By Dan Egwu
There was once a kingdom where a man had served in a very high office and, by all accounts, had left behind a record that many people admired. He was not perfect. No one who has ever occupied public office is. But when he left, there were projects to point to, achievements to discuss, people who remembered his tenure with gratitude, and a legacy that refused to disappear simply because his time in office had ended.
Then came his successor. Ordinarily, a successor inherits both the achievements and the unfinished business of the person before him. He is expected to build where his predecessor stopped, correct what went wrong, improve what can be improved and, above all, serve the people. But something strange happened in this kingdom. The new man appeared to have been given a different assignment.
He was not merely expected to govern. He seemed determined to erase a man. Everywhere he went, the ghost of his predecessor loomed large and appeared to follow him. A project became an accusation. An achievement became a scandal. A policy became evidence of incompetence. A legacy became something that had to be dismantled, discredited or explained away. It became almost comical.
One began to wonder whether the predecessor had left behind an office, or a haunting. The more the new man tried to diminish the old man’s record, the more people began asking an uncomfortable question – Why is a man who has been given the privilege of leading today so preoccupied with a man who led yesterday? And that is where the story became tragic.
For there is a particular kind of person who can occupy a magnificent office and yet become an instrument in somebody else’s small game. He may sit in a grand chair. He may have impressive titles. He may command enormous authority. But if someone else can whisper into his ear, point him towards his target and make him dance to another person’s tune, then the grandeur of his office becomes merely decoration.
There is nothing more dangerous than giving a small assignment to a person occupying a great office. Especially when the assignment is to destroy his own brother. For brothers in public service should understand something – today’s enemy may be tomorrow’s predecessor, and today’s successor may one day become yesterday’s man. Power has a peculiar way of humbling everyone eventually.
The man being pursued, however, did something unexpected. He did not fight fire with fire. He did not organise a counter-campaign. He did not spend every morning explaining himself. He simply carried on with his life. He watched. He remained silent. He allowed time to do what angry men often forget time can do – tell the truth.
And slowly, the spectacle began to reverse itself – the hunter became the hunted. The man trying desperately to destroy another man’s reputation began attracting more attention to it. The more he spoke about his predecessor, the more people remembered the predecessor. The more he tried to bury the legacy, the more curious people became about what exactly he was trying so desperately to bury. And then came the great irony – the man hired to destroy the legacy was becoming part of the legacy. Not for the reasons he had hoped.
History has a strange filing system. It records not only what people accomplish, but also what they do with the power entrusted to them. It remembers the builder. It remembers the destroyer. It remembers the person who walked away from provocation with dignity. And it remembers the person who was so consumed by another man’s existence that he forgot to build his own story.
There is a lesson here beyond politics. Hatred is expensive. It consumes the person carrying it long before it reaches its intended victim. Jealousy is even more expensive. It makes another person’s success feel like a personal failure. And allowing oneself to be used against another human being is perhaps the saddest expense of all. Because when the assignment is finally over, the person who gave it to you may disappear into the crowd. But your fingerprints remain on the work.
So, before accepting the dirty job of destroying another person’s name, perhaps we should ask ourselves — who gave me this assignment? Why am I carrying somebody else’s hatred? What will history say about my own contribution? And when the noise dies down, will I be remembered for what I built, or for whom I tried to destroy?
There is an old wisdom worth remembering – when you spend your life digging a grave for another man, be careful not to spend so much time digging that you forget to build your own house. And perhaps the greatest victory of the quiet man is not that his attacker eventually fails. It is that he never allowed his attacker to turn him into what he was fighting. That is maturity. That is restraint. And sometimes, that is the most devastating answer of all.
Let the record speak. Let time judge. Let history remember.
