, collapsed because women, being women, had a hard time understanding what Etteh was doing with the funds.

We’ve been moaning about how we ended up with an Etteh on our hands; yet not even one who has eaten the head of a tortoise would fail to be moved by the story of her fall. Etteh, the kid from Ikire in Osun State, started her working life as a receptionist/typist with the Ibadan-based engineering consulting firm, Etteh and Aro. She slowly but steadily picked her way through work-a-day life and Nigeria’s rugged political terrain. After her training abroad as a beauty therapist, her moment of anchor appears to have been when Bode George became the military governor of Ondo State. He has remained her godfather and was quite willing to forgive her initial, wayward sojourn in the AD on whose platform she was elected into parliament in 1999.

Of course, her penance was not complete until she defected to the ruling PDP. As Leader of the PDP South-West and Deputy Whip in the last House, she was a remarkable diva and arrowhead for Obasanjo’s third term ambition; it was the least she could do for George and for her new father figure from Ota. Her election as Speaker was a rare and spectacular reward of loyalty by a party famous for its treachery. In spite of the dark clouds over her past, however, I desperately hoped that Etteh would make good, and perhaps become the poster girl and symbol of hope for all who may have hard a difficult past. But alas, that, obviously, was not to be. We are confronted with a congenital liar and a brazen manipulator of the levers of power. Some have argued that she should get away lightly because she had nothing to gain personally from the transaction and that it was, after all, only a procedural breach. That’s nonsense. When Chuba Okadigbo was removed as President of the Senate, it was not because he had profited personally from the contracts that landed him in trouble; it was for what became famously known anticipatory approval. Contrary to the Senate rules, he approved the contracts before the funds were appropriated. Once a public officer makes a fatal error of judgment, there is a heavy price to pay.

But sadly, the speaker can’t get it. She cannot understand that it’s not about money, godfathers or about twisting the system around her fancy nails. Yes, such a mess crops up around the world from time to time, whether in form of Jack Abramoff in the US, Tessa Jowell in the UK, or Mbulelo Goniwe in South Africa. The difference, however, is that while elsewhere legislatures are striving to clean up their act, become more transparent and make parliament as good and as honest as the people it represents, our system appears to be stuck in the mode of secrecy and primitive accumulation.

The House must be commended for yet another act of self-cleansing in its journey to become an institution that we can all be proud of. But that process will suffer a fatal blow if Madam Speaker, her deputy, and others involved in the scam are allowed to stay one day longer than October 16.