Nation Building in China and America, and Lessons for Africa on Quest for “Credible” Leaders

Good People, I’ve read the comments on the broad conversation of building nations through credible leaders, understanding that credibility could be domain specific. Yes, Donald Trump is a credible businessman who speaks the language of business, and can tell investors what they want to hear, typically “assured high returns”, if they invest in America. Imagine if Nigeria makes Aliko Dangote the president, he can raise $billions quickly because his business credibility will enable him to bring truckloads of money into the nation as investments. Afterall, in most years, Dangote Group has raised more money than the federal government of Nigeria!

Yet, that Trump is a credible businessman does not mean he could be a credible man to lead your church choir.  In the same spirit, asking Dangote to lead a national movement to ask those who gave Nigeria loans to forgive them may not be prudent.

But in everything, I see building a nation to come down to one core sphere: pragmatism and honesty with a system that rewards results. In America, elections are readily free and fair, and the candidate most voters judge to be the best wins. But in China, they do not follow that process but when you look deeper, despite “no voting”, they are doing the same thing.

Assume Nigeria practices what China does, we will have a one-party system headquartered in Abuja. The leaders of the party will appoint 774 men and women to all the local governments in Nigeria to run those LGAs with clear targets and deliverables. Those appointments are not made based on state of origin. That means, a Kano indigene can be appointed to become the LGA of my beloved Isuikwuato LGA in Abia State. His job will be to improve my local government. If he does well, he would be promoted to a quasi-regional government like becoming a governor of Osun state. If he fails, he is cut-out.

In other words, for Chinese leaders, this is like a corporation where the party leaders are appointing managers to run shows at local, and state levels. If you do well, you are promoted, and doing well is clearly stated as developing the place. Magically, that system makes local governments and states competing against one another because every leader is working to have good scorecards for the next elevation. The current Chinese leader XI Jinping was a regional leader in different places, and his results qualified him to be on the national committee.

Credibility to lead a nation comes via many ways; the Americans and Chinese have their own models, and those are working. If you are from Imo State and did well to transform Sokoto State, it is very likely that markets will see you as a credible transformer, within the Chinese model. In America, if your fellow citizens have voted for you in a free and fair election, they will see you as a credible representative of the people. With credibility, you can form alliances and advance communities and people. 

Finally, the challenge for Africa remains that we continue to struggle to attract people with credibility at the highest levels because the process to get there is convoluted with mass rigging of elections and undemocratic systems. But in ancestral Africa, we used to have ways to elect and select leaders – yes, credible leaders – but we lost those due to colonialism, and embraced a Western system we may not mature into for the next 100 years! 

How did they do it then? Villages were governed by elders, and elders would honour promising members of the community with leadership roles. Those days, to speak in a village square, you must have been qualified by concrete things you have done in the community via service. Have you been cleaning the village source of drinking water? Have you been teaching women how to feed babies better? Have you taken orphans to apprenticeships?  In other words, you cannot get to a position of leadership without evidential tractions in communities!

In short, in ancestral Ovum (the name of my village before the British renamed it Ovim), to speak at the village square, many villagers would have seconded you and that is done out of service and impact.

Those services were self-evident to all, making it possible that when you raise your hand to speak, the elders will allow you to address the community. And upon that credible service, the villagers would readily follow you. Today, it is about what the electoral umpires have announced irrespective of what happened in the polling units or communities; that will not help the “leaders” and the subjects, and neither would those global investors believe.

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