Panacea to Chronic Leadership Failure

Also published in DAILY TRUST

Despite its shortcomings and sometimes unfairness in dealing with issues, the United Nations through its most important platform i.e. the Security Council has succeeded in preventing and checking various incidences of systematic human right abuse, genocide and other crimes against humanity perpetrated by some regimes against their own civilians.

Ordinarily according to its own charter, individual countries’ sovereignties should always be respected, which clearly outlaws interference in any country’s internal affairs. However, knowing how some unscrupulous regimes could abuse their powers and capitalize on such provision to subject their own citizens to misery, the UN considers some particular systematic excesses against vulnerable civilians grievous enough to warrant its intervention in order to check it and rescue the civilians. Likewise it can intervene to protect the citizens if the regime proves unable to protect their lives and properties.

Intervention into a sovereign country represents the last measure in the list of the punitive measures applied by the UN, which range from diplomatic pressure, targeted sanction against some individuals in the accused regimes, partial sanction against the regime, general sanction and military intervention, depending on the gravity, circumstances and sometimes vested interests surrounding a particular case in question.

Unfortunately however, vested interests of particularly the major powers have often influenced the UN policies and operations, although realistically speaking (not necessarily idealistically) it is quite predictable in view of the human nature. But in any case, generally speaking its role is much better than none, for only God knows what the world would have been today without such deterrent diplomatic, economic and military disciplinary measures.

Nevertheless, I believe it is high time the world through the UN also considered systematic culture of corruption, gross leadership incompetence and bad governance amongst other things severe enough to warrant international interference in any affected country. After all, it is obvious that wherever such crimes are entrenched and left unchecked, the vast majority of the citizens remain in perpetual misery.

This is pretty necessary and indeed long overdue because just as a despot and cruel regime abuses the fundamental rights of its own citizens, causes their displacement and even commits genocide against them, a corruption-ridden and incompetent regime equally perpetrates the same though in a gradual but sustained manner.

In Nigeria for instance, the repercussion of the deep-rooted culture of invasive official corruption and gross leadership incompetence over the decades is not only very obvious to behold but actually too painful to endure. The number of people who die of preventable diseases every year, which they catch as a result of inhabiting unhealthy and indeed uninhabitable environments, lack of reasonable health care services, starvation and destitution in the country amounts to a massacre in reality.

Similarly, the regime is consistently proving too weak to ensure the security of the citizens against organized attacks and other violent crimes, which claim so many innocent lives on a daily basis. The recurring outbreaks of ethno-religious crises in various parts of the country in which so many people are killed, maimed and displaced under the helpless watch of the regime say it all. Moreover, other miscellaneous crimes claim many more lives all over the country while the system remains not only unable to check it but apparently clueless on what to do specifically.

By the way, referring to the increasingly escalating security threat of Boko Haram in particular, the Christian Associations of Nigeria (CAN)’s leader was reported to have advised Nigerian Christians to defend themselves against Boko Haram. And notwithstanding from which angle one looks at such advice, it confirms the existence of systematic failure to tackle such security challenge. And I wonder how similar advice has not been heard from Muslim leaders despite the fact that Muslims constitute more than 90% of the Boko Haram’s victims.

Anyway, moreover the amount of systematic human right abuse is so alarming that one’s chance of enjoying his human rights depends on the extent of his connection with the regime or some of its influential lords. And in case of having none, he remains vulnerable or even actually subjected to all sorts of systematic abuse as a human being.

For instance, the number of people dumped in the country’s various prisons, police station cells and other detention centres, and who have spent untold periods of time “awaiting trial”, or have actually served out their (in many cases) faulty sentences or are actually completely innocent, is extremely high.

All these apart from the miserable living conditions, general frustration and acute hopelessness, to which the vast majority of Nigerians have been subjected to through systematic corruption and incompetence.

Incidentally, though largely ineffective, the occasional probes conducted at various levels of government, investigations and trials reveal terrible accounts of how the country’s resources are being primitively looted in monumental magnitudes that evoke a huge frustration in every living conscience.

For instance while the ongoing probe on oil subsidy is revealing the plunder spree that has been going on in the oil sector, the Chairman, Pension Reform Task Team revealed how they found two billion Naira in cash stashed in the private residence of a civil servant in the pension unit of the Office of the Head of Service. As he (i.e. the Chairman) also revealed how a pile of US Dollars was found in the private residence of another civil servant from the same unit.

In a country where such instances of reckless looting constitute only a microscopic fraction of what is actually going on at the various levels of government, I see no reason why there shouldn’t be an international regime under the United Nations or any other platform for that matter, which will provide for appropriate punishments against thieving and/or grossly incompetent ruling elites, who plunder and/or mismanage their countries.

Appropriate criteria and leadership performance indices should be adopted to assess leaders’ performances in transparency, competence and delivery on leadership responsibilities according to their respective countries’ resources and potential.

In other words, appropriate targets in human development indices should be assigned to each country on the basis on which it will be continuously assessed. Hence once it fails to meet the minimum expectation, the international body shall decide the appropriate punishment to be meted out to its ruling elites, which could be a targeted sanction against them as individuals or even forcing them to quit and be prosecuted in an international court, while international technocrats take over the country’s administration for a specific period of time depending on the level of rot in each particular country in question.

NGOs and other civil and human right organizations in collaboration with other global civil organizations should advocate for such an international regime, because it is obvious that ruling elites in the affected governments e.g. Nigeria will never consider this idea in the first place. Instead they will try to undermine it by appealing to their people’s emotions under the pretexts of national sovereignty, political independence, self-pride and other empty rhetoric.