By Alex Byanyiko
“Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of dedicated individuals,” said Martin Luther King Jnr.
In about nine months from now, Nigerians will have another opportunity to elect people into various positions of leadership in the country. By then, we will have had twenty years of uninterrupted democracy.
Whether or not we have recorded desired progress in our democratic journey, it is another matter entirely and I will attempt expressing myself on that in a separate writing. But here I want to focus on the processes of hiring our supposed leaders.
From 1999 when this democratic dispensation began, we have had President Olusegun Obasanjo who ran for two terms in office to 2007, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua who, unfortunately, died on seat three years into his tenure on the 5th of May 2010, giving room for his then vice president Goodluck Ebele Jonathan to assume the presidency according to constitutional provisions. Now it is President Muhammadu Buhari. In all this, Nigerians have had to complain about one leadership failure or the other.
From the Senate, Federal House of Representative and across most of the 36 states of the country where self-serving governors, members’ state Houses of Assemblies, chairmen Local Government Councils and others helped themselves with public funds while doing very little or nothing to improve the lives of the people they claimed to be serving.
While we cannot accuse all government officials or political office holders of corruption and embezzlement of public funds, Nigerians have been suffering from leadership that leaves so much to be desired either by reason of incompetence, self-aggrandizement or outright lack of vision and, or, dearth of ideas about governance. And yet, every turn of election period we have all manner of people parading themselves as candidate into various levels of leadership.
Even though we can say there has been a little improvement on our electoral processes, especially with the turn of events in 2015 which saw an opposition candidate in the person of the then General Muhammadu Buhari defeating a sitting president, and the incumbent president’s heroic concession of defeat and even calling his opponent to congratulate him, so much has been a disappointment for Nigerians so far.
I am not going to enumerate the myriad of challenges we are now faced with as a nation. Different people have been doing so both on the traditional and the social media since President Buhari was handed over power in 2015, especially with the delayed appointment of his cabinet members about six months after assuming office and the consequent challenges that followed.
My purpose for writing this is to inspire Nigerians to look at the leadership challenge from the roots: their various localities. If we can solve these problems locally, then we can solve them nationally.
I am not so naïve as to discountenance the role that money plays in our politics, but I dare to say that something can be done towards sanitizing and improving the processes of choosing those who should be in position of leadership in this country.
All along we have been made to believe that money is everything in politics and life generally. While this is true to some extent, I believe that the will of enlightened people in choosing quality leaders can ultimately beat the money-bags when backed up with selflessness and a true vision for a country or society that should work. Anywhere in the world things change for the better when people subject their personal interest for a greater purpose.
It was Benjamin Disreali who said, “Nothing can resist a human will that stakes its heart upon a purpose”. And I believe there are many selfless Nigerians who can stick out their necks for the benefit of all. Many have done that before. We need to identify such people, starting from our communities, and support them into getting leadership positions.
As a people, we have long been robbing ourselves of a better society and a country each time we allowed the wrong people into leadership positions. But who are the wrong people? You would ask: they are those opportunistic politicians who, by happenstance, have been enriching themselves and their cronies with our collective wealth while serving us with peanuts circumstantially.
They are those political jobbers who throng around those in the corridors of powers for nothing other than seeking undue favors. They are those political hooligans who violently steal the mandate of others to emerge into places of authority.
They are those capricious business men and women who invest in certain politicians with the sole aim of manipulating them and the system to serve their greed and wickedness. They are those lily-livered gangsters who lack any sense of neither order nor vision, but will kill for the sake of power. They are those men and women who cannot even lead their own lives in the way they should go, but want to be called leaders of the society. I can go on and on in this regard, and Nigerians can bear me witness as to our experiences of leadership in this country, but I have to stop here and maintain the purpose of this writing, which is finding the way forward.
Some Nigerians argue that it is better they grab whatever is possible from the politicians as election results are usually decided even before we go to the polls. They, therefore, are willing to trade their consciences for a morsel of meat during electioneering campaign and voting periods.
This horror played out at the recent disappointing gubernatorial elections in Anambra State, Nigeria, where voters were alleged to have been selling their votes to politicians at the rate of N500 to N5000. Sadly, this horrendous destruction of democratic processes followed similar cases in Edo and Ondo States as reported by various media. And we are carrying on as if nothing happened? Obviously, when you see a carcass of an antelope on the ground, and a lion cooling off and smiling few meters away from the spot, do you need to ask any questions?
But how long can we continue on this suicidal paths? How much longer can we continue in this thick, darkness of ignorance and stupidity in the face of information age? Should we not have been building from the partial successes of the 2015 general elections?
How does it feel when you collect a bag of rice today and vote for a candidate that runs the system in a way that leaves you for four or eight years without a cup of garry on your table? How does it feel, when you go without good and functional education for you and your children? How does it feel when you have to go without electricity to power your house or businesses for years without end? Usually the theft and bad decisions of bad leaders haunt us all along after they have gone. We live with all the consequences of their corruption, ineptitude, greed and lack of direction. Think of a man who gives his 12 year old daughter in marriage to a dog.
However, we don’t have to continue in this wrong path. We can decide to change if not for our own sake, for the sake of our children. We can reflect on the words of Martin Luther King Jr, “It is incumbent on us to live today so to act throughout our lives as to leave our children a heritage for which we will receive their blessing and not their curse.” Cursed are those who, in the course of carrying out their duties, received kickbacks and other forms of bribery that led to sinking the ship of our nationhood.
Yes, we can change this narrative. We can decide on the kind of people to lead us. It is possible against all odds. We can do it. As it has been proven in the 2015 general elections, flawed as it might have been, ultimately power belongs to the people, and they can use it in choosing the best brains and hearts to move this country from this abysmal performance and dangerous footsteps to a prosperous dance and laughter. We can have a paradigm shift and begin to act like civilized people working towards uplifting the nation.
There are some simple ways we can do that. It is no rocket science. We have just simply refused to be courageous and visionary enough in handling the affairs of governance in our society.
I have earlier mentioned identifying true leaders. Such people do not wait until they are in position of leadership before they start impacting on the lives of people around them. True leadership is not a matter of position. It is a matter of the heart and head. So if someone comes and asks for your support to be in a position of leadership, simply check his antecedents. What are the things that he or she has been doing for the benefit of others in his or her immediate environment? Not those pockets of hypocritical service that some people engage themselves in to a selfish end. Check instances of sacrificial behavior in, say, the last 10 to 15 years of the life of such a person. Carry out a thorough research on his or her background: consult his or her closest friends in secondary school as well as those who might not be close friends but must have had some kind of interactions with. Some of their university friends and may be foes, and then working colleagues or business associates, suppliers and customers past and present alike.
Another factor that must not be compromised or taken for granted is the person’s competencies and experiences. The era of having jobless guys who describe their ‘professions’ as ‘politicians’ should be flung into the waste bin of history. It is, in this complex and modern times, unacceptable to have this gang of people who have no record of success or, at least, some experiences in any business or profession, pose themselves as professional politicians. This has been one of the reasons we have people being paid mountainous salaries from our collective wealth and yet cannot deliver a fly from a pit toilet, let alone meeting the yearnings of our people. People simply can’t give what they don’t have.
The willingness to learn the business of leadership is another thing to consider. Whether or not leaders are born, I will rather leave it for those who will like to debate on that. But with the little that I have learned so far from the lives of great leaders like Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Bishop David Oyedepo, John Maxwell, Stephen Covey, John Hagee, Martin Luther King Jr, Winston Churchill and others, there are certain principles that stand great leaders out from the rest and such can be learned by anyone who is willing to do so. If a person gives himself or herself to learning about leadership, it will definitely show in their interactions with people around them.
Humility of a person is an unmistakable sign of strength in leadership. Those who seek respect or honor by force are a red flag. They seek people to serve them, when they are supposed to be the servants of their people. This, however, can be deceptive because, recently, most people have been carrying themselves with some form of humility in the way they address others, but when you look closely, their actions will always betray them.
A man of vision is the one you should support. Someone who has identified a challenge he or she wants to address, not those who come singing the song of condemnation against the incumbent (s). Such people usually fall foul of the same or even worse crimes they charge others with. For instance, someone might want to be elected as a member of the National Assembly so as to sponsor a bill that should end child labor or violence alongside representing the interests of his or her constituency. Vision is one of the most important keys in leadership. We should run away from people who come and say they want to end poverty. This has become a cliché in our democratic experience. Such people always end up ending their own poverty and further impoverishing all of us.
This is, by no means, exhaustible, but they are a few things we can check come 2019, when another opportunity comes for us to elect those who should lead us. Here comes an opportunity for us to start to choose the very best amongst us to serve us. We should not be fooled by the simple narrative that our votes do not count. When we vote from the depth of our consciences, we can make our votes count.
We have been in this valley for so long, but we can climb up the mountain of justice and performance in public service. We can truly get the best people to lead us to our promised land. We can render this gang of democratic rapes irrelevant. We can send them back to where they belong.
I know some people will want to ask me who should go and do all such cross checking or investigation of election candidates. Those who live around the people who wish to lead us can play a vital role in announcing to the world what they know about such candidate. Civil society organizations also have some responsibility here. Get all the facts about such candidates and let the world know what such candidate represents. It is our responsibility to do so in order to prepare a sustainable future for our country. When we choose our leaders consciously, we can then have the moral right to hold them accountable every step of the way and we can ultimately frustrate those evil men and women who have been manipulating us for so long and want to keep the status quo. It was Alan Kay who said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. We can invent a working Nigeria today for tomorrow.
Alex Byanyiko is an author, script writer, music and movie director and producer. He writes from Abuja