By Arthur Agwuncha
Nwankwo
One factor that has led to the collapse of many societies throughout
history is internal decay brought about by inept and visionless leadership. The
pages of history are littered with examples of societies whose final descent
into perdition was preceded by unprecedented internal rot. This type of rot is
usually sustained by a corps of lackadaisical and moronic leadership that made
a vocation of blaming their predecessors for the rot of society without as much
seeing in their own lethargy, ineptitude and lack of foresight as significant
contributory factors for that collapse. This is the product of the nemesis called
“blame game” syndrome in leadership.
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| *President Buhari and APC National Leader, Bola Tinubu |
Blame game syndrome is as old as the history of creation. It has always been
the stock-in-trade for those who fail. Those who fail in their assignments must
always find an escape goat for their failures. Their failures must have been
caused by someone else, and not necessarily by their own actions. The Bible
records the earliest form of this blame game attitude in the Garden of Eden.
God, we are told in the Bible, created a man and a woman and put them in the
Garden with a very clear instruction never to eat of the tree of life.
The consequences, God had warned them, would be dire and ultimate. But Adam and
Eve failed. The serpent deceived them and they ate the forbidden fruit. Adam
was the head of God’s mortal creations and therefore was in-charge and
ultimately answerable to God. When God, therefore, confronted him to know why
he had chosen to flout His orders by eating the forbidden fruit, Adam resorted
to the blame game denial. The woman you gave to me, Adam stammered, gave me the
fruit and I ate it. Adam’s failure was fatal and in laying the blame on the
doorsteps of the woman God gave him, Adam was factually accusing God of making
a mistake in giving him the woman. Adam’s failure would ultimately bring to
ruination, the fate of man on earth.
Such blame game syndrome has always been the hallmark of inept leaders. Lacking
in vision and the initiative to elevate their thinking to glorious levels, and
also of what should be done to transform society; a typical scenario of a bad
workman quarrelling with his tools, such leaders invariably lead their
societies into destruction. The history of some of the world’s worst leaders is
replete with this type of blame game. And in their naivety and dearth of focus,
such leaders have always hit on the expedience of the most absurd and
outlandish policies to superintend the affairs of the state. The product of
this type of absurdity and lack of focus has always resulted in mass murder of
citizens. Pol Pot of Cambodia, Idi Amin of Uganda,
Torquemeda of Spain, Prince Vlad Dracula, the Impaler of the ancient Wallachia
Empire and Josef Stalin of Russia
are just some of the typical examples of this class of leaders.
And in the 21st century, Nigeria’s
version of Pol Pot has reincarnated in Muhammadu Buhari and the APC. And
typical of his types in history Buhari, along with his APC has reinvented the
blame game and elevated it to a principle of governance. Rather than initiate
practical and pragmatic policies to drive their change agenda, Buhari and the
APC has resorted to blaming the past government of former President Goodluck
Jonathan as the reason for their headaches, bellyaches and heartaches. The
Goodluck administration must be blamed for our economic recession, for the full
blown process of Islamization of the country, for the plummeting of the naira,
for the ethnic and religious cleansing sweeping through Nigeria, for the
unprecedented resurgence of corruption; for the government’s inability to bring
back the Chibok girls; for the ever scorching activities of Boko Haram and for
the total collapse of our public institutions.
