A Society Is Its Leadership. And we can attempt a reality check to see if indeed this assertion is true, if you would take a quick walk across your street with me, to any Christ Embassy near you.
What did you see? Did you fail to notice the mien, mannerism, speech act and fashion sense of the popular Nigerian televangelist, Chris Oyakhilome, boldly written all over the place? And yet he was not there.
This is the picture the American life coach and leadership expert, John C. Maxwell, was trying to paint when he decided to define leadership as influence, in his work, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.
We can also check the next door. Your neighbour’s place. What did you see there? Dirty, unkempt and lousy kids? No! What you saw there is a failed leadership that is lacking in the core values of hygiene, family health and child welfare.
The apple does not fall far from the tree. And so is the society and its leadership. By their fruits, you shall know them. Apples and oranges may compare in leadership, and in some instances, the difference can be so nauseating, sharp and contrasting like night and day.
In ancient Egypt, the sons of Joseph; a Jew and the Egyptian Chief Economic Adviser at the time, once dined and wined with the Princes of Egypt, before the coming of the Pharaoh of the oppression, under whose watch newborn Hebrew sons were taken from their mothers at birth and dashed against walls. What had changed? Leadership.
Many, who lived in Hitler’s Germany and had seen the burning furnace of the Holocaust, could never have imagined a time in the near future when a Deutsch government will open its borders to humanity and every citizen of the free world including the Jews.
But the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, did more than that when in 2017 she opened her doors to feed and tend the wounds of many migrants of all races, who were stranded on the Mediterranean Sea and in dire need of succour and milk of human kindness. Again, what had changed? Leadership.
In North Korea, Kim Jong-Un’s poorly managed temperament has become a national burden, which constantly puts the safety of her citizens and neighbours on the edge. There are justified fears beyond the shores of Seoul, that Mr. Jong-Un can wake up on the wrong side of his bed on a fateful day and plunge the entire Korean peninsula into a senseless war.
This is how sensitive and critical the nuances of leadership can be in determining the fate of a people. Leadership brings with it the character of the man at the helm to power. What a leader does, says or fail to say are all rife with meaning and consequences that can upset the apple cart and throw a nation off balance.
After President Muhammadu Buhari had told a bewildered global audience in 2016 that his wife belongs to the kitchen, in faraway Berlin, where a woman is more than just a housekeeper but a leader of over 83 million people, I was not surprised when a Nigerian parent and a twitter user, later complained that a teacher in the 21st century is teaching his daughter in school that “daddy goes to work and mummy cooks at home,” because what President Buhari had said on that fateful day in Europe was inarguably a policy statement on the Nigerian girl-child.
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Nigeria almost went over the cliff early in the year, with President Muhammadu Buhari’s poorly managed communication skills and unholy silence on the gruesome murder of about 73 indigenes of Benue in one fell swoop by marauding Fulani herdsmen, which left survivors of the mayhem feeling angry and vulnerable, with many forced to resort to self-help in reprisal attacks that was only a breath away from full-blown genocide.
And this unsettling silence is what the government media handlers are quick to promote as Mr. President‘s body language. And while Nigerian citizens continue to express a genuine concern why it should take its leadership almost eternity in responding to emergencies, like what President Buhari did in the Benue pogrom, the president in an effort to hint on diligence, made an attempt to debunk the accusation of being slow, sluggish and lazy in taking critical decisions on burning issues of state by saying that he chooses to take his time in order not to make mistakes.
But as plausible as his argument may seem, President Muhammadu Buhari in 2017 after taking all the time he needed to compile and release the long-awaited list of appointees into federal government parastatals in Nigeria, made a costly mistake that did not only ridicule the entire Nigerian nation before the rest of the world but reduced it to a butt of jokes by the rest of civilisation.
Mr. Buhari, in the end, after the long wait and a supposed due diligence, had only succeeded in turning in a ghost list of many dead Nigerians, and some were dead men and women whom he had officially acknowledged their passing in condolence messages he personally signed.
This singular incident of gross incompetence and negligence of duty, for many, had served to remove all existing doubts where there was any, that the Buhari administration is indeed slow, sluggish and lazy in most part, especially considering the sad fact that it also took President Muhammadu Buhari almost half of a fiscal year to form a cabinet, after the wheels of government had practically been brought to a halt without an economic team in place and a lack of policy direction.
And yet the Nigerian purse was still exposed to pilfering by no less an appointee than the then all-powerful Secretary to the Government of the Federation and close friend of Mr. President, Mr. Babachir Lawal, when the government was finally formed. Again, after a supposed due diligence.
It remains inconceivable to the minds of many Nigerians up to this day, why the machinery of the Buhari administration cannot for whatever reason under the sun, dutifully crosscheck facts and verify public documents before releasing same to the public. Nigerians do not know which account is credible anymore, with different government officials giving varying figures on recovered monies from alleged looters.
With the appointment of a litany of personal aides, who we want to presume must have all gone to school, by President Muhammadu Buhari to help with his official work schedule and a presidential staff, who we want to assume are all professionals, Mr. Buhari in the early life of his administration was still accused of plagiarism.
He was later found out, after he had lifted quotes from President Barack Obama’s 2008 victory speech without acknowledging the author, in an address he delivered at the launching of the Change Begins With Me initiative in 2016.
This theft of intellectual property was one embarrassment too many for an obviously lazy leadership. It was an avoidable gaffe. A simple recourse to the use of the google app on any handheld device would have saved the most populous black nation on earth and the home of great scholars and intellectual giants, the agony of international ridicule.
Between the Nigerian youth and the Buhari administration, it goes without saying, that it is the latter that has earned the ignoble legacy of being slow, sluggish and lazy in a fast-moving digital world, where information is on the fingertips.
And interestingly, no Nigerian leader of living memory has been known to have thought of the Nigerian youths as being lazy before now. And no contemporary Nigerian leader has ever shied away from talking about the resilience and brilliance of the everyday Nigerian youth outside the shores of Nigeria except President Muhammadu Buhari who according to Aisha Yesufu, “threw the Nigerian youths under the bus,” in London when he insinuated that the Nigerian youth is lazy while attending the 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting CHOGM.
“We have a very young population, with more than 60% below the age of 30…they’re claiming that Nigeria is an oil producing country and therefore they should sit down and do nothing,” said Mr. Buhari. Again, what had changed? Leadership.
In 2019, the Nigerian youths will have to come together to change this leadership, if they must reverse this ugly narrative against their toil and redeem themselves in the eye of the rest of the world.