By Rotimi Fasan
A LOOK at how world leaders conduct themselves today leads one to ask what role government should play in the lives of citizens; how much of government involvement should be allowed in the affairs of a people? The American society presents an interesting picture of how this question is handled.

The two dominant parties, the Democrats and the Republicans are distinguished to a large extent by how much power they believe any American government should exercise over their own people. While the American society was founded on the principle of personal and collective liberty of the people to take control over their own affairs, they nevertheless submit some aspects of these affairs to the control of their elected representatives.

The extent of such submission of personal liberty to the control of elected representatives is what distinguishes the Republicans from the Democrats. While the Republicans believe in limited government control, the Democrats are inclined to ceding more power to government than the Republicans consider justifiable.

On certain issues, say gun control or abortion rights, for example, this difference in position could be as contentious as it could be extremely polarising, often raising fundamental questions about the principles on which the American society was founded.

This much was evident in the Supreme Court pronouncement supporting the Obama administration initiative to extend health cover to the vast majority of Americans, a move which the Republicans believe will not only worsen the deplorable health care bill of the government but, ultimately, the overall bill of government, thereby steeping future generations of Americans in government-induced debt.

For others, their opposition to Obamacare is a matter of personal rights/concern in which they cannot imagine any interference from government.

This is just a very rough and simple way to describe the ideological difference between America’s two leading parties and their supporters. But the sense in which I use the word government here goes beyond politics. It extends into the world of business. This point needs to be stressed in an increasingly globalised world in which economic and political power go hand in hand.

Perhaps more than at any other time in the past, our world has witnessed a dilution of both economic and political power to the extent that even the economic side of global power is shaping the political or the political is made to serve the economic in a way that underlines the equal if not greater significance of the latter. One proof of this is the haste with which governments around the world, especially the American government, came to the rescue of many business organisations in the wake of the global meltdown of 2008.

In spite of the fact that many of the affected businesses which ran aground following the greed of private executives ceded much of their powers to government in the wake of the meltdown, the bail-out given them underlines their importance in the overall scheme of things. But as I have mentioned above, the sense in which I talk about government here extends into the world of corporations and other businesses managed by private individuals. Like their political counterparts, many of these business leaders are no better than common thieves. They cannot be trusted to do right by those they claim to represent. As always, what comes first and last is their own interest.

This point was brought forcefully home to me again when the Barclays Bank rate-fixing scandal broke out in the UK last week. Bob Diamond, the Chief Executive of the bank had to step down with immediate effect and faced parliamentary scrutiny when it emerged that the bank he led was involved in rigging interbank interest rate in order to increase the profit going to the bankers to the detriment of ordinary people.

Diamond, an American academic-turned investment banker was a well-known supporter of huge bonuses to bankers which he saw as reward for their hard work.  But now he is quick to wash his hands off the excesses of those who worked right under him to cheat the British people.

Already Barclays, the UK’s second most profitable bank and the fifteenth largest in the world, has been fined to the tune of $453 million, but that does nothing to the huge bonuses that have gone to Diamond and his cohort who continued to milk the ordinary people until regulators came up with their discovery of the fraud.

As it is, the world is yet to move beyond the greed of bankers that led to the economic meltdown that started five years ago. If anything, it is becoming clear that governance in the world of private organisations, as in politics, is weak and that many corporate leaders need to be under the constant watch of the people, not just some gate keepers, acting in their own capacity or doing so in the name of the people.

As we cannot avoid ceding part of our liberty to authorities, many times unelected and unaccountable in our part of the world, people must show interest in how their leaders go about their affairs despite the crass disregard of public opinion that many of these leaders show. This was the case with President Jonathan who claims not to give a damn what Nigerians thought of his refusal to declare his assets publicly.

Vigilance we’ve been told is the eternal price of liberty. People the world over, especially in African countries like Nigeria where leaders literally throw dust in the face of the people and call their bluff- people must not take the words of their political and economic leaders for it. Crime and mass poverty many times are traceable to the activities of these categories of individuals who are specialist at turning the commonwealth into personal estates for themselves and their unborn generations.

In Nigeria, the ongoing trial of bank chiefs who ran their organisations into bankruptcy, business men who collect so-called oil subsidy and promptly kept them away in private banks only to be probed by legislators who saw such probe as opportunity for corrupt enrichment- to say nothing of capital market players who routinely create schemes, running into hundreds of millions of naira from businesses and people they are supposed to regulate and through which they raise funds that are turned into their private accounts in the guise of celebrating some ghost achievements- all of these point to the need to put government, economic or political, under close and constant watch because the interest of these leaders are often at odds with the interest of the vast majority of the people.

Such leaders are no sooner in position than they become laws unto themselves subject to nobody but their personal greed and sometimes the fear of discovery. Which is why ours must be constant vigilance- trust no government.