As political office seekers criss-cross the country, wooing voters ahead of the 2019 elections, the issue of the right leadership at all levels to restore hope to a traumatised population has returned to the front burner. Instructively, the hundreds of candidates have each posed as the messiahs of the day, with very few exhibiting the knowledge and attributes acknowledged globally as visionary and purposeful leadership. Nigerians, however, have another, and decisive, opportunity to sift through the chaff and vote wisely to put only quality materials in elective offices.
Leadership is said to be the ability of an individual or a group of individuals to influence and guide followers or other members of an organisation or polity. One definition says, “Making sound – and sometimes difficult – decisions, creating and articulating a clear vision, establishing achievable goals and providing followers with the knowledge and tools necessary to achieve those goals, are attributes expected of effective leadership.” Purposeful leadership after its emergence from communist rule delivered development steadily to make Poland the eighth largest economy in the EU today and largest in the former Eastern Bloc members of the EU; it is now classified as a high-income economy by the World Bank. Botswana’s rating by the African Development Bank as sustaining one of the world’s longest economic booms is linked to its visionary, democratic leadership.
But, 20 years – and four general elections on – an overwhelming majority of those who have emerged here at federal, state and local government levels in leadership positions failed the test of superintendence. The results are visible. In 1999, poverty rate in Nigeria, measured as those surviving on income of less than $2 per day, was 54 per cent of the population. Progressively, this figure has risen to 61 per cent, 70 per cent and stands at 80 per cent today. Nigeria recently overtook India as host to the world’s largest “extremely poor” population. Unemployment spiked to over 23 per cent in Q3 2018 compared to 4.2 per cent in 1999. Other human development indices are equally depressing: the world’s largest population (13.5 million) of out-of-school children; one of top five countries with highest mortality rates; one of the three remaining polio-endemic countries, and the third most terror-afflicted country.
Insecurity has reached record levels: Islamist terrorism in the North-East region, rampaging Fulani militia everywhere, banditry is spreading from Zamfara State to other parts of the country, just as kidnapping-for-ransom has spread from the south and armed/highway robbery has made the roads unsafe. Add to this, deep fissures in the federation of over 250 ethnic nationalities and multiple faiths that have exposed the fragility of the union and hampered meaningful development, you have a picture of a state peeling apart at the seams.
Yet, past and current leaders have demonstrated nary a clue: instead of a vision to restructure the country to reflect its natural diversity and policies to harness the immense natural and human resources to deliver progress, retrogression is everywhere in evidence – from the ruined economy to patchy infrastructure and broken institutions. Nigeria, by many accounts, is at the precipice; only Nigerians can save themselves from further misrule and a rapacious political class that has gorged itself at public expense and driven the country to the edge of failure.
First, voters should reject office holders that have failed; rational voters everywhere else reject politicians who fail to deliver welfare and their promises. These include state and federal lawmakers whose abject failure to make good laws, provide oversight and check the executive has rendered our parliaments impotent with legislators given primarily to plunder and self-interest.
Voters should junk the herd mentality of voting blindly for parties: ours lack ideology and viable issues and candidates are often not known. Aspirants change parties as easily as their wardrobes. Instead, insist on seeing and subjecting their programmes to viability tests. Other emerging economies, including Ghana, The Gambia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, are electing leaders on platforms to address their concerns. Our parties have failed. In democracies, political parties are the incubators of leadership, conveyor belts that churn out their brightest and most visionary. In Nigeria, the obverse holds true; our parties are ideologically bereft, unfamiliar with policy formulation and the basics of internal democracy. They have become mere platforms to field candidates handpicked by godfathers, through an informal highest bidder auction, with thuggery, violence and blatant manipulation freely deployed. The worst of us, as the cleric, Tunde Bakare, noted, therefore emerge. Massive looting of the treasury, poverty, insecurity, economic ruin and a polity exhibiting all the tell-tale signs of a failing state are the results.
Elsewhere, capable candidates outside the traditional mainstream parties are being elected in Brazil, Mexico, France and Georgia, as voters there, tired of irresponsive incumbents, opt for men and women with fresh ideas.
Nigerians should eschew sectionalism, sectarianism and selfish interests; experience proves that even when your co-religionist or ethnic compatriot who lacks the essential ingredients of leadership gains power, everyone is the worse for it. Of the three zones – South-West, North-West and South-South – that have produced the last four presidents, none can point out any signature improvement in the lives of its citizens. The South-West infrastructure is in total disrepair, while it has lost its leadership in education to the South-East: the South-South remains deprived and denied of the full benefits of its oil wealth, while the North-West is adjudged the world’s poorest region. Sound leadership, however, will galvanise development and simultaneously unleash the vast potential of all the six geo-political zones.
Singapore had its Lee Yuan Kew; Malaysia its Mahatir Mohammed; Botswana, its Festus Mogae; Germany its Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl. We once had Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ahmadu Bello, Obafemi Awolowo and Sam Mbakwe: all these outstanding personalities were freely elected.
When institutions and politicians fail, voters should seize the initiative by delivering a stinging rebuke to their oppressors through the ballot box and vote into power only candidates that demonstrate the qualities of true leadership and are not tainted by the corrosive corruption, incompetence and cluelessness of the past and current offerings at every level.
