Stunt leadership: Aliyu’s example

 Stunt leadership: Aliyu’s example

Fresh-in-the-saddle Sokoto State Governor Ahmad Aliyu, last week, broke with the conventional mould of the conduct of power as we are familiar with in this country. He paid an impromptu visit to a government hospital on a fact-finding mission; and what’s more, he went in a disguise and rode in a tricycle to get there. It was a populist foray outside the conventional mould, because their excellencies typically ride in motorcades with sirens blaring to sites where reception parties had advance information they were coming and would have put up veneers that accord with, or at least border on what would gratify the August visitor. Most times, those veneers are deceptive and only momentarily dissemble the stark reality that ordinary members of the public encounter in transactions with facilities in question.

The Sokoto governor toed a different path. He reportedly arrived at Sokoto Specialist Hospital unannounced last Monday following complaints by state residents about collapsed state of service delivery at the facility, and he spent considerable time getting first-hand experience of ongoings there. A statement by the governor’s spokesman said he rode to the hospital in a tricycle, with the stunt visit enabling him to personally appraise the hospital’s dilapidated structures, erratic power supply, dearth of manpower and lack of functional medical equipment among other challenges. He was also able to get first-hand information from hospital workers. 

The statement cited Governor Aliyu saying: “I was surprised with what I saw during my visit  to the hospital, which lasted four hours; it afforded me the opportunity to see things for myself. Patients and their relatives are subjected to all kinds of hazardous situations owing to dirty environment and lack of functional  equipment at the medical facility. Patients’ relatives rely solely on alternative sources of power due to erratic electricity supply in the hospital.” The governor added that he had directed the management of the hospital to see him for further discussions on how to remedy the ugly situation. Agency reports also cited a top management source at the hospital saying the rundown state of things owed to the failure of past administrations in the state to release allocations to the institution when due.

There are many things to say for the prankishness of Aliyu, who took the reins of leadership in Sokoto barely three weeks before his outing. His going to the hospital in a tricycle indicated a daring affectation for the people he leads. Many in the Nigerian leadership elite, including legislative representatives and council officials who should be close to the grassroots, go around with security fortification that keeps them out of touch with the people they represent and suggest they indeed detest the rabble in the manner Shakespeare’s Coriolanus detested the Roman plebeians. Then, Aliyu’s choice to see things for himself helped unquantifiably in exposing the true state of things, because if he had stayed away and merely asked for reports, he would most certainly have been fed lies about the status quo. Besides, those hospital workers he was opportune to speak with would never have gotten their voices heard by the governor, while the voices in position to be heard would have masked the reality from him to the extent that it profits them. If you bother to check, you may find that allocations that reportedly weren’t getting to the hospital may not be for failure of past state governors to approve some funds, but rather that such funds were intercepted upon being disbursed. Meanwhile, their excellencies sitting cocooned behind mahogany desks would not know any better as the public languishes under dilapidation of services arising from contrived neglect. The derring-do approach by Aliyu circumscribes distortive mediation and gets ungarnished facts to the surface.

The greatest tragedy of governance would be if the prankishness of the Sokoto governor was all that – prankishness and symbolism; if not much gets done to remedy the challenges at the hospital after his visit; and if administering the hospital remain business as usual. It would indeed be tragic if the new governor enacted that whole act for mere dramatic effect and to get attention, rather than this being a philosophy of governance for him. In other words, we wait to see that it wasn’t mere initial zeal that will soon fizzle out into insulatory comfort of routine governance. 

“Stunt populism has value if it contributes to delivering good governance”

There are examples across the world of leaders who were noted for adventure in their bid to get the pulse of the reality of the people they rule over. Soon after attaining the throne in 1999, King Abdullah II of Jordan was reported stunting in covert exploits to identify with the Jordanian masses. At one time he posed as a taxi passenger, spending two hours watching life unfold on Amman’s often chaotic streets. Reports said for his taxi ride, the then 37-year-old monarch wore the kind of beat-up clothes an ordinary Jordanian would put on in the harsh economic clime. His disguise was so convincing that he avoided detection even when he and the supposed cabdriver, who was a palace aide, stopped to ask a policeman for directions and later, eager to test local law enforcement, made what palace sources called “a manoeuvre or two that was illegal.” The conduct of policemen, who reportedly stopped the errant taxi and scolded the ‘passenger’ for not wearing a seat belt, but were talked out of issuing a ticket, did not help the reputation of the force seen by many Jordanians as less than competent. And King Abdullah took all that in. 

At another time, the Jordanian king reportedly disguised as a television reporter, complete with fake white beard and Arab robes, as he and an aide armed with a video camera went to inspect Jordan’s free trade zone about which investors had bitterly complained of suffocating bureaucracy and red tape. During that outing, the monarch had to ditch his disguise when trade zone officials obstructed the camera team, saying they could not work without a permit. In response, according to reports, the king pulled off his fake beard to reveal his real, stubbly and black one. If nothing else, he thereby served notice – to the public and to businessmen, to bureaucrats and other members of the Jordanian power elite – that he was willing to break the mould to shake things up.

In more contemporary times there was Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who in 2013 spent an afternoon working as a thinly disguised taxi driver in Oslo to gauge Norwegians’ views on a range of issues. Even in autocratic China, there was once a report that President Xi Jinping dumped his private car and hopped into a cab. He reportedly probed the driver’s views on air pollution before disclosing his true identity, saying: “Everyone is equal, and I’m from the grassroots too.” And British politicians are fond of appearing as being in touch with the people by taking public transportation. Prime Ministers Tony Blair, David Cameron and Boris Johnson at different times travelled on London’s underground network accompanied by photographers. As premier, Johnson was as well fond of riding bicycles to neighbourhood grocery stores to do personal shopping. Of course, some members of the Nigerian power elite have also at different times been spotted in populist posturing, like when they commingle and eat corn off the streets with the rabble crowd. Only that much of such showing occurred during electioneering when votes were being hunted; outside of electioneering periods, power actors get walled off by power from easy access to the people.

But there is no doubt that stunt populism has value if it contributes to delivering good governance. It would be nice, for instance, if Nigerian power actors come down every now and then from the Olympus and get the street experience of the impact of their exercise of power, just like ordinary Nigerians do. It is a win-win effect such practice would have for both the leader and the led: it would garner emotional support for the leader who would be seen as being in touch with the people; and because the leader is really in touch, policies would be enacted with empathic touch as would succour the people. Let me be clear that the idea being canvassed is not to stage vacuous shows of populism just to win spontaneous applause; because where you have such happening, it is more or less like watching a nice theatre movie: when you go out of the theatre, you get hit with the hard facts.