Jose Mujica was Uruguay’s president between 2010 and 2015. Despite a monthly take-home pay of $12000 (about N4.3 million) he opted for a life of penury and was described as the world’s poorest president. But Mr Mujica was not poor. He was only human and humane. And unlike most leaders today, he was an empathetic politician who felt and understood the suffering of his people and swapped it with his own comfort to bring to them succour.
Ninety per cent of his salary, each month, went to charity. Even as president he had no fascination for choice cars or magnificent property. Instead he chose to live in a run-down farm house, owned by his wife, and drove a rickety 1987 Beetle. For Mr Mujica, love means everything and love he shares by caring for everyone.
Moved by his benevolence, in 2014 an Arab Sheikh offered $1 million for the president’s Beetle. But, while emphasising he had no commitment to cars, Mr Mujica said the entire money would go to a housing support programme for the homeless.
Speaking on Al Jazeera, the former president once posited: “A president is a high-level official who is elected to carry out a function. He is not a king, not a god. He is not the witch doctor of a tribe who knows everything. He is a civil servant. I think the ideal way of living is to live like the vast majority of people whom we attempt to serve and represent.”
Such was Jose Mujica’s exemplary and inspiring leadership, which is worthy of emulation especially by African politicians, to whom politics is a one-way road to affluence and power aggrandisement.
Africa is sadly home to a large population of the world’s poorest, with over forty per cent of people in sub-Saharan Africa living in absolute poverty. But the continent has produced some of the world’s richest politicians and public officers, with no prior history of wealth or independent wealth creation enterprises.
Apart from direct proceeds of corruption, for which the continent has earned for itself a notorious reputation, politicians have, unabashedly, continued to expropriate from the people and appropriate to themselves ridiculous amounts as wages and allowances. Thus, out of politics few stupendously wealthy Africans have emerged.
A study in 2013 by the UK-based Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) and the International Monetary Fund (IMPF) shows that of the five countries with the highest paid MPs in the world four are from Africa and they include Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa. And, not surprisingly though, three of the four African countries top the list, while South Africa occupies the fifth position behind Indonesia but clearly ahead of much bigger economies like the US, Japan, Germany, Britain, China etc.
While leadership, as exemplified by Mujica and many non-Africans, typifies empathy and altruism, to the egocentric and nepotistic African politicians everything revolves around the self, with all that pleases it, consciously and subconsciously. Even policies are often indicative of the insatiability of the greed and vindictiveness of this self-destruct self.
In the run-up to elections, when canvassing for votes trumps reason, ‘slums’ are accessible and credible. But as soon as the elections are won such overcrowded communities, which are homes to millions of voters whose usefulness has now elapsed, are reviled with the tag of illegality and targeted for demolition in order to justify a brazen social cleansing.
So, unlike Mujica who worries about homes for the poor and food for the hungry, politicians on this side of the divide deprive the poor of homes and keep them hungry by not paying their wages and blame it on paucity of funds. Yet the money they claim is not available to do the needful is spent on the needless.
But Mujica’s conscience consciously daunts his appetite for opulence. And that is why choice cars and palatial homes befitting of an ‘emperor’ are conspicuously not in his list of desirables. On the contrary, because their conscience has taken a permanent leave, leaders in this clime outrun each other in the race to erect for themselves sprawling mansions fully fitted with state-of-the-art accessories.
For these category of leaders paying workers’ wages is de-prioritised; losing millions in revenue due to workers’ strike is, ironically, a non-issue; schools churning out barely literate graduates is not a disaster; and hospitals being barely functional is least of all worries.
After all, for them and all theirs, money is never in short supply and with it anything is buyable, including the the best education and medical care there can ever be. Nonetheless, even for them, it’s all a fool’s paradise because they, like the poor they spend a lifetime actively impoverishing, do not have the means to halt death, being an unstoppable end and common destination.
