Leadership and responsibility

In his New Year address to the country on Monday, President Buhari, once more, chose to travel the well-worn road of blaming others for the policy choices and ineptitude of his administration than take responsibility for the fuel scarcity that marred the yuletide celebrations in the country. Hear him: “Unfortunately, I am saddened to acknowledge that for many this Christmas and New Year holidays have been anything but merry and happy. Instead of showing love, companionship and charity, some of our compatriots chose this period to inflict severe hardship on us all by creating unnecessary fuel scarcity across the country” even when as he claims, the “NNPC had taken measures to ensure availability at all depots”. He therefore pledged to get to the root of what he calls “this collective blackmail of all Nigerians” and ensure that no group is again able to repeat this “manipulated blackmail.”
It is disheartening that despite that even at this point, the President still believes or is made to believe that the problem of perennial fuel crisis and scarcity was and is being caused by sabotage rather than a simple display of the economic laws of demand and supply. If last December’s scarcity was a ‘manipulated blackmail’ as the president claimed, what about those of 2015 and 2016 under this administration and countless others down the years? Were they also a result of manipulated blackmail?
What the president’s address shows is that the days of fuel scarcity are still with us and when it happens again, the president or his handlers will still look for someone or people to blame it on. After all, he has been blaming others since 1977 for recurrent fuel scarcity in the country. We recall how his administration blamed the 2015 and 2016 scarcities on the Jonathan administration and on fuel-marketers.
It is clear to anyone with a modicum of common sense that the problem has to do with government’s firm control of the industry and its monopoly on fuel importation. The solution to the problem then is to simply deregulate the downstream sector of industry and get out of the business of fuel importation and restrict itself to the regulation of the sector just like what obtains in the tele
coms sector. The job can be better performed by major marketers, independent marketers, depot owners and so on. They need a favourable policy environment to operate maximally. But the president has refused to countenance deregulation and liberalisation and is content instead, blaming others for the failure of his government.
This behaviour is consistent with the history of humanity which is just the history of attempts to shuffle off, displace, delegate or otherwise vicariously attribute responsibility to others aside the one with the agency. Abrose Bierce, the American satirical writer, saw this clearly when he defined responsibility in his book “The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), as “a detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, fate, fortune, luck or one’s neighbour. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star”.
But while other societies have made progress in getting people and most importantly, leaders to accept responsibility for their actions, in Nigeria, we continue to blame others and external forces for the results of our actions – and this has became a hallmark of leadership. They always have a surfeit of excuses – colonial condition, external environment, previous governments, the opposition etc – for the abysmal fortunes of the country. They unwittingly reduce themselves to helpless victims, who are usually passive and acted upon. What is more, they take advantage of a citizenry who have a warped idea of the underlying social contract, a right-based idea that sees itself more as receiving from, rather than giving to the state.
But the president must realise, like John Burroughs warns that “A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”