Nothing seems to be more definitive of the human experience as hypocrisy is.
It is the reason why some, not of as much moral constitution as they would wish the world to believe, would describe others as immoral, primitive, uncivilised, or incapable of being able to organise their societies within the frame of higher values. Yet, our shared history as humans speaks otherwise, and points out primal similarities, while also revealing that the ability to point at others and call them needless names is essentially a function of power.
One of the greatest theatres of hypocrisy is certainly the sphere of leadership. And, we see its routine enactments from the so-called dysfunctional spaces of Africa’s ‘banana’ republics, to the gilded halls of privilege, from Downing Street, to Westminster, then Washington DC, and beyond.
Not just in Africa, or some parts of Asia, there is a crisis of leadership all over the world. And the need to keep reinventing leadership across great swathes of the human experience. Which makes the moral posturing and condescending outlook of the West deeply hypocritical, if not annoying. Still, its inspiring to see that a newer movement has started calling into question the honesty of leaders, from Aso Rock to 10, Downing Street, and the American White House.
As a function of the powers they have appropriated due to their economic dominance, countries of the West have arrogated to themselves the role of the policeman of the world, defining and deciding on the standards of accountability to hold others to. This is more so benchmarked on their systems of democratic and economic governance or, simply, social norms.
They even seek to police morality in deciding what should be acceptable behaviour, conduct or even stance on issues, such as sexual orientations or the different ascriptions to gender – whether non-binary, transgender, gender neutral, etc. Or even that greater incursion into privacy by trying to police the woman’s body, as evident in the recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade in the United States and the decision on the legality or not of abortion rights.
But the police man of the world itself appears to be in need of serious policing, pointing to the fundamental hypocrisy in the global order, essentially by those who consider themselves as powerful enough to call others derogatory names, despite the thinly veiled dysfunction in their own make-up, constantly erupting to the surface.
I’ll elucidate with two poignant instances, which vividly illustrate the coalescing of tendencies that had always been immanent. In contemplating the spectacle in two prominent bastions of the Western world – the United States of America and the United Kingdom – as representative of the inherent inclination, in recent times, it is almost clear why questions of and the questioning of leadership has become very critical at this historical juncture. And, it has ‘democratised’ the spotlight prejudicially trained on Africa, whilst amplifying the deep moral fault-lines in the human nature.
Moral Decadence as the American Exceptionalism?
Not too long ago, there was the eruption that offered its most concrete expression in Donald Trump, who sought a very monarchical presidency in the United States, and tried to run the country by fiat as a dictatorship. The nasty trail of his toxic leadership has witnessed the rise and almost institutionalisation of racism, along with persistent race-baiting, the sponsorship of hate-driven immigration legislation, a wilful distortion of public policy to suit private profit – as evident in the near destruction of the climate agenda, etc. These were finally crowned by that ugly insurrection on the Capitol – in an act that tried to overthrow the national parliament as an enduring symbol of democracy.
Worse still, Trump turned lying into statecraft, and this very shameful act was almost conferred with some sort of perverse respectability through its description as the enabling of ‘alternative facts’. When truth becomes relative, it inaugurates a moral universe that is baleful. The Washington Post, which took up the noble task of chronicling these devious lies, revealed in its ‘Fact checker’ that Trump told 30,573 lies over his four-year presidency, averaging an erroneous 21 claims per day! It is documented that in his first 100 days in office, the 45th president of the United States made 492 “suspect claims” and on November 2, 2020 alone, as he sought re-election, he made 503 “false or misleading claims”! Under Trump, the American exceptionalism appeared to have been hinged on moral decadence.
As successor to that malevolent presidency, concerns around the integrity of leadership however remain, even if of a less despicable tenor, for now. In his first 100 days in office, Forbes has equally observed President Biden as having made false claims in his statements discussing the minimum wage and immigration patterns.
United in Duplicity?
Boris Johnson has been described by his people in the United Kingdom as a “serial lair” whose prime calculus, from 2015 when he became Member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip with eyes on the Prime Minister’s seat, was about getting advantage for himself. He has also been noted as a serial traitor, who was a prominent actor in the vicious shenanigans and back-stabbing that brought down administrations from that of Gordon Brown to David Cameron and more recently, Theresa May, who he took over from. There were certainly the outright lies about what Brexit entailed and would achieve, which ultimately swung the pendulum in his favour during the leave campaign.
We’ve seen the fallout of the past few days of vicious bloodletting in Downing Street, which has shown Boris Johnson the door, even as he seeks to latch on to straw in one final act of desperation. His catalogue of misdeeds show how he rehabilitated his official quarters as Prime Minister from a private donation that reeks of corrupt influence-peddling, and the reprehensible acts of partying during Covid restrictions – at periods when the entire country was held to a different standard that almost smothered life out of many stranded in need. There was also the rank cronyism of enabling the boys’ network, with the promotion of an aide who had been indicted as a sexual offender, among a slew of other official misdemeanour. While he wants to remain as caretaker PM till October, many in his party feel he is already too morally damaged to remain in this position, and they insist that he must leave immediately.
Children of a Lesser God?
Within the dubious heritage and frame of naming, we can reflect on the prejudicial epithets that have been hauled at Africans, Nigerians, and Others from time immemorial, of being uncivilised, incapable of self-government, ‘fantastically corrupt’, and running banana republics that deserve nothing short of a newer colonialism. And that is not minding the fact that the pervasive economic and social systems in many of these former colonies remain neo-colonial, which is certainly more pernicious, but without the lingering guilt of slavery or direct physical control.
Naming has always been the preserve of those who dominate the means of communication. It calls to mind an unforgettable excerpt from Chinweizu’s The West and the Rest of Us, of how the West sought to tame the barbaric African savages by tying them to the stake and killing them, while hunting down their mothers and families, setting fire to their cities which were built to the glory of barbarism, and castrating their generations. It then makes one wonder who the real savages were!
The Western world advocates institutions of accountability, which they demand of others but seek to avoid in many of their home territories. Examples of these abound and traverse the human experience, but we saw a sore standout instance with the coming into force of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but which American administrations from the Bush era down have refused to ratify, so that American troops or citizens are not accountable to this mechanism. This is particularly in conducts where their actions would constitute crimes against humanity or war crimes.
We all witnessed the sad spectacle of how the coalition of Western forces invaded Iraq and toppled the Saddam Hussein regime, and no Western leader has ever been held accountable for this act of military terrorism till date, in spite of serious indictments. This was after it had been conclusively proven that the so-called search for Weapons of Mass Destruction was no more than a thinly-veiled excuse to raid the oil-rich country, in a logic driven by the need to contain oil prices, and the rising costs of energy in the West, etc.
More so, the West gave Africa the system of social organisation called democracy, and has sought to coral the world into its own image – through an enthronement of a neoliberal economic framework, multiparty elections, with intermittent alternations of powers to promote a diversity of approaches and inclusion. While these, and specifically the latter aspect, have their remarkable points, one is reminded that the teachers themselves are hardly as upright in the practice of what they preach. This reminds one of the very caustic observation of the Afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, who asks the teacher not to teach us nonsense! The teacher whose society is the hallmark of violence of different manifestations, of human rights abuses and institutional discriminations (of racial minorities and the religious Others), and who even sabotage the system of elections they extoll as one of the greatest exemplars of human civilisation, and at the very heart of democracy. We saw this in the highly contested Florida votes during the first coming of George Bush Jr. and then in Donald Trump’s bold-faced attempt to subvert the popular will only a short while ago.
True, in all these, the creation of sturdy institutions in society is the needed bulwark of civilisation against the deep-seated human inclination to undermine order for personal or group advantage – whether in Europe, Africa, Asia or the Americas. And, it is certainly the most crucial of efforts to keep strengthening these institutions for the civilisational imperative to be on the advance. Yet, what deeply riles is the wilful determination – coming with economic power and the imbalances in geo-power relations that it motivates – to accuse others of what we are profoundly guilty of, and foist names on them that equally describe us. At the end of the day, we are all humans and we are work in progress.
