The real cause of Nigeria's political leadership failure

THE REAL CAUSE OF NIGERIA’S POLITICAL LEADERSHIP FAILURE When most people were making a lot of noise in the social media and on the streets in most major cities and villages across Nigeria for a ‘change’ that will bring about the much desired political and economic respite for the country, they forgot something important. When most of these concerned nationalists were hell bent on choosing the political leadership which they think will cure the nation of all its problems in a few short weeks, they forgot something important. When the only basis for change they campaigned for is a change in the political party that is in power, and the focus back then was to lie, intimidate, cajole and coerce most people to abandon the idea of voting for a particular candidate in a particular party, they forgot something important. We all heard the allegations, we all saw the write ups accusing a lot of government officials of very massive corruption and financial mismanagement, many of these government officials were summarily tried, convicted and sentenced in the media, but are they still not forgetting something important? Most people alleged they should have got more infrastructure, some wanted more jobs created, some just wanted power supply to be massively improved, while the problem in some regions is security problems as lives and properties are lost to terror, wars and militancy. But it was more than this. The real problem in Nigeria is the quality of our political leadership, please note the word, QUALITY. From the time the Handed over power to Nigerians, there has been some huge mistrust among the federating regions in the country. Such mistrust is at the bottom of the problem, permit me to remind you that this mistrust is as a result of poor political leadership where people elected to be leaders chose to aim their policies against other people from other regions while not considering the likes and dislikes of other people from other regions. It was this poor quality of leadership that made the coupists to strike in 1966, ending the nation’s first democracy after just 5 years. Let us remember that after all the blames which should rightly go to the coup plotters for hijacking power from elected government officials, some blame should go to the errant government officials themselves. Some of them had started to be clannish and making financial mistakes which made the common man to see them as flamboyant, while they paid little attention to the real reason they were elected. Over the years, the quality of leadership has been on a steady decline, it went into free fall in the return of Nigeria to democracy in 1999, if you say Obasanjo was not a good leader, what will you say about Jonathan, and before you criticise Jonathan for bad leadership, consider how deep we have dug ourselves into the ground now in the regime of Buhari. Square pegs are being positioned in round holes everyday and things continue to look bleak. This decline is also evident in all states and local government areas where the best of the worst set of us are narrowed down and selected for leadership in gross disregard to laid down elective laws. So what is the solution? The youths should stand up and seize their country back from the hands of elders who will not have our best interest at heart. Development of the country must be pursued instead of playing partisan politics, and finally, we are not moving an inch to the right direction if this nation is not restructured. John Okoye is our guest writer from Abuja.