The will to see when a nation is flawed, damaged and in denial

By Richard Ikiebe

These two words, flawed and damaged, are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, but they describe different dimensions of the human condition. One speaks more to the universal condition of being human; the other more often points to the consequences of experience.

Being flawed is part of being human, while being damaged is part of living in a world where human beings can wound one another, and sometimes themselves. Some people are flawed and arrogant; they refuse to accept that they are flawed. Some other people are damaged and in denial; they think that their faults are exaggerated, or else, that the faults belong to others.

From Socrates and Confucius to Carl Rogers, Aaron Beck and today’s behavioural scientists, moral psychology keeps returning to one question, how do people change? The common answer is that people rarely change because they are shown they are wrong. They change when they become willing to see themselves differently. Insight cannot be forced. A flawed or damaged person must first see that a problem exists and that hope is possible.

While both categories need humility, wisdom and discipline, the damaged person often needs safety, compassion and time in addition. But seeing comes first. Many leadership failures are failures of self-awareness, not of intelligence.

The ancient Greek injunction, “Know thyself” remains leadership’s most demanding injunction. Education can supply technical competence, and experience can build strategic skill. But a leader who cannot recognise their own flaws, or who refuses to confront their own damage, becomes dangerous to themselves and to the institutions they lead.

Leadership scholars increasingly speak of self-awareness as the foundation of ethical leadership. Without it, power amplifies flaws, and hides damage. With self-awareness, flaws become room for growth and damage becomes a source of empathy. Self-recognition, however uncomfortable, is often where transformation begins.

In the broader area of nation-building, this framework can be extended beyond individuals. Communities, institutions, and even societies may become flawed (through entrenched norms such as arrogance, or complacency) or damaged (through conflict and oppression). The same principle applies at scale: before reform can succeed, leaders must first cultivate environments where truth can be spoken safely, responsibility can be accepted without annihilating dignity, and hope is credible enough to motivate change. This is as true of nations as it is of individuals.

Nations are historical constructions. They emerge from particular combinations of geography, conquest, migration, negotiation, and political imagination. Their founding arrangements determine, to varying degrees, who belongs, who rules, and who is excluded. Every nation is flawed in one form or another from birth, but not every nation is founded on the same combination of flaws. However, the degree of damage that nations carry in their souls is often based on the character and choice patterns made by their leaders and accepted by the people.

Nigeria is a state assembled under faulty foundations. The 1914 amalgamation brought together a collection of strange tribal bedfellows created by an alien colonial administration. The resulting state inherited foreign administrative and political structures that complicated the formation of a shared national identity.

Subsequent Nigerian leaders did not have create all these conditions, but their leadership choices, the complicity of their people eventually determine whether those imperfections become enduring pathologies. Though such damages create historical burdens, they do not dictate every future outcome, and no nation is condemned to reproduce the circumstances of its birth.

National damage is the consequences of poor choices made over time. A nation becomes deeply damaged when several conditions converge. When truth becomes dangerous, citizens learn to conceal reality because speaking honestly carries a personal cost. When injustice becomes commonplace and ordinary, abuses no longer provoke sufficient public outrage to compel correction. And when trust collapses, citizens expect exploitation from officials and sometimes from one another.

These conditions reinforce one another. One must however differentiate between structural flaws and accumulated damage. Structural flaws may be reflected in an over-centralised state, unequal access to resources, or institutions that reward patronage over competence.

The citizens are rarely a single moral actor. They come in many categories as powerful beneficiaries, as onlookers and bystanders, as resisters, and as victims; they all do not bear equal responsibility. Consequently, while national repair must involve accountability, it must also distinguish degrees of responsibility. A people can collectively inherit a damaged nation without being collectively guilty of the damage.

In Nigeria, it is important to examine the relationship between inherited structures, leadership choices, and popular political behaviour over time. But can a nation be damaged in its soul? A nation’s “soul” might be understood as the combination of its moral imagination, collective memory, civic trust, and shared expectations of what is acceptable.

Nations are born into histories they did not choose; but they accumulate damages and perpetuate them through choices they make, and through practices they normalise. Britain and the United States abolished slavery; South Africa dismantled apartheid. Neither action automatically eliminated the legacies of the systems being dismantled.

Genuine recovery can only begin when leaders and citizens develop the courage, and collective will to confront both their inherited flaws and their acquired injuries. The ultimate measure of national healing remains with Nigerians; but can they, and will they live differently and make different, even if hard, choices because the nation has finally become aware of its precariously flawed or damaged position.

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