You excellency, permit me to send in the third part of my advise to you as you begin your governance journey. As I highlighted from beginning, the only true driver of what you do as a governor is that core thing that drove you into taking the plunge to contest and win.
It usually isn’t the publicly stated objectives. It is something that sometimes you are even afraid to tell yourself not to talk of others. But it is something strong enough to make you make all the alliances and compromises and sacrifices that has brought you to this table.
In my last missive, I pointed out that for most humans it is power, wealth and legacy that are the primary drivers of the ambition to get in to powerful political position. But then, your tenure is limited either by the constitution or by nature. Eventually everyone dies.
All the great men of yore are dead. Power and wealth often die first before the physical men as these are the easiest to lose once you are out of power. My advice to you will be to pursue legacy. With legacy you will have wealth and power that will survive your brief stint in power and in life. With legacy you could become immortal. And immortality is the goal of all great men from the time of Gilgamesh.
But what is legacy and how will you go about building one? How does legacy assure you of power and wealth in your present tenure and in the future when you are out of the government and possibly in the grave? Forgive me for how long this discussion is but the questions require lengthy discussion. For the rest of this piece I will concentrate on enlightening you on what legacy is and how to go about building a legacy. In a subsequent letter I will relate building a lagacy with the power and wealth you crave.
To understand what legacy is, let us go over a few stories of people who have attempted to and succeeded or failed in building a legacy. Let us start with a young man who in a space of 3 years some 2000 years ago created a movement that became what we call Christianity today. He publicly disavowed political power, but went about doing good ( feeding people, curing people of their mental and physical maladies), demonstrating an extraordinary power over nature but refusing to deploy his powers to save himself from death in the hands of those with political power. He preached a message of love and unending hope and promised an eternal destination where all our human frailties are replaced with eternal graces. 2000 years after his death , millions of people and millions of institutions can claim to be influenced or working under the influence of his message. 2000 years after. Battles have been fought, mercies extended and miracles wrought in his name. Wealth have been created in his name and power exercised in his name. In fact, his followers , do not accept that he died, he just went away to prepare a place and he will come back in the fullness of time. The fullness of time has no date. Jesus Christ created a legacy with a message, a promise, a clear vision and plan of how his message will be sustained across geographies and generations and works that serve as eternal reference. None of his traducers are remembered today except as traducers of Jesus Christ.
About 70 years ago, another young man sold his country a vision of Aryan superiority and his mission to propel them to the top as rulers and conquerors of the earth. His vision led to genocidal massacres of others regarded as subhumans, tremendous technological development and a world war that wrought havoc on his people and the rest of the world. Adolf Hitler is remembered today for crimes against humanity. But he was not the first or the last one that has promised his people that they have been ordained by God to rule others and if these others resist , massacre them and take their land and resources by force. Ghengis Khan did so. Tamerlane did so. Even Usman Dan Fodo did the same. And today, Donald Trump trumpets an America first message. Many of such people have created legacies that their descendants will keep apologizing for.
Your legacy is what lives on after you have exited the stage of power or of life. It is your claim to immortality. It is the influence you have to determine the flow of wealth and power when you are no longer in a position to demand it as of your right. Legacy is the foundation you have created that future generations can build upon and for which they remain grateful to you. Legacy is what you have left behind that others will fight to defend or advance when you are no longer there to command them to do so. Legacy is only a legacy when it has survived your exit from power and your exit from life.
With the example of Jesus Christ, it is easy to see that long lasting legacies are inscribed in the hearts of men and not in bricks and mortar or electrons. People like Obafemi Awolowo , Aminu Kano, or even Usman Dan Fodio has left a legacy where access to power in their region is tied closely to identifying with their name or family or friends even if their ideas are so diluted now they have become every con-man’s fable. If you can’t reach the level of Jesus Christ , at least you have to surpass the level of Awolowo and others mentioned earlier.
Building a legacy is a deliberate act that requires you to make plans and decisions with the future and future generations in mind. The first decision of course is to commit yourself to building a legacy, a sustainable legacy that will expand outside your region of immediate influence surviving across generations. With that done, you can easily weigh any decision from the prism of how will that decision impact my enduring legacy? This ritual of commitment is one you will do well to do publicly and get your core team and core of disciples to also do and then invite your general public to do. You will teach children to do it and create a whole ceremony , philosophy, history and science around it. The continuation of this ritual after you are gone is a major measure of whether you have truly established a legacy. Jesus Christ was baptized and Christians today do a ritual baptism that commits them to the ideals of Christ. Many other rulers seeking legacy from the Nazi’s in Germany to the communists in North Korea have discovered this truth.
Before this commitment happens however, you need to have a promise and a message. A promise is the destination of your legacy while the message is what will be inscribed in the hearts of men. Nnamdi Kanu has promised that Biafra is his destination. And his message is clear, his followers just need to reject Nigeria. What, your excellency is your destination. Hitler’s destination was Aryan supremacy. His message was simple, Heil Hitler. Just believe and acknowledge Hitler and he will lead you to Aryan Supremacy. What, your excellency, is your promise and your message? For your legacy to transcend your exit, the destination must also transcend your exit. Will it be an Igbo supremacy? Or Wawa renaissance ? Or what?It obviously can’t be access to treasury or access to federal might or access to power. These will not transcend your exit or your demise.
If your destination is set then your message has to be crafted to encapsulate the association of the destination with you. The message will be in two parts, the simple message to excite the masses and a deeper philosophical and historical framework for the elites and scholars. So if for instance you coin Wawaism as the message for the masses for a destination of Wawa Renaissance then you have to also invent or resurrect the myths and philosophies and history of wawaism.
You do not of course have to have the mental capacity to invent these, but that is why in my first letter I advised you to have in your core team those who will create the myths. Messages and destinations can also evolve and can be created in partnership with the populace however legacies are built on certainties and strong belief. Which means you and your core team have to present a coherent destination and message as soon as possible to build the legacy around it.
If you have a destination, a message that resonates then you must have a plan for spreading this message and inscribing the destination, the message and your role as the embodiment of the destination and message in the hearts of your people and beyond. Jesus Christ appointed 12 disciples and gave them clear instructions and even sent the Holy Ghost to further advise them. When that was not enough given the educational limitations of those followers, he co-opted Paul who was learned enough to take the Jews on in their temples. Who are your 12 apostles? Who is your Paul ?
A few ideas in this regard. Utilizing ideas in mass communication, neural language programming, social media and community organization will quickly get your destination and message across. Oh , some call these tools of mass brain washing. Your modern day pastors are employing them to great success. You could co-opt one of them. Since you are looking at legacy, you have to put in place educational material and curriculum from kindergarten to doctorate level to teach your message. Education is the most powerful acculturation tool for building legacies. Early Christian missionaries started with education, Your Excellency.
The last component of building a legacy is the works. Jesus Christ went about doing good, raising the dead, feeding crowds, calming sea storms. Adolf Hitler built roads, rebuilt the army and conquered countries. What will be your works that will make your destination and message manifest in the life of your people today. All your people? Without works, faith is futile or so the Bible says. Your works will be geared towards reinforcing your message and creating unending hope for your destination. If you had taken advice from my last letter, your intelligence agencies should have surfaced the major issues your people are facing, the state of their physical and social environment and those things that they are afraid to aspire to. It is from these that you will pick your deliberate actions.
So, let us assume that your destination is Wawa Reanaissance, with a mass message of wawaism or I am proud to be a Wawa man. Your intelligence would have shown you that the Wawa man feels oppressed, unrecognized, frequently overlooked in federal appointments and inferior. It would have shown you that infrastructure in Wawa land is abysmal , that governance does not exist at the grass roots , that divisive politics have removed any commonly shared identity, that the Wawa man is threatened by criminals within and even more dangerous criminals without.
It would have shown you that Wawa land is not regarded as a leader in any sphere of political or economic activity. It would also have shown you that you met an empty treasury, a dysfunctional civil service and a restrictive constitution.
Amongst all this, I will suggest that you make it a mark of urgency to pick a loud public fight for something you are sure Wawaland should have. Maybe an appointment or a project or public policy. This action will mobilize the Wawa men around your destination and your message and send the tone for the rest of what you are to do. A loud boisterous campaign for an issue that feeds into your message and destination excites the public and makes it easy for them to buy into your message. Asiwaju fought for control of the local governments and used the fight to unite Lagosians around his message of federalism. And he won the fight and gained the legacy.
Secondly, Do an expert led root cause analysis of the state of Wawa land and identify no more than three issues to resolve in your first term. Start a public and private consultation on the best ways to resolve them. The public consultation feeds to your message, the private consultation allows you to get expert opinion. Say for instance that infrastructure is one of the areas. Then you launch public consultation for a policy and plan for creating world class infrastructure for Wawa land. Get every community and every group involved. Put it on social media and on radio and television. Hold conferences in Wawaland and outside Wawaland soliciting for ideas on how to fix the problem given the obvious constraints on tenure and capital. Hold night Virgil’s and prayer sessions. In fact craft prayer points around it. Get international organizations involved, get aid organizations involved, get leading researchers involved.
The good thing is that at the end of the day, you will have a solid infrastructure plan with the buy in of Wawa populace, international support and national support. Then take the action in the plan. In doing these you have mobilized people and resources around your destination, and your works will start to cement your legacy.
Let me apologize again for the length of this letter. As you digest it, I will take time to show you in my next letter how chasing a legacy will also bring you power and wealth.
Best Regards
James Agada is the former CEO of Computer Warehouse Group Plc
Note: This article was first published on his Medium.com page.