In the last one week several newspapers, including the Sunday Vanguard of October 24, have published a full page advert by Chief Edwin Clark in which he responded angrily to the campaign by the Northern Political Leadership Forum (NPLF) led by Malam Adamu Ciroma against the decision by President Goodluck Jonathan to contest next year’s presidential election.

In the advert, Chief Clark not only called Malam Adamu “an empty, narrow minded and self-centred bigot,” among several other execrable names. He also dismissed the man as a political paper tiger who has no moral right to call himself a leader.

Malam Adamu, said Chief Clark, has “never been able to contribute to the electoral fortune of neither NPN, NRC nor PDP in (his) zone, state or local government from 1979 till date.” Worse, he said towards the end of his diatribe against the NPLF chairman, “You have never won elections in your life.”

My concern this morning is not the strength or otherwise of Chief Clark’s defence of the president, suffice it to say even the most casual reading of his advert would reveal it as watertight as a seave. Such reading would also reveal the chief’s blindness to facts that get in the way of his somewhat fertile imagination about how Nigerians so much “trust” and “adore” the president.

This piece is also not concerned with the accuracy or otherwise of his attempt to paint Malam Adamu as the villain of the almost palpable tension in the country. Again even the most casual reading of the chief’s advert would reveal that his attempt is a classic case of mistaking effect for cause.

My concern this morning is the chief’s attempt at redefining the concept of leadership. That attempt illustrates, once more, the validity of that famous thesis of the even more famous Africa’s leading novelist, Chinua Achebe, that “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership...The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which is the hallmark of true leadership...”

From even the most casual reading of Clark’s diatribe against Malam Adamu it is safe and fair to conclude that for the chief the hallmark of a true leader is not his moral integrity or competence but his electability and/or his ability to get others elected no matter what and how.

Throughout the chief’s advert he did not for once question Malam Adamu’s moral authority to ask questions about President Jonathan’s integrity and competence. Rather, the malam’s crime, he said repeatedly, was that he lacked any electoral value.

This claim is, of course, not true. The chief, I am sure, need no reminder that Malam Adamu led contestants in the somewhat inconclusive presidential primaries of the National Republican Congress during the transition programme of military president, General Ibrahim Babangida. The chief also surely knew that the malam stood a good chance of beating the clear winner of the Social Democratic Party primaries, late Major-General Shehu Musa Yaradua, in the general elections if the results of the two primaries had not been annulled by the military president.

Chief Clark may argue that this is mere speculation and he would have a point. He cannot, however, deny the fact that Obasanjo won the 1999 election because of support from the North and in spite of widespread opposition from the South generally, that of Obasanjo’s home South-West region in particular. Malam Adamu, as the chief knows all too well, was very prominent among those who led the campaign that got Obasanjo elected.

At any rate even if is true – and it’s not - that Malam Adamu is incapable of delivering votes, Chief Clark should be the last to say so; in spite of his arrogation of the leadership of the Delta region to himself, he has woefully failed to deliver his candidates for the governorship of his native Delta State since 1999.

But I digress. As I said my concern this morning is neither his diatribe against Malam Adamu nor his defence of President Jonathan. My concern is his attempt to re-define leadership as the ability to get elected or to deliver votes. Presumably, how you do it does not matter.

It is this definition of leadership, however, that has landed this country in its terrible mess of being a terribly poor country in the midst of so much natural and human endowment.                

No one, ironically, has, in a sense, put this better than the chief himself. Obasanjo, the chief has said again and again and again is Nigeria’s worst leader to date. In an interview in The Guardian of Sunday September 9, 2007, for example, he accused the former president of being the root of the country’s prevailing predicament.

“I have,” he said, “said so: that the former President (Olusegun Obasanjo) was responsible for all the wrongs and the troubles we are facing today. In the last six months of his administration, he was a terror, dictator and nobody knows the amount of money he made away with. So, as far as we are concerned, Obasanjo is the root of the present evils of this society.” Not many Nigerians would disagree with this portrait of Obasanjo’s presidency.

 The fact, however, is that no Nigerian leader has been able to rig the country’s elections as blatantly as Obasanjo did in 2003 and, worse still, in 2007. By Clark’s reckoning therefore Obasanjo should be the best leader Nigeria has ever had.

Yet it is obvious that one’s electability or ability to deliver votes cannot, on their own, be the hallmark of leadership. Far more important are competence and, even more so, personal integrity.

On these scores Malam Adamu is, by a long stretch, certainly a better leader than his traducer. The proof is there in a comparison of the record of the two in public service going all the way back to the Gowon years between 1966 and 1975 from which the chief emerged as a federal commissioner of information accused of being among the most venal public officers.

In sharp contrast, there has never been the slightest whiff of scandal against Malam Adamu in all his years of public service as minister in various administrations going back to the Second Republic in 1979 and even going further back to his brief governorship of the Central Bank of Nigeria in 1977/78 and his editing, and subsequently managing, the then powerful New Nigerian in the late sixties and early seventies.

To rephrase Achebe’s thesis about the trouble with Nigeria, clearly the country is in its peculiar mess simply and squarely because it has been saddled with leaders like Chief Clark who apparently believe that the end justifies the means.

On Nwodo and Ogbulafor

You like to pick on people’s mistakes but you are a sloppy writer too. Ogbulafor was PDP chairman and not secretary-general like you said in your column (last) Wednesday.

+2348162849366.

I couldn’t agree more with this respondent particularly on this one, more so as I have referred on these pages several times before to Ogbulafor as PDP chairman. My friend and more careful columnist, Newswatch’s Dan Agbese, who also drew my attention to the error, said, jokingly of course, that I should blame it on the (printer’s) devil. Fact is I can only blame it on myself.

My apologies to both Nwodo, the current chairman, and to Ogbulafor who he succeeded.