Leadership

One of the great fallacies in Nigeria is the notion that leadership starts and ends with political leadership, and that “our leaders” are the entire cause of the problem with Nigeria. This is a fine piece of nonsense. Leadership is a broad concept. The church is a constituency with leaders, so are the mosques, the traditional healers, the business establishment, academia, students, and so on. Every segment of our population has a hierarchy of some sort, and with that, it also has a leadership class. Our lazy habit of blaming all and sundry on our leaders, and especially our leaders in “government” (by which we usually mean the federal government, not, say, the judiciary, or the 36 imbeciles who lead the states) is a classic cop out. It is a way to make us feel better about ourselves. The fact of the matter is that wherever you are, as a member of our society, you have the opportunity to demonstrate the leadership you wish we had. And watching these alternate leaders in society is a study in the true challenges of leading the county. Too often we see the exact reflection of everything that we loudly complain about. The example of estate associations stands out. It is a real indictment that even in the entirely private, resident-controlled estate associations, whose job it is to ensure the comfort, security and general wellbeing of the residents of the estate they belong to, the record shows that, as a rule, these associations fail to discharge that responsibility honestly and diligently. The stories of mismanagement, simple theft and tribalism are legion. Perhaps even, the existence of these organisations is a statement set in bold of the critical challenge of achieving basic goals in this country. I am still flabbergasted by the daily reality of neighbours, whose children play together, stealing diesel money from the estate pot. The insults we hurl at “government” make us feel better about ourselves. We trot out the standard complaint that “we are not ready” all the time. Yet, in our small pockets, we fail miserably. Surely there is no greater demonstration of the national challenge than these micro failures. It is an uncomfortable truth, but Nigeria is made up of Nigerians, not anyone else. What we see is what we are. And we are, far more often than we wish to admit, not the change we wish to see in our world.