On September 30 this year, Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama
was a guest at Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta where I teach. He
came here to deliver a public lecture to crown the “Year
of Ghana” country program, a year-long exploration
of the history, culture, and peoples of Ghana through lectures, exhibitions,
visits, etc. at KSU.
When I got an invitation to attend the public lecture (which
also featured a Q and A session), I was reluctant to go. I’d frankly grown
tired of listening to witless buffoons from Africa coming to make a fool of
themselves and their countries before Western audiences in the name of
delivering public lectures. I didn’t know what to expect of the Ghanaian president
because I had no familiarity with his pedigree, so I chose to err on the side
of cynicism.
But a friend dragged me to the event at the last minute. I’m
glad I attended it. President Mahama turned out to be one of the most inspiring
and knowledgeable presidents one can ever wish to meet. He was a superb orator
who was also thoughtful, incisive, insightful and supremely self-assured.
His speech was about the “role of democratic governance in
sustainable economic development in Ghana,” but he veered off on high-minded
intellectual excursions on the discourses of Afro-pessimism, on the
perniciousness of alterity, on the role of dominant historical narratives in
the construction and reconstruction of the consciousness and image of a people,
etc. The speech was certainly conscious of its audience because it read like a
paper at an academic conference. Its profundity and high-flown, intellectually
fashionable phraseology impressed students and professors alike.
Well, you might say he didn’t deserve much credit for the speech
because it was written for him by his speech writers, but one couldn’t help but
admire the smoothness, naturalness, and rhetorical dexterity of his delivery.
He was earnest, eloquent, and confident. But his true brilliance came out even
more boldly during the Q and A session. He answered questions from professors
and students with ease, grace, panache, depth, conviction, and creative humor.
Everyone in the hall was bowled over by his brilliance,
humility, and intellectual agility. This was evident from the rapturous
applauses and good-hearted guffaws that greeted his responses to questions. I
came away from the lecture proud of and overawed by the alertness and fecundity
of the Ghanaian president’s mind. All of us Africans in the lecture hall raised
our heads high.
While basking in the euphoric afterglow of the Ghanaian
president’s brilliant performance, I couldn’t help recalling Nigeria’s then
Acting President Goodluck Jonathan’s first official visit to America, which I
wrote about in an April 17, 2010 article titled “Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, that was Embarrassing.” Among
other things, I observed that in his speech and during the Q and A session at
the Council on Foreign Relations, President Jonathan “couldn’t articulate a
coherent thought, hardly made a complete sentence, went off on inconsequential
and puerile tangents, murdered basic grammar with reckless abandon, repeated
trifles ad nauseam, was embarrassingly stilted, and generally looked and talked
like a timid high school student struggling to remember his memorized lines in
a school debate.” I concluded that Jonathan “came across as unfathomably
clueless.”
I certainly would never have attended the public lecture at my
school—or anywhere else for that matter— if President Jonathan was the guest. I
would never be able to survive the embarrassment of listening to a barely
literate president who can’t even read a speech much less answer unscripted
questions from students and professors.
President Mahama of Ghana has only a bachelor’s degree
while Nigeria’s president claims to have a Ph.D. Nigerians like to
describe ignorant people with grandiose paper qualifications as “educated
illiterates.” I’ve heard that phrase used several times to describe President
Jonathan. Well, I think it is more appropriate to call him a highly
credentialed ignoramus—if he indeed has a Ph.D.—than to call him an “educated
illiterate; it is unfair to mention “educated” in the same sentence with
“President Goodluck Jonathan.” I know this sounds harsh, but it’s true.
I’m aware that the usual line of counter-attack from defenders
of mediocrity in Nigeria would be that I am hung up on appearance at the
expense of substance. Beautiful, confident verbal delivery is not a good
measure of leaders’ effectiveness. That is certainly true, except that
President Jonathan, apart from being an inconceivably uninspiring and colorless
president, is also notoriously ineffective. I would have been one of the
staunchest defenders of his seeming illiteracy and depthlessness if he had a
clue what governance entails. Alas, he does not; he has not the vaguest idea
what it means to truly govern—much, to be fair to him, like many of his
predecessors. So we have the tragedy of being burdened with a leader who
neither inspires confidence nor knows what it means to lead.
For inexplicable reasons, while Nigeria’s elites have a habit of
choosing the worst in their ranks to lead the country, Ghanaian elites are
infinitely more discriminatory in their choice of leaders. I know of no
Ghanaian leader in recent memory who isn’t intelligent, inspiring, confident,
and well-spoken. That’s why Ghana has always been a far more progressive
society than Nigeria.
However much we might wish it weren’t true, the reality is that
there is a link between inspirational leadership and national growth.
When will modern Nigeria produce an inspirational president, a
president we all can be proud of anywhere?
Tags
Politics
Ummmm! Food for thought,
ReplyDeleteWe will elect a good leader when we stop fooling ourself. It was clear Jonathan can never be a good president. When he can't prove himself after 2 years of Yaradua.
ReplyDeleteWhich way NIGERIA? Which way to go?
ReplyDelete...And to crown it all, he married Patience. Who is the better of the two of them - Patie and Goodluck?
ReplyDeleteSpeaking nglish fluently does not make a good leader. A man with good leadership qualities can still perform well whether he speaks english well or not.Leadership involves brain work.
ReplyDelete