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| Nigeria's visionless leadership is QUICKENING the road to Biafra |
At a meeting of the institution of the African Union (AU),as reported in The Guardian Newspaper of October; 22; 2009 the Economic Commission of Africa (ECA) said that corruption has remained the most formidable stumbling block to the economic development of the continent. It said that while Africa witnessed economic growth of 5.5 percent, the positive change did not reflect in the standard of living of the people.
The report said:
"Corruption is a major challenge to governance and development in Africa. It erodes the capacity of the state to deliver services efficiently, provide security and maintain peace, order and stability. When deep rooted, corruption generates poverty ant turns resource-rich countries into low income, backward societies. Many African countries are trapped in this cycle of corruption, poverty and under-development". It adds that corruption is especially debilitating for Africa, the poorest continent. "It undermines the ability to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) because resources meant for education, health, rural roads and electricity are diverted for personal use. Corruption also increases the cost of doing business in the region, adding that it is a major disincentive for the much-craved foreign direct investment."
The former United States Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized Nigeria on January 26,2010, for corruption and poor living standards which she said encouraged the sort of extremism typified by the attempted bombing of an American airliner by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas day in 2009. Speaking at a town hall meeting of State Department employees, Clinton said the Nigerian government has failed for years to address the legitimate needs of its people. She added that the failure of the Nigerian leadership over many years to respond to the legitimate needs of their own young people, to have a government that promoted a meritocracy, that really understood that democracy cannot just be given lip service, it has to be delivering services to the people, has meant there is a lot of alienation in that country and others. (The Nation, Wednesday, January 27, 2010.)
The 1967-70 genocidal war,the Niger Delta militancy and recently the Biafran spring and all the security threats to the nation are attributed to vaccum in quality leader which has made a strong case for self determination of all the indigenous people that were falsely lumped together in 1914 along ethnic lines
Missing $20 billion Oil Money: Why we can’t publish full details of audit report – Nigerian Govt.Premium times 16th January 2016
The audit report by PriceWaterHouseCoopers on the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, accused of diverting the money, has been ready since September 2014, but the government has declined repeated demands to make the document public.
Amid pressure from the public and the opposition All Progressives Congress, APC, the government early February issued a “highlight” of the report, with a conclusion that the alleged missing $20 billion, exposed by a former Central Bank Governor, Lamido Sanusi, was a farce.
The “highlight” concluded that less than $2billion was missing.
Nigeria Lost $1B Per Month Under Goodluck Jonathan: Former Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi International business times January 27th 2016.
The fact is that there is no space to chronicled published corruption news and articles in Nigeria from the founding fathers of Nigeria’s nationalist to date.
The general belief in Nigeria is that the country has not been blessed with selfless leaders since independence. The leaders have been seen as self-centered, very corrupt and highly insensitive to the problems of those they govern. This phenomenon has brought untold hardship to the people with attendant massive unemployment, job insecurity, lack of social security systems, unexpected retirement and retrenchment of workers, inability to pay gratuities many years after retirement, inadequate pension benefits and to worsen it, failure to pay pensioners their dues regularly. The situation in the private sector is not different particularly with the high rate of corruption in commercial banks involving the Bank captains, oil marketing companies engaging in product tripping, the rise in Automated Teller Machine (ATM) frauds and collusion(s) by some so-called great entrepreneurs with those in government to steal government funds.
Leadership is important in any political community because the mass is generally atomized and inert. "The mass is able to act as a single unit only when it is integrated from outside by the leader. Leadership can transform the mass from an aggregation of isolated unit into a solid, unified group" (Geraint Parry, 1977, p. 53). Lenin, the great leader of the masses noted that the workers themselves never transcend their mileux to see the distinction between the bread riots and total revolution. He maintains that "without leadership, there is no such coherent thing as a 'people' - there is a messy mass" (Geraint Parry, 1977). Political leaders should, therefore be people who commune emotionally with their followers. They should not be selfish individuals who ride on the back of the people in order to achieve personal goals and ambitions. The goals of the leader must always be one with those of the people he is leading. Because he is apparently more foresighted, he has reduced the needs of his people into working ideologies which he pursues with the support of his people. Leadership is said to be meaningless without values. In pursuit of these values, a leader should be ready to suffer severe deprivations in the interest of his people. In building a nation, therefore, the first requirement is a good political leadership. Without it, and irrespective of all other human and material resources which a country may possess, its progress, growth and development will remain stunted.
We may now wish to ask what role has political leadership played in the task of nation building in Nigeria? Has Nigeria produced any leaders that have the political will to lead the country selflessly? How and when will the right type of leadership emerge on the Nigeria political scene? These questions constitute the main thrust of this section of our paper.
The eminent Nigeria novelist, Professor Chinua Achebe, has opined that "Nigeria is less than fortunate in its leadership". According to him, Nigerian leaders have "a tendency to pious materialist wooliness and self centred pedestrianism" (Achebe 1983, p 11). To buttress his point further, Achebe drew our attention to the statements made by Nigerians' best known leaders, Dr Azikiwe and Chief Awolowo respectively in their autobiographies, which could be construed to be the underlying principles of their leadership behavior in Nigerian politics. Dr Azikiwe was quoted as having pledged in 1937:
"That henceforth I shall utilize my earned income to secure my enjoyment of a high standard of living and also give a helping hand to the needy."
In the same streak, Chief Awolowo was quoted as saying: "I was going to make myself formidable intellectually, morally invulnerable, to make all the money that is possible for a man with my brain and brawn to make in Nigeria (Achebe, 1983, p. 11)."
One cannot but agree with Achebe that "Thoughts like these are more likely to produce aggressive millionaires than selfless leaders of their people." A critical look at the political leadership and behaviour of Nigeria's founding fathers, and those who came after them, both military and civilian political leaders, tend to bear Achebe's submission on leadership, we must reiterate, especially leadership directed towards nation-building, is a selfless endeavour. The leader should see himself as true servant of the people whose interests, values and aspirations are inter-twined with his own personal yearning for them; yearnings which have inspired him in the first place to volunteer to lead them. Should there be, in the course of leading them, a clash between personal interests and those of the people he leads, or the original vision which motivated him into leading them, the former interest should be sublimated into the latter. But has this been the case in Nigeria?
Events and incidents in Nigeria's political experience seem to supply a negative answer to the above question. Right from the era of the nationalist struggles, through the period of responsible government and independence to the checkered period of the military regimes, Nigeria's political leaders have failed to rise, at critical moments, above the mundane and pedestrian promptings of their ego, to the chivalrous heights of self-abnegation and sacrifice for the sake of father-land and the masses.
In Nigeria, political leaders have not discharged their obligations well. most of them forgot that true leadership is an interactional process whose sole aim is to procure, the good life for all. They have used political leadership to enrich themselves and their immediate minions. Their idea of political leadership is self-centered. To them, the masses do not count. In fact, in 1947, chief Awolowo wrote that the masses were politically indifferent and refused to be bothered by politics, being pre-occupied with the search for foods, clothing and shelter (Awolowo 1947, p.31-32). The chief, like the other leaders forgot that leaders are meant to help followers find "food, shelter and clothing". The result is that in critical moments in our national history, moments which called for high-order statesmanship, our leaders tend to succumb to the mundane dictates of their selfish interests. Examples are rampant, particularly now when all hands should be on deck to alleviate the suffering of the poor masses as the result of economic downturn occasioned by fall in oil, instead it was visionless leadership that led to some state governors in 2015 to drag the federal government of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan to court to share the fall out of the excess crude sales instead of reserving for the rainy day like this that has brought ruins and untold hardship to the people.
The resultant effect of poor leadership/followership dimension is that the economy is ruined and Nigerian's are suffering in the midst of plenty. There is nothing to talk about as health, education, transportation, infrastructural facilities are all in ruins. the ultimate tragedy is that these unthinkable conditions could have been buried in the sand of history, provided sophisticated code of normal behavior and disciplined economics policies were implemented. The result is a worthless and falling currency with no branch at all to wage the downward movement making the country a laughing stock in business circles across the globe including smaller feeder African nations like Benin and environ whose currency, the CFA has become a champion to the Naira
. Egwakhe states further that corruption from practical indication is a disproportional high burden on the economy and previous experience shows that condition harms the economy, undermines the rule of law, and grossly weakens the public confidence in government. From this, corruption escalates economic cost and dispassionately affects the quality of life .Some other factors that institutionalized corruption in Nigeria can be red in two of my published
Little wonder Ojukwu in his 1969 declaration of Biafran revolution at Ahiara has this to say about Nigeria
‘’Bribery, corruption and nepotism were so widespread that people began to wonder openly whether any country in the world could compare with Nigeria in corruption and abuse of power. All the modern institutions - the Legislature, the Civil Service, the Army, the Police, the Judiciary, the Universities, the Trade Unions and the organs of mass information - were devalued and made the tools of corrupt political power. There was complete neglect and impoverishment of the people. Whatever prosperity there was, was deceptive. Unemployment was growing. Thousands of young school-leavers were drifting away from the villages which had nothing to offer them into towns with no employment openings. There was despair in many hearts and the number of suicides was growing every day. The farmers were very hard-hit, their standard of living had fallen steeply. The soils were perishing from over-farming and lack of scientific husbandry. The towns like the soils were wastelands into which people put in too much exertion for too little reward. There were crime waves and people lived in fear of their lives. Business speculation, rack-renting, worship of money and sharp practices left a few extremely rich at the expense of the many, and these few flaunted their wealth before the many and talked about sharing the national cake. Foreign interests did roaring business spreading consumer goods and wares among a people who had not developed a habit of thrift and who fell prey to lying advertisements. Inequality of the sexes was actively promoted in Nigeria. Rather than aspire to equality with men, women were encouraged to accept the status of inferiority and to become the mistresses of successful politicians and business executives, or they were married off at the age of fourteen as the fifteenth wives of the new rich. That was the glorious Nigeria, the mythical Nigeria, celebrated in the European press.
Then worst of all came the genocide in which over 50,000 of our kith and kin were slaughtered in cold blood all over Nigeria, and nobody asked questions, nobody showed regret, nobody showed remorse. Thus, Nigeria had become a jungle with no safety, no justice and no hope for our people. We decided then to found a new place, a human habitation away from the Nigerian jungle. That was the origin of our Revolution.
It is therefore time ,after 57 years of nursing the terminal illness of Nigeria for all the ethnic groups that were forced into this unwanted marriage called Nigeria to come together and apply a legal means of killing a terminally ill patient known as euthanasia(mercy killing) to end the life of Nigeria for better countries with love of nation , devoid of corruption to emerge for the mutual development of all new nations.
-M.M.Mbanaja
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