It is bewildering to watch (please also read (https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2023/01/17/the-chatham-house-effect/amp/) how our political stakeholders and major presidential candidates of 2023 General Elections across all parties are successively flooding to Chatham House in London to sell their empty political agenda to a disinterested audience while shunning the nation’s similar establishment, such as “Nigerian Institute of International Affairs” (NIIA), with real electorates and genuine interest. Where on earth, if not Nigeria, can the nation’s entire leadership celebrate such life of self denial?

For over six decades, we have been told that we have become an independent nation. Have we ever truly been so, or we are simply daydreaming all these years? What we really need is a revolutionary leadership with a clear focus and direction who can think critically and creatively outside the box to fix the crack and set a functioning system. Forget about fixing electricity, water…, fighting corruption, indiscipline etc. They are all empty promises. If our politicians do not know they have been fooling us, at least we ourselves should know we have been fooled. We should be bold and mature enough to say ‘enough is enough’. We should not continue to be deceived even when the deceitful are being deceived by their deceit. Let the envisioned leadership focus only on one thing: that is setting “a functional system” for all structures, within the first 4-year term and even for the second term. If the base is sound and solid every superstructure will blossom. Such base will celebrate and further nurture visionary leadership and dislodge lunatic leadership with myopic agenda. Otherwise, if the system allows anyone to aimlessly sail the ship of life, we’ll remain adrift forever and all things will fall apart.

Let us invest all-out effort in erecting a “Core Governance Performance Indicator” or a “Minimum Governance Performance Standard” in the same way we have been asked lately to adhere to a “Core Curriculum Minimum Academic Standard” CCMAS by the NUC. Today our system, including political leadership, is largely dysfunctional; it allows anyone even with mental disorder to become the President of a country with over 200 million population as long as he can play well the camping, decamping and recamping political prostitution game. What a generation of disorientated leadership dislodged from their land!

Prof. Abdul Kabir Hussain Solihu,
Kwara State University
19th January 2023