EXCELLENCE: SANWO-OLU’S DOCTRINE

By Olatunji Dare

I do not envy Governor of Lagos State Babajide Sanwo-Olu.

Last week, he made a public show of repudiating the honorific that had attached to his office and his name until the week before.

No more His Excellency Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, or His Excellency Babajide Sanwo-Olu; just plain Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu.

If he had kept God out of the matter, his fellow governors and the legion of officials who cherish and parade the same honorific would perhaps have charged him with nothing more than grandstanding. But I hear they have been chafing and squirming moment he asserted that only God Almighty is worthy of that appellation.

Sanwo-Olu’s assertion merely questioned the appropriateness of that term in the political context in which it is usually employed. I will not be surprised however if some fundamentalists in our midst will go further and maintain that, however acquired or employed, be it as a job description or even as nickname, the term reeks of blasphemy and deserves to be visited with a fatwah.

In which case you can expect major, minor and lesser officials who have worn that title like an ornament for decades to cast it away, not from modesty or conviction like Sanwo-Olu, but from fear of consequences known and unknown.

School uniforms and such things may stir up fundamentalist passions in the organised religions here, but I doubt whether the usage of a particular honorific can have that kind of effect. It will more likely set off a wide and engaging national debate that may even resonate across the world.

At the funeral a fortnight ago for the late African-American statesman, civil rights leader and chair of the powerful U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform, The Hon. Elijah Cummings, former President Barack Obama spoke with practised subtlety about those who became honourable only after attaining certain positions, or indeed only by virtue of holding those positions.

Then, pausing for effect, he added: “Elijah Cummings was honourable before he became a leader of the United States Congress.”

You could see members of the audience suppress their titters, nod approvingly, and exchange knowing glances.

That one is for you, Donald Trump, Obama might have added. But he did not need to. Nor did the audience expect him to. Any elaboration would have ruined that deft rhetorical device.

For until a narrow victory in the 2016 election catapulted him to President of the United States, only a few could have found the most tangential association between “Trump” and “Honourable.” By his conduct in that office three years on, the chances of finding any association between the twain will have to be judged galactic.

It will be said that the term “Honourable” refers only to the office, not to the man or woman, and that if even the incumbent is a certified reprobate and a blackguard, we should still accord him or her office the benefit of the doubt in matters relating to honour: a person without honour elected to and basking in the glory of an office designed for persons who are at the very least supposed to know what honour is.

That is not uncommon in tribal politics, however.

“He is a thief all right, but he is our thief,” it is often said, in extenuation of wayward conduct.

The dissonance resulting from this mindset cannot make for healthy politics or a heathy polity. No wonder we are in such a mess.

All in all, I do not expect that Sanwo-olu will not be assailed by the stormy winds that a fundamentalist or literal construction that some expect his disavowal of the honorific attached to his position. Still he could be prepared for hard questions on other matters arising from that act.

Such as: How can he preside over The Centre of Excellence if he has no claim to excellence? Applied to Lagos, is that term not misconceived? Can there even be such a place in this sinful world, let alone Lagos? Only Heaven, Sanwo-Olu’s critic will chide him, qualifies to be regarded as a centre of excellence.

Here, as a long-term Lagos resident and a Lagosian at heart, I must come to the aid of the good governor. As I see it, connotes aspiration rather than actuality. And aspiration is the one thing most of us have in common, those on the march to sainthood as well as the most desperate hustlers.

Sanwo-olu’s critics will grant this objection but insist, nevertheless, that shedding the honorific at issue or going about his official business without being heralded by menacing outriders leading a snaking motorcade is not enough. If he is really serious about the Excellency deficit, he should proceed to shed at least many of the perks and perquisites that flow from being designated excellent.

Those are statutory benefits. He did not confer them on himself. They come with the territory.

Divest himself of whatever he does not absolutely need in his emolument package, I can almost hear his critics rejoin. How much does a person really need anyway, even a state governor?

Other officials on the Excellency spectrum can similarly expect to be badgered, even if the honorific consists mainly in holding a diplomatic passport and carries far fewer benefits than in the case of state governors. I hope matters do not get to a point where they determine that the honorific is not worth the risk.

Who wants to be caught wearing that label in any form while travelling through territory over which syndicated kidnappers rein?

Fortunately for our senators, being merely “distinguished” does not carry the kind of query that being “excellent” carries even if, in this particular instance, there is little basis for it in parliamentary history or usage.

When members of the House of Representatives, following foreign precedent, appropriated the term “Honourable” to themselves, the senators who stand higher in the political pecking order scrambled to find a grander and more evocative title. But what they settled for was something more prosaic: Distinguished.

What their distinction consists in is far from clear. They are for most part distinguished only for or being distinguished, as has been said of those who are famous for being famous and not for any particular achievement that is the stuff of fame.

Still, I guess they will retain the honorific, happy that it is unlikely to attract the kind of objection that “excellency” and “honourable” seem set to attract, following what future historians will call Sanwo-olu’s Doctrine, at least, not until the senators come to insist that “Most Distinguished” is a more befitting term for their status.

Shall we then return to the “simply Mister” era when high-riding newspaper The Guardian, presuming to set the tone and temper of public discourse, chose to dispense almost entirely with titles and honorifics and replacing them with “Mr” for men, and I forget what for women — almost entirely, because it allowed for some exceptions, notably Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Mallam Aminu Kano.

There is a good dose of federal character there, too.

These exceptions, based on long usage to which the public had become accustomed, doomed the scheme. Probably the fatal blow was a strong misrepresentation from the military regime to the paper’s proprietors that it was subversive of the strict hierarchy of the military tradition, a levelling too far.

You cannot employ the same prefix to a General of the Army and a private and not give the corporal a false sense of equivalence, they said.

Since then, titles and honorifics have, if anything, proliferated beyond logic and beyond regulation. They will endure, in spite of the once and formerly excellent governor of Lagos State, now simply Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, of what will doubtless continue to be the Centre of Excellence — excellence as aspiration, if not as actuality.