MY ODE TO THE NIGERIAN LEADERSHIP

If you want change, think not of leadership in Nigeria. Think rather about criticism of leadership. Leaders stand poignantly against change and stoically against progress of their land. They only yield to change when and after they have been pushed strongly against, by the critics of leadership, who are the actual change agents.

Learning how to be a leader, in Nigeria, is not about learning about what is right and wrong, or what is good and bad. It is not even about learning how things are done rightly or wrongly. It is not also by learning how the society would be perfectly constructed like Utopia.  Those that become leaders are actually that unenterprizing part of our human society who only knows how to manufacture, search for and harmonize interests, no matter how objectionable those interests being harmonized are.

Leaders in Nigeria are the impediment to better society. They frolic in status quo ante and revel in society's Commonwealth, yet their actions are reactions. The real drivers of society's progress are never song; they are not even countenanced; they are not valued. They work, while the so-called leaders take the glory.

Any time you want a positive change, or you want to drive a positive change, don't think about leadership; think about criticism of leadership. This is because when you think about leadership, you think about assuming leadership, acquiring leadership and jostling for leadership. When you think about leadership, and jostle for leadership, you become a numskull, a lazy and base man, you think about interests and harmonization of interests; you think about people to please, you think about toes not to step on. You even work against progress of society if an interest of a heavyweight is in line and you need his support. Thus, thinking leadership is thinking retrogression and anachronism.

Seek to be a leader because leadership is good; leadership is opulence. Leadership is sugar in the mouths of leaders. It is easier to aspire to leadership than to choose the path of acting watchdog of society; yet some people still choose this difficult path of watchdog. Those that work are the monkeys. Those that take the glory are the baboons.

The lazy baboons who become leaders in Nigeria, acquire and have all the powers, and could even tap or force compliance of the monkeys, at their will. The baboons are repeatedly and constantly urged on to work. They are pushed and criticized to make life better for the monkeys that till the soil. The baboons are supplied with alternative solutions to problems on a platter because they have no solutions to the problems; yet they exhibit untold inertia to do a thing. They are reckless with commonwealth, squandering and sharing the dividends of leadership.

So, they live a life of extravagant waste, crass incompetence and estimated debauchery. When eventually they wake, and in their hangovers permit that one positive change, amongst many that the critics have canvassed, pushed and supplied to them, be implemented, the people will rejoice, and encomium is showered on the leaders!!!

People will praise the same leaders that have raped them, slept when the people suffered, slumbered when he should be awake, refused to allow their progress when he could have allowed, and has been an impediment to their better life because he was debauched.

Nobody praises the monkeys that made it happen, nobody remembers the watchdogs that discovered the secrete rapes, nobody remembers those that worked against the great powers of leadership. The monkey is left with nothing, other than a slightly better society needing still much more pushes and panting on leaderships, in a perpetual circular motion of the leaders' stingy relinquish of people's rights and benefits.

The epitaph of Nigerian leadership is inscribed with the name of the leader; just as he carries the symbol of his former office as a smoother to yet another coveted post.

If you think that the society is just and fair, think about becoming a leader.

©Mr Awkadigwe F. I.