As the end of politics as we know it upon us? Put in another way, the question becomes a double-barrel poser. Is the current refugee crisis in Europe and the poor leadership response to it so far a result of the devaluation of politics and the consequent attenuation of leadership? And is the continent of Africa even more poorly served by this global poverty of leadership?
It is surely a remarkable historical spectacle to find European leadership in the main listlessly fretting over and enormously frightened by the ultimate logic of globalization, a phenomenon which has benefitted their people and western civilization for so long. Could it be that nobody ever foresaw the fact that the abolition of time and space and the consequent hybridization of global populace would one day lead to a human armada which will threaten the very foundation of the nation-state paradigm which western civilization has foisted on global space from Afghanistan to New Zealand?
You cannot eat your cake and have it. Famously described as “the universalization of the particular and the particularization of the universal”, globalization, like the internationalization of slavery in all its dire particularities, has served the metropolitan centre very well. But when the universal decides to converge on the particular that decides to universalize—in this case western modernity and civilization—everybody should be game. By this logic, one cannot and must not be in a position to choose which aspects of globalization to obey or to reject.
Prosperity also has its adversities. Those who lament the absence of great leadership in the west are not doing the proper analysis. Great leadership does not just emerge out of nowhere and from a great vacuum. It is usually as a response to deep systemic stress and institutional dysfunction. Charles de Gaulle always averred that in her greatest moment of need, France always throws up a great leader. As examples: Joan of Arc, Charlemagne, Napoleon Bonaparte and, by honorable inference, Charles de Gaulle himself.
In the west, the great crisis of nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century which led to two world wars threw up exceptional leaders: Woodrow Wilson, the two Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Mao Tse Tung, Chou en Lai, Ho Chi Minh and a host of others. If we are not to slander ourselves, the corollary decolonizing project also threw up a string of African avatars: Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Senghor, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Ahmed Ben Bella, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Herbert Macaulay , Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello ,Nelson Mandela and many others.
The paradox of the current leadership paralysis in Europe stems from the fact that it is an end product of exemplary leadership of the past. When a society has solved, in the main, the problems of food, shelter and security for the populace, when the political class, despite wide ideological divergences, converges on certain core principles and a cardinal consensus which drive politics, such societies run on an auto-pilot which does not require great exertion and political imagination.
In Great Britain for example, no matter how rabidly and radically leftwing a party claims to be, it cannot afford to toy with royalty and constitutional monarchy. By the same token, no rightwing structural reengineering however extreme and daring can do away with the abiding fundament of the welfare state. For the foreseeable future in America, no party in its right sense will dare put up a pure Muslim as its presidential candidate.
Prosperity and the great industrial strides taken by western societies in the last century have led to the industrialization of politics itself or what we propose as political Fordism. Just as the Fordist factory overcame the problems of mass consumption through division of labour which turns the factory worker into a robotic cyborg without much initiative, political Fordism turns the laboratory of politics into a circus of mediocrity through the mass production of leadership wannabes.
These are Pavlovian political pigmies, creeps of consensus and minimalist managers who are just there to oversee the odd sneeze and stutter in the production belt and the occasional lubing of the engine. Theirs is simply to maintain the status quo and not to engage in any harebrained scheme which may bring the belt and the illusionist fantasia to a shuddering halt. Just get on with it and stop whining about paradise on earth. The order of illusion requires the illusion of order.
Yet as prosperity brings about greater inequality and greater inequity of opportunity , as the great tide of globalization brings hordes of the great unwashed to the banquet table, as contradictions open up between actual lived experience and the abracadabra of progress, the veil of illusion is torn off. Loud murmurings and great tremors rumble through the land.
In America, the contradictions have opened the door for Donald Trump’s extreme rightwing hell-raising and Hitlerite hysterics. In Great Britain, it has led directly to the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn, a classic contrarian and leftwing rabble-rouser, who has no time for elite consensus or conciliation.
The historic wager is that as the storm breaks in the west and unless there is a dire emergency which puts matters beyond the reach of the populace, the wise and pragmatic voters of Europe and America will choose the golden mean and the middle way out between the xenophobic ranting of Donald Trump and the Communist phantasmagoria of Corbyn. But that may merely be akin to postponing the evil day.
Postponing the evil day is also a strategy of containment, that is until the evil day refuses to be postponed a day longer. The paradox of human endeavours is that the evil day often opens the door to real visionary leadership. It is not by accident that the greatest government thrown up in Britain in the last century, Churchill’s War Cabinet, was a product of intricate elite pacting and consensus beyond popular franchise.
In Nigeria, the absence of the core principles which drives a nation and the lack of elite cardinal consensus which guides the immanent destiny of an organic community of citizens with equal rights have continued to aid the devaluation of politics and the attenuation of sterling leadership. There are encouraging signs of proactive leadership in post-PDP Nigeria. But it is also becoming clearer by the day that unless something is done about the architectural configuration of the nation, we may well be jogging in the jungle.
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