Mike Adeyemi
Leadership is the exercise of power or swing in social collectivities, such as groups, institute, communities or nations. Leading implies a joint path, and this in turn, often implies that all parties to the leadership relation have a common goal or at least similar well-suited goals. Leaders sway suggests an affirmative input towards the realization of these goals. A leader is one who is repeatedly professed to execute acts of leading.
A leader establishes the goals, purposes or objectives of the collectivity, creates the structures through which the purposes of the collectivity are satisfied, and maintains or enhances these structures. Leaders are supposed to synchronize, direct, guide or muster the hard work of others.
Leaders may also coax, maneuver, beguile, reward or pressurize. Leadership usually has consequences for the lines and wellbeing of clique, hence the importance attached to it in any Community. Leadership variable, is thus, awfully fundamental in understanding and explaining the twist and yap of the political course principally in a budding nation like Nigeria.
It is also very key to make a distinction headship from supervision, and perhaps followership. Supervision is influencing lesser to do nothing more than simply fulfilling the minimum requirement of their jobs to avoid off-putting consequences. A follower is someone who takes a sort or instruction from someone vested with power and authority. Such a follower is projected to confirm, comply with, and observe some lay down rules and set of laws as spelt out of the organization or group headed by a leader. This in core means that a leader cannot operate in a vacuum; he or she must lead in a milieu or group, where others are guided, led or ensue.
The leader is seen as seminal the thought and actions of his followers, whereas his cohorts in turn influence the leader, hence the ironic statements, “I am their leader, therefore, I must follow them”. The critical mark of leadership is the knack of the leader to see beyond the perceptual vista of his people, value their upper needs, and enthuse and egg on them to cherish and desire those needs as goals that should be achieved.
Thus, leaders are agents of change, ‘whose intuitive abilities and personal persona are vital in getting followers to widen their energies and attitudes towards bigger goals and ethics. Leadership is imperative in any political community because the throng is by and large atomized and inert. The mass is able to act as a lone unit only when it is incorporated from exterior by the leader. Leadership can transform the mass from an aggregation of isolated unit into a solid, unified group.
Political leaders should, therefore be people who kibbutz psychologically with their clique. They should not be egotistical folks who ride on the back of the people in order to attain personal goals and ambition. The goals of the leader ought to at all times 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 worthless without values. In pursuit of these principles, a leader should be ready to suffer quite a lot of deprivations in the interest of his people.
In building a nation hence, the first prerequisite is an excellent political leadership. Without it and irrespective of all other human and material resources which a country may possess, its steps forward, growth and enlargement will linger diminutive.
Has Nigeria produced any leaders that have the political willpower to lead the country altruistically? How and when will the right type of leadership surface on the Nigerian political vista? These questions craft up the focal push for this column.
The reputed Nigeria play write of blessed memory Professor Chinua Achebe opined that,” Nigeria is fewer than lucky in its leadership.” According to him, Nigeria leaders have “a propensity to be sanctimonious, materialist, piety and self centered pedestrianism.” To prop up his point further,Achebe drew our awareness to the statement made by Nigerians best known leader, Dr. Nmandi Azikiwe and Chief Obafemi Awolowo respectively in their autobiographies, which could be construed to be the causal philosophy of their leadership behaviors in Nigerian politics. Dr. Azikiwe was quoted as having vow in1937; “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 smudge, Chief Awolow was equally quoted as saying; ‘I was going to make for myself frightening intellectually, ethically invulnerable, to make all the money that is possible for a man with my fiber and brawn to make in Nigeria”
One cannot but agree with Achebe that, “Thoughts like these are more apt to create belligerent millionaires in an selfless leaders of their people.” A critical look at the political leadership and deeds of Nigeria’s founding fathers, and those who came after them, both military and civilian political leaders, tend to bear Achebe’s acquiescence.
Leadership, we must recap, primarily headship directing towards nation-building, is an altruistic venture. The leader should see himself as true servant of the people whose curiosity , ethics and aspirations are inter twined with his own private yearning for them, yearnings which have inspired him in the first place to volunteer to lead them. Should there be in the path of leading them, a spar between personal interests and those of the people he leads, or the original vision which motivated him into leading them, the formal interest should be sublimated into the anon. But has this been the case in Nigeria?
Proceedings and incidents in Nigeria’s political experience give the impression to supply an off-putting answer to the above question. Right from the epoch of autonomist struggle, through the era of responsible government and sovereignty to the checked period of the military regimes, Nigeria’s political leaders have botched to rise, at decisive moments above humdrum and pedestrians 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 havenot expulsion their obligations well. Most of them forgot that true leadership is an interactional sequence whose sole aim is to secure, the good life for all. They have used political leadership to augment themselves and their instantaneous minions.
In 1947, Chief Awolowo wrote that the masses were politically apathetic and refused to be uptight by politics, being pre-occupied with the search for foods, clothing and shelter. Leaders are meant to help followers find “Food, shelter and clothing,” The upshot is that in decisive 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 wild , particularly now in the fourth republic when all hands should be on desk to lay a rock-hard underpinning for the country after almost thirty years of military which brought ruins and myriad hardship to the people.
The resultant effects of poor leadership viz- a- viz followership facet is that the economy is insolvent and Nigeria is tormenting in the midst of bounty. There is zero to talk about as health, education, transportation; infrastructural facilities are all in carcass. The ultimate heartbreak is that these absurd state of affairs could have been averted in the sandpaper of history had it being urbane code of normal deeds and discipline economic policies were implemented.
The wants in the midst of plethora sobriquet which Nigeria has engrossed since 1996 from the Briton Wood Institution particularly the World Bank, is a substantiation to the demoralizing pang of sleaze on the country’s growth effects that the contemporary coincidence of poverty is anywhere from fifty to seventy percent. It is therefore no shocker that the sanguinity at independence regarding the country’s potentials for sustainable development has since given way to despair among the pauperized citizenry.
The economic reforms of agenda of succeeding government, which were articulated essentially within the framework of IMF conditionally, have not significantly upturned the underdevelopment quandary. Too, the coverage constitutional provisions linking to rule based governance in democratic Nigeria, plus the gargantuan over-sight responsibilities of the National and state Assemblies as well as a serviceable and effervescent Independence Judiciary, have not discouraged widespread malfeasance. Until this is done, developmental indices will continue to elude the nation. To have a good society, we must quest to have a good leader. God bless Nigeria.
Mike Adeyemi, a journalist writes via mikeadeyemi2001@gmail.com
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