By Des Wilson
“No amount of study or learning will make a man a leader unless he has the natural qualities of one”. – Sir Archibald Wavell, London Times, Feb, 17, 1941
Several writers and scholars have pontificated on what constitutes the qualities or character of a leader or what constitutes the goals of leadership. From what is widely known as the qualities of leadership, humanity has benefited from a shortlist of intrinsic attributes extracted from a cafeteria of exaggerated or affected refined and sometimes gruesome facetiousness.
There are many who, caught by the bug of exaggerated self-importance and greed for power, who believe that the only quality desirable for leadership is the positioning of self in the starting blocks of the power race. Even here, the hustlers for power and leadership do not always obey the rules of the game. They do not also understand the role they seek to play except the realisation of their overweening ambitions.
The present generation of Nigerian rulers, it appears, does not understand the process of leadership recruitment. Sadly, most of those we promote as leaders do not know the difference between rulership and leadership. Of course, the main difference between the two lies in the fact that a ruler is one who commands, while a leader usually guides the followers to accomplish the task ahead of them. Right now, it is clear to most Nigerians that they have no leaders, but only politicians in power at various levels who command. And again,
Nigerians have grown distraught with the daily obfuscation of the differences between the two. Our reward system no longer encapsulates the basic foundational principles of incentives, salience, associative learning and positively valued emotions on which most nations have established their national principles.
There is a certain fatalism and a piratical streak which colour the imagination of aspirant leaders or, better still, rulers in Nigeria. They are neither trained nor do they have valuable associative leanings to oil their raw ambitions. All they are exposed to is a convoluted system of dishonesty, bribery, violence, unfairness, insecurity and intimidation on the part of the noisy spiritual undertakers and judicial injustice fueled by ignoring the facts and the law for pay-as-you-go verdicts.
One may vaingloriously declare oneself a saint, not out of their deeds or moral strength but as a jocular claim to membership of a pantheon not their own. Such claims do not in any way degrade the importance attached to such a serious claim. The claimant may, in fact, beat a retreat when the traditional standards are held up to scrutiny as in a papal beatification enquiry. This may sound like hair-splitting stuff, yet there are universal standards which define the hagiography of real or true leaders.
Therefore, I seek to lay out some basic standards for determining whether one is a leader or simply a colourless figure taken from a blue book. And sometimes, I have felt that simply railing at idiots without providing them with a rule book could unfortunately make one sound idiotic too.
2025 provides us with a fair, critical and realistic starting point for these political time servers, parasites and harlots of Maitama who are maggots of the Nigerian state. Some lessons have to be learnt even though most members of this class are unteachable. They easily dismiss a welcome advisory as an unwanted proselytizing meant to wean them from the intoxicating weed from the Devils garden. This is perhaps not a comfy way of advertising a political apostate whose claim to prominence or chieftainship is their unbridled avarice and disdain for order and dignity.
It is the reason we have to play the role of teacher to a class of citizens who superintend over our political and justice systems.True, the rules of governance are not the same as the foundational precepts of our faiths, if we excuse the inanities of the countless revisionist scholars and miserable preachers of the various religions who proclaim nondescript messages before their captive congregations. Unfortunately, the portals of these mystical and miracle houses are the first ports of call of the cheating politicians who have manipulated the world around them to emerge winners in a freak and failed election. When this happens, truth is suppressed, as losers are forced to seek redress at Kangaroo tribunals and courts where justice is bought, and a compromised followership is tamed.
