By Kunle Rotimi
Looking back at our developmental history from 1960, our dear country has had its unfair share of poorly disoriented citizens and leadership deficiency, tinged with social and political instability and internecine Civil War!
Within three years after independence, the toddling nation was embroiled in political crises, involving brutal killings, religious upheavals and tribal distrust.
These ills snowballed into needless military putsch in January 1966 and another occurred in quick succession in July of the same year! In 1967-70, the devastating Civil War erupted and dragged back the nascent nationhood, creating visible cracks and dilapidations in the country’s geo-political architecture!
Rising from the ashes of the war, the ill-prepared military adventurers continued to sap the national resources dry through morbid ambition and unaudited wasteful expenditures. The largest looting sprees in Nigerian history occurred during military regimes! One coup led to another, with each successive junta competing in aberration of constitutional development and scandalous wastage of public funds.
The incursion of the military into Nigerian politics since 1966 has seriously undermined the rate at which the nation could have developed its basic infrastructures. Unfortunately too, the civilian administrations that spotted from 1960 to date are somewhat midwifed by departing neo-colonialists and the military.
The sub-human relics who raped democracy to death in 1983 and 1993 are today hero-worshipped by children of anger and disillusioned younger generation! The Nigerian leadership has thus mismanaged the country’s steady growth and development through selfish ambition, complacency and insatiable lust for power.
Those who clamour for public offices In Nigeria often do so to feather their personal nests and keep the nation on its knee or on all-fours. These demagogues, cruel pretenders, desperately seek high public positions like musical chairs, by changing the music with same recycled dancers! They deceive their followers by creating political cults of exclusion, monopolized by their cronies and bloody initiates!
Sad enough, the generation of younger Nigerians wallows in very parlous orientation, reflecting in the way they reason awkwardly on issues that border on their fundamental rights, well-being and prospects. The resilient masses are so gullible that some leaders take their docility for granted in the course of misappropriating public funds and mismanagement of performance.
The predatory leaders abuse the poor masses as mere pawns on political chess-boards. Nigeria needs benevolent and charismatic leaders whose desire must be to serve selflessly, not as predators whose mission in governance is to exploit the masses and steal.
At the moment, Nigeria is facing very challenging problems of insecurity and retrogression which are traceable to the poor orientation of younger citizens generally! The miscreants who tag themselves as boko harams, the political thugs that perpetrate violence, the cyber rats who post senseless and insulting comments on social media, kidnappers, fraudsters, rapists, armed robbers and other nuisance variables that make the country insecure are mostly younger generation of citizens.
These are people who have mortgaged their promising future to lotus eating. The politicians who have impoverished the masses use money and bags of rice as baits to manipulate their destiny! Some frustrated politicians use religion and tribal persuasion to hoodwink some hoodlums in causing mayhem during or after elections!
There are religious bigots and their cannon fodder, satanic sponsors of terrorism, the political denizens who cannot survive outside the comfort zones of public offices! There are ‘former-this, former-that’ leaders who are never satisfied with the huge perquisites and ill-gotten resources they have amassed! They are still too desperate, even at very old age, to continue in their plunder. They have succeeded in conscripting a few citizens who lack personal values, the younger generation who will prefer clapping and ululating perpetually in the streets after their oppressors!
Most Nigerian youths, semi-educated and stark illiterates lack conventional wisdom and orientation of civilized world. They claim not be pleased with their socio-economic and political conditions, yet they unwittingly subscribe to the manipulations of their oppressive leaders.
It is very unfortunate that most of those who complain bitterly against misrule and bad leadership in Nigeria are themselves steeped in corruption in their sphere of influence! They shout when they want cheap attention, but their ulterior motive is to blackmail their targets or get settled. The same chronic complainants fawn after rebellious politicos and spent political forces, exhuming their carcasses and giving their remains unbefitting accolades!
Some youths have constituted themselves into rented crowd of acrimonious gangsters, with little or nothing to show in value dispositions!
Until the masses in Nigeria rethink to identify what is good for them, and they develop better mindset with appreciable personal values, there will be no rational basis for the downtrodden to condemn the lackluster leadership!
Every society deserves the kind of leaders it gets. Bad leadership reciprocates decadent followership, in that, the former evolves from the latter’s nucleus in vicious recycle!
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| Nigeria: "Leadership Deficits Vs Disoriented Followership". |
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