THOUGH most statesmen are politicians, but it isn’t every politician who is a statesman. And it isn’t only the political class that exclusively produces statesmen.
The late legal icon, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, was undeniably a Nigerian legal statesman, who deployed the law against the impunity of powerful elites in Nigeria; as the late English economist, John Maynard Keynes, whose macroeconomic prescriptions were used in containing economic depressions was undeniably a global economic statesman.
But despite Nigeria’s decades long democratic project, statesmen are becoming an endangered species, reflecting their poverty in the nation. The conflation of this poverty with recycled powerful politicians, most of them slavish to their short-range self-serving visions, has plunged the nation in a national disaster.
Whereas most politicians have short visions, fixated only on reproducing themselves, their minions or heirs in power, wouldn’t mind propelling their nations backward, if that fits into their agendas of winning the next elections, incapacitating them for effective statecraft in their nations.
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Conscious of their legacies to future generations and the verdict of history, statesmen are motivated by long range visions. Illustratively, the far-flung empire for which the British are known, spanning from where the sun rises to where it sets, had been immensely beneficial to generations of Britons. But that empire couldn’t have been established if the English/British societies didn’t produce exploratory statesmen, who ventured beyond their shores to explore the globe, paving the way for the historic engagements of the British with far-flung states. And it couldn’t have flourished without the contributions of trading and missionary statesmen, backed by political statesmen deploying military powers to project and defend British imperial interests throughout the world.
Pioneer American statesmen fought and transformed the American colonies into the United States. If the American political and military statesmen led by President Lincoln hadn’t anticipated the reduced impact of a divided United States in global politics, and the spread of slavery on the American union and democracy, who envisioned the military and political restoration of the Union, there wouldn’t have been that powerful nation arrogantly projecting itself as today’s global unipolar power, which along with Britain, and the former Soviet Union rescued democracy from the fascist triumvirate of Germany, Japan and Spain during the Second World War.
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Without the highly motivated Russian revolutionary statesmen led by Vladimir Lenin, The Revolutionary in Chief, Leon Trostky, military strategist and Chief of the Red Army, among others who established the Soviet State, which became the nemesis of the imperialist powers, the course of global politics could have remained for a longer time unchanged, and probably Churchill’s wind of change declaration wouldn’t have been made, or it could have been considerably delayed. The monumental political, military and intellectual powers of the Soviets upended the global balance of power, reinforcing the drive of colonial peoples for national liberation, facilitated the demise of the colonial system.
Statesmen would proactively obliterate the fault lines of their nations, effectively gluing them together, but self-centred politicians wouldn’t mind exacerbating the fault lines, deliberately amplifying them, setting ethnic groups and regions on collision trajectories with competing ethnic groups and regions. The political antics of reducing national interests to self-serving interests is ominous to the well-being of societies.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution could only be actualised by great statesmen, who foresaw that without communistic political and economic praxes, and consensual blueprint to fully develop the Chinese educational system, tailoring it to the economic, military, scientific and technological needs of their nation, China couldn’t have today been playing her leading global role, along with other nations posing a monumental threat to the American dominated global world order.
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In a global solidarity of statesmen, following the footsteps of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, an international revolutionary statesman, who left Bolivia to uplift humanity in Batista’s Cuba, non-African statesmen (Cubans, the Soviets, etc) who rejected colonisation as an impairment of humanity, reaffirmed their belief in the universalisation of freedom, reinforced African statesmen from Cairo down to the Cape with moral, materials, financial and diplomatic support in the struggles for independence.
With the capitulation of some of the Middle Eastern states to American imperialism, hadn’t the Iranian theocratic statesmen ably led by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, envisioned that the only way to reverse the contemptible descent of Iran into a subservient Western and American lackey, was by the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Israel would have long ago overran the Middle East.
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Nigeria has had its impatient modernisers, veritable statesmen who left unperishable legacies. They were those leading statesmen who plunged the nation into a healthy cutthroat regional competition, with the relatively more developed Southern regions racing to develop faster than each other; whilst the highly envisioned Northern statesmen spiritedly raced to catch up with them, and tried to surpass them.
Subsequent political and military statesmen inspired by the grand vision of bequeathing a united country to generations of future Nigerians, did all they could to keep the nation an undivided entity.
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But despite Nigeria’s decades long democratic project, statesmen are becoming an endangered species, reflecting their poverty in the nation. The conflation of this poverty with recycled powerful politicians, most of them slavish to their short-range self-serving visions, has plunged the nation in a national disaster.
Therefore, blessed are those nations blessed with more statesmen than self-serving politicians, because the former leave inspiring memories behind, whilst the latter are unmindful of the legacies they leave behind, and the verdict of history on them.
Statesmen wouldn’t prioritise the quest for regime legitimacy over national interests; but politicians with short-range self-serving visions would do that. Statesmen would be concerned with the debt profiles of their nations, and would go the extra mile to reduce them, but politicians unconcerned with debt burdens on future generations, wouldn’t care about skyrocketing the debt profiles of their nations.
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Statesmen would proactively obliterate the fault lines of their nations, effectively gluing them together, but self-centred politicians wouldn’t mind exacerbating the fault lines, deliberately amplifying them, setting ethnic groups and regions on collision trajectories with competing ethnic groups and regions. The political antics of reducing national interests to self-serving interests is ominous to the well-being of societies.
Therefore, blessed are those nations blessed with more statesmen than self-serving politicians, because the former leave inspiring memories behind, whilst the latter are unmindful of the legacies they leave behind, and the verdict of history on them.
Jahun writes from Dutse, Jigawa State Capital and can be reached via email: aminuhabibu58@gmail.com.
