Empty excellencies

Your Excellency. His Excellency. Her Excellency.

To attend or observe a public event in Nigeria is to witness a farce. First, you are immediately immersed in an institution described as “protocols.”

That is when a speaker, such as the master of ceremony or the chairman or official speaker launches into an endless rigmarole in which every supposedly important person present is identified by title and name.

Sometimes, some people are not even present, but they are sufficiently “excellent” to be captured in the speech anyway. Such “protocols” can last two or three pages or about 15 minutes of an ego roll call. And very often, when the speaker has finished, to his attention is brought further names, and back to the microphone he goes.

His Excellency. Her Excellency. Their Excellencies. Your Excellency. These “protocols” are sometimes abridged by speakers who try to head off criticism of failing to capture anyone and everyone who is supposedly important by saying, “All protocols observed.”

The honour, “Excellence” or “Excellency” was originally used in the Catholic Church for Bishops and Archbishops, and then for such high government officials as governors and diplomats.

In Nigeria, it has captured the imagination and worship of politicians who are fascinated by the concept—but rarely the substance or challenge—of excellence.

Excellence does not mean you are highly regarded: it is something you earn. It relates to preeminence in character, learning or achievement, as it speaks to your distinction in some specific regard. You cannot buy it, borrow it, or have it bestowed on you or upon someone else.

In Nigeria, however, politicians crave it. Both elected and appointed officials, many of whom buy or speculate in chieftaincy and honorary academic titles, want it appended to their names. This is responsible for the long “protocols” at every public event, our love of titles mixing with our desire for high-sounding adjectives, no matter how falsified.

This is how the hunger for “excellency,” as a title, has gripped Nigeria.

Remember one Muhammadu Buhari during his state visit to the United States in 2018?

At the White House, the Nigerian leader kept addressing his American counterpart as “Your Excellency.” Mr Donald Trump was at once surprised and fascinated.

“I could get used to this,” he remarked joyfully about a title in which Mr Buhari bathed every day back in Nigeria. The adulation did not stop him from calling Buhari lifeless, as we found out.

Buhari has no relationship with excellence. Ahead of the election which brought him to power in 2015, he was publicly embarrassed after it was discovered that in place of his academic certificates, he had submitted only an affidavit to the electoral commission, lying about his credentials.

“All my academic qualifications documents, as filled in my presidential form, president APC/001/2015, are currently with the secretary, military board, as of the time of presenting this affidavit.”

The army publicly denied that claim, and Buhari’s deception lasted into his quest for a second term.

Of perhaps greater importance, Buhari’s entire presence in Nigerian politics rested on his self-marketing that he was incorruptible and would rid Nigeria of corruption. On the contrary, his eight years exposed him as being ethically and administratively worse than those he had lambasted since 1985 when he was ousted from power as head of state.

It had taken him 20 years of insisting that he was “excellent” and the only one who could fix Nigeria to return to the throne, only to be exposed for his emptiness and to leave the country in an unprecedented stench after eight years.

Consider, then, how many present and former federal and state officials Nigerians celebrate and praise daily in the country as “Excellency.”

But there is nothing in the country that is excellent. If there is, it has most probably just been constructed or erected and not yet tested by time, a challenge that humbles all pretenders.

Excellence is achievable. It should even be desirable. When it is achieved, respectable institutions award or declare it on those who have earned it. In society, people also celebrate people who, by conduct or achievement, demonstrate excellence through genuine and sustained commitment to the community.

Some public officials, unfortunately, serve their extremely narrow and selfish interests. They appear to resent anything that genuinely uplifts the people or serves the public interest.

This is what excellence is about. It implies a spirit and mindset that is higher than the individual: appointing the best expertise available—not simply relatives or convenient persons nearby or convenient—to develop and implement public policy. It involves deploying deep reserves of personal character.

The quandary that Nigeria is in arises from officials consistently refusing to adopt this mentality in the service of the people. We want to be considered icons and praised as special when everyone can see that we are not.

We want to be celebrated as “excellent” even when we have very low or no standards. Our supply of officials willing to do or say the right thing dwindles with our national prospects. Look at our policies. Look at infrastructure. Look at the judiciary. Look at the civil service. The security services. The legislature. Education. Sports.

Contrast each and any one of those with the lifestyle and conduct of officials and their inner circles. First Lady Remi Tinubu, who is alleged to be a pastor, taunts Nigeria’s poor and starving with tales of how rich her family was and is. The president spends lavishly at home and abroad to guarantee his luxury, while he preaches sacrifice for citizens who have nothing left. But Nigeria has never been more miserable, or in greater danger, than in his hands.

Still, we call him Excellency. Despite his record—or lack of it—as a person. Despite an abysmal presidency in which Nigeria has become unrecognisable for all the wrong reasons.

Many states are in even worse shape. Still, we call each governor “Excellency” even when we know there is no one more sinister, incompetent, or corrupt. The governor spends his tenure largely in Abuja, playing political games and coordinating his ill-gotten wealth, his state perpetually underperforming.

Still, we call him Excellency. But Excellency is neither in their conduct nor in the constitution. He wants to be called ‘Executive Governor,’ which flatters his ego but does not appear in the constitution either.

Your Excellency? Excellent as in what?

His Excellency? How does pretence double as performance? When and where did your governor earn his excellence?

The truth is that Nigeria, where she is not running on platitudes, is running on empty. We must stop inflating empty and incompetent people with hot air and then wonder why they are such lightweights. They should be satisfied with their names and official titles.

You want praise? Earn it!