Ahmad
When I read the comments of many perplexed Nigerians who queried President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua for passing up yer another excellent opportunity to engage with other influential world leaders at the United Nations last week in the hope of getting us out of our economic doldrums, I actually recoiled ith laughter.
I laughed heartily even with my grieving heart because the president’s no-show at the global even was merely a case of deju vu. Even without the timeless admonition of Chinua Achebe in his theses “The trouble with Nigeria” or the recent lectures from America’s combative Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, the reasons for the president’s course of action should be quite obvious.
Even the blind can see that the major recurring decimal on the subject of the alarming gap between the promise Nigeria showed at independence and what has become of the nation presently, is that of Lilliputian leadership foisted on the nation since a bunch of misguided rascals in starched khaki overthrew our legitimate democratic government in 1966!
But it was not only the president’s absence at the UN that should be of serious concern to millions of Nigerians. As anyone with even a pedestrian comprehension of the subject would teel you, for leadership to be effective, it must be inspirational. On that score, only the President can explain why he opted for the highly insensitive choice of attending the commissioning of an ultra modern university in Saudi Arabia at same that our own tertiary institutions are not only in ruins, but also in deep crises with lecturers on strike, and our children out of school!
Except there were other undisclosed motives for it, whoever advised the President to embark on that trip to Saudi Arabia at this material time has done him a great disservice. His esteem has never been lower among the high and low Nigerians I interact with through this medium. Now, I fear that he may even have damaged his irreparably.
Anyhow, this week Nigeria is due to cross another significant milestone in our national evolution. On Thursday, we will collectively saunter into the year of our supposed golden anniversary and earn the right to invite the world to celebrate fifty years of our nationhood by the next October in 2010. The tragedy of course, is that on the evidence of the mosaic of social and institutional rot that confronts us today in every corner of the nation today, merely dreaming of the event is the easier part intruth.
For ordinary Nigerians like myself, coming up with the definitive list of successful projects, ‘programs’ or achievements to celebrate will be more like looking for a needle in a haystack. Unless we delude ourselves, there simply aren’t too many positives to flaunt. Here again, we must admit that selfish and incompetent leadership ranks highest is the principla factor when we only seemed to have exchanged our political freedom from the British with economic bondage in its brutal and most primitive form.
In any case, our bicentennial celebrations will not be the same as organizing state visits for foreign leaders when, as we all know, our leades routinely engaged Julius Berger to erect used containers to shield our slums from view in pathetic self-delusion. When the world gathers in Abuja to celebrate with us next year, the inevitable comparisons would be made between Nigeria, and other nations that obtained their independence about the same period with us. That is when genuine patriots of the nation will wish they lived in a different era.
Names like Singapore and Malaysia will quickly jump out of the hat to our collective shame. Our humiliation will be complete. As painful as it may seem to digest for most patriots, at independence, Nigeria even showed more promise than the two nations put together. The difference is that they never experienced the type of leadership jinx we endured in the past several decades. They never had to cope with leaders who believe they can ‘vision’ for eternity on how to move the nation forward.
That explains why there is so much hoplelessness in the land presently. Our collective faith in the nation appeared to have wavered perhaps irredeemably. The evidence is there from the body language of our athletes and the naked hypocrisy of those who claim to be our leaders. Deceit is now the national past time.
For those reasons, a former governor wanted for money laundering overseas suddently wants us to believe he is hunted for opting to defend the rights of the citizens of the Niger Delta. Federal Permanent Secretaries of northern extraction who can hardly extricate themselves from the excesses of the executive arm, and used the past three decades to amass mansions in choice precincts of Abuja, also want to exploit the deep north-south divide for a stay execution as they seek to avoid the axe from the public service.
It has always been like that. We all want something for ourselves it seems but nothing for the nation. And we compound our problem withour gullibility and primities senses of ethnic, regional or religious solidarity that has only served to retard whatever cohesive intensions of development we have had since independence.
It is therefore within this context that we must situate the ‘exemplary leadership’ award conferred on the executive governor of Gombe state Mohammed Danjuma Goje by the youth wing of the Christian Association of Nigeria over the weekend. The award was the first of its kind in the nation by disciples of one faith to a leader who happedned to be of the different religious persuasion. More significantly, as the CAN Youth Leaders Pastor Sado Henry said, being so generous to members of the Christian Faith did not make him less Muslim than his fellow northern governors of the same faith.
The award was hugely symbolic because it proved that with competent leadership we can successfully bring down the barriers of religious or ethnic prejudice. Most of the views expressed by the impressive list of speakers at the event only vindicated what I wrote on these pages in the past several months on huge transformation of Gombe state in the past six years.
Yet, by winning the CAN award, Goje has shown the way for other leaders to follow in our search for religious tolerance in the nation. We can only hope that the Ebonyi state governor Martin Elechi who has seems to have abridged the rights of Muslims in his state in recent times will borrow a leaf rom his Gombe state counterpart.
Throughout history, experience has shown that great leaders are at their best when they seek to unite their people. Leaders inspire their people and inject them by their actions with uncommon enthusiasm for the common purpose. The follower’s on their part put their trust in the leader knowing the chances of betrayal are minimal.
Today, Governor Danjuma Goje may have his critics like every human being, but it is his singular ability to unite his people through the provision of the dividends of democracy and visible leadership that makes hime worthy of emulation by his peers.
