Our Northern ‘Naughty’ Governors

By Emmanuel Onwubiko

Since independence on October 1st 1960, one question that has continued to be asked without appropriate response is: why is Nigeria so cursed with poor leadership? Another corollary to this interrogatory is: What is the leadership recruitment process in Nigeria? These key questions are germane and hold the magic wand to the bigger question of why Nigeria is in rapid decline from all indexes of human development.

(pix: thesheet)

To go straight to providing answers to the above interrogatories, the beginning point is to take a cursory look at the work of the renowned writer Professor Chinua Achebe of blessed memory which he titled- “The Trouble with Nigeria”: Professor Achebe summed up the trouble with Nigeria as that of poor leadership. Professor Achebe quickly added that poor followership is also a major issue. I agree.

Nigeria indeed has a warped leadership recruitment process which emphasizes the role of political godfathers and the role of illicit money which are the combined factors that have consistently determined much of the political leadership of Nigeria since the last half a century.
The consequence of this distorted and crime infested leadership recruitment process is the near- state of collapse that Nigeria faces.

Corruption, ineptitude, indiscipline and above all impunity are some of the cocktails of this poor leadership system that Nigeria is contending with.

Because of the urgent need to salvage Nigeria from impending implosion and collapse, a number of patriotic but scholarly minds have often intervened intellectually by proffering pragmatic panaceas to this debilitating virus of poor and naughty political leadership in Nigeria.