We should be starkly aware of the fact that Nigeria is now peopled by warped human beings. Majority of Nigerian citizens have little positive signs of being real human beings. The signs by which human beings ought to be identified are love and concern for one another, social responsibility for one another and wholesome concept of balance between groups and classes. None of these signs seems to feature in present-day Nigeria.
Government, which ought to create the enabling environment for the development of these features of wholesome country, has been distorted into centres for perpetration of wrong principles of converting public property to private estates and perpetuation of self in the continuum of governance. Nothing positive can be envisaged in the horizon for this country, unless serious changes are speedily embarked upon by all and sundry.
We are witnesses of the bestial proclivities of Jihadists in our midst. We have seen politics of assassination of opponents in ‘democratic’ rivalry. We know of dare-devilry in power struggles between participants in corporate life. We are witnesses to usurpation of all types in relationships between investors in companies bound by law to behave positively to one another. We have experienced powerplay for even traditional leadership in communities, exposing involvement of people in manipulating police authorities to gain undeserved relevance. Turn whichever way, the signs are ominous. The Nigerian system is heading for the rocks. This again is a statement of fact borne out of half a century of experience as a committed citizen.
A person is one who has a wholesome spirit for what is good and in the interest of all. He or she contemplates in love what should benefit one and all before embarking on a course of action, which is invariably power by will, which in turn is powered by thoughts and desires. It is degenerate to allow thoughts that are negative issue from our spirit. The flip side, of course, is that positive thoughts cannot attract negative ones and the actions that arise from such thoughts. Persons with similar thoughts and volition should make up parties. Where parties are made up of people with negative volition, nothing good can be expected from such parties. Belonging to a party on the premise that it is a quick access to wealth and power is hardly positive. Creating parties based on desire and will to suck it on others and hold power for selfish ends is not positive. Nigerian political groups have got it all wrong so far. Drivers of their actions are not in the public interest. In fact public interest has for long been relegated to a non-issue.
People without visible means of livelihood now occupy our public space. People without cognate experience of running institutions have undeserved access to leadership. Parties are formed on the basis of how to access power at all costs without thorough concept of goals desired from use of power. People in our legislature, for example, are not issuing from any experience worth anything to the electorate. They are products of schemes deliberately contrived for pecuniary goals. In civilised climes, no one becomes a legislator without having experienced workaday productive life at which required knowledge of people are sharpened. No one gives what one does not possess.
Leadership cannot be offered by people who have not experienced private or public positive lifestyles. Legislators in wholesome climes arrive portals of legislation after workaday life during which lessons are learnt of what is best for one’s people. Executive positions should be vested on people who are professionals in fields of responsibility cognate to their roles based on experienced profiles. But our country is in woes unending because people scheme themselves into power without appropriate personal, formal discipline imbued by positive learning and experience. Our woes derive from this abnormality.
Our parties cannot, therefore, yield us a positive country with aspirations that can be trusted to lift our people out of cycles of poverty into any modicum of comfort in the near or far future until we examine ourselves thoroughly and re-engineer our constitution to forbid neophytes and schemers without credentials from accessing power of any type.
Being on the corridors of power without credentials and cognate experience in real life should not qualify anyone to become a political leader. What should count is track record of faithful adherence to positive values through experiencing in related fields to those of aspirants to power. A person who has no personal discipline cannot be a governor of a state or a member of legislature. A person who has warped upbringing, bereft of respect for others, cannot be a leader just because he is loaded with guile for outdistancing others in vices of all types.
Political leaders should issue from established commitment to welfare of particular electorate. They should have individual character worth the trust and confidence of an electorate. People of doubtful pedigree and woolly experiential profiles should not approach corridors of power at all tiers: executive, legislature and judiciary. Until we get these facts right, Nigeria cannot move forward. So far, those who have held power are people without the requisite qualifications to man our resources and common will. For this reason, Nigeria is doomed for want of real persons and parties.
