2019: The President Nigeria needs
As the general election of 2019 continues to dawn on us, politicians have started positioning themselves for victory at various levels. Self-imposed political analysts have also started inundating us with tales about the qualities of aspirants they feel we should vote for, more often than not, for personal aggrandizement. It is also a season of letter writing and predictions.
Two former presidents have issued statements asking Nigerians to cooperate with incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari to finish his first term of office next year, but that he should make a sacrifice for a better Nigeria by standing down his right to vie for another term of office and thereby allowing a younger person to emerge as Nigeria’s next leader.
Nigerians are described as the most prayerful people in the world. That, ironically, has not stopped some of our people from committing some of the worst crimes known to humanity. In number of mosques and churches, we are said to be have the highest, but globally. But in terms of morality, we are among the lowest.
What this boils down to is the need for us to dwell practical in the choice of our next president - to at least try to catch up with the rest of the world beginning with our small African neighbors that have gone far ahead of us because they did not allow primordial sentiments to determine their choice of leadership. They go for quality, and quality they get in governance.
In the fast-paced world we live in today, what we need is a leader who can create solutions; who can, literally, squeeze water out of stone. We need a leader who can take responsibility for governance; one who believes the buck stops on his table. It is not just about saying I can do it. Anyone, including an idiot, can claim he or she can do it. But it is about established record of performance, or what is called pedigree. This is a very serious matter because Nigeria’s almost two hundred million people will be such a huge burden on the rest of the world if, this time around, we fail to get it right. We simply shall not, and cannot continue to see our children crossing to Libya and other countries and ending up in humiliating slavery or dying in the Mediterranean. We need a leader who will make Nigeria attractive for all its citizens to see the need to remain here and develop it.
It is about providing solutions, not excuses or buckpassing. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin realized humanity was finding it difficult to access information with ease, they created Google to make us find things faster on the Internet. There was a time, in the 80s, a set of computer was selling for over five thousand dollars. And the size was awesome. To solve that problem, Steve Jobs partnered with Steve Wozniak to reduce the size of computers and make it handy.
Today, we all hold sophisticated computers on our hands with the smartphones we hold. Computers are no longer for the rich and the famous. From his dormitory room at Harvard University, Mark Zuckerberg created the Facebook to help render the world to a truly global village. At the touch of a button, one can socialize with persons across all regions of the globe. Jeff Bezos is today the richest person in the world because he created real solution to a problem facing humanity.
Many Nigerians may be cynical about him and his ways. But that is what former military president Ibrahim Babangida means when he asked Nigerians to go for digital leadership in 2019 and move Nigeria forward. When Singaporeans realized they were headed for doom, they elected a man of action, not excuses, in Lee Kuan Yew to save them from potential annihilation and horrible poverty.
A few years later, Yew provided the quality leadership that transformed Singapore from third world to first.
A short video I watched on the Internet described the biggest problems needing global solution as energy, water, food, environment, poverty, terrorism and war, education, democracy and population. To solve these problems, we need a leader who, as said earlier, can literally squeeze water out of stone.
So when the globallyrespected Reverend Father Ejike Mbaka lately asked Nigerians to go for Dr. Ibrahim Hassan Dankwambo as president in 2019, I decided to dig some more to see how far the Gombe governor has performed. I soon found out that when Dankwambo assumed office in 2011, he realized that, in spite of the commendable efforts of his predecessor, the state needed more investments in education, infrastructure, agriculture, trade and commerce and more. Rather than wasting time filling the airwaves with excuses or buck-passing, he frontally faced these challenges with unprecedented commitment and zeal. He knew he cannot go it alone. He therefore assembled a team of quality aides and commissioners who he saddled with responsibilities and clear-set goals. You get pushed out of the way if you prove to be lousy. It is not about friendship or relationship, but about serving the people. He believes leadership is all about changing society for the better, not about personal aggrandizement.
In education, he realized that thousands of indigenes of Gombe who failed to get admission in institutions of higher learning were turning themselves to nuisance to the society. Some will get admission, but will choose to remain at home because of distance. That was how, in no time, his predecessors transformed thousands of youths to the dangerous thugs that we used to know as ‘Yan Kalare. Trade and commerce, which the state was known for, started nose-diving, because people were afraid to go to Gombe. And poverty reared its head on all fours.
He therefore made education as his number one, number two and number three priorities. That, of course, does not mean other sectors are relegated to the background. Today, school enrollment in Gombe is one of the highest in the country. The rate of crime is also one of the lowest because these dangerous youths have now seen that the old order was just using them to score cheap political goals. Most of them have now embraced education.
Right from his first term, Dankwambo started building a replacement generation of budding leaders who will not only take over the mantle of quality leadership which he has made a legacy, but will also compete with their peers in developed societies to provide Nigeria with the quality leadership that will make us reach our manifest destiny.
When he assumed office as governor of Gombe, he virtually met an empty treasury. But he did not dwell on blaming his predecessor. He employed strict methods of governance deeply rooted in accountability and commitment to using scarce resources to deliver high quality service. He delivered immediate results, which made the politicallysophisticated people of Gombe to overwhelmingly vote for him for a second term. He did not perform woefully and asked his people to give him chance to serve them better in second term, as is the case in Nigeria today.
And what is more. Dankwambo has successfully managed the heterogeneous nature of Gombe, such that the kind of animosity persisting between Muslims and Christians or between tribes in the larger Nigerian space is non-existent in Gombe. It is all about leadership.
That is the kind of leadership Nigeria needs, if we are truly serious about building the society of our dreams, and saving our children from dangerous voyages abroad by giving them hope for a better tomorrow.
Louis, a retired ambassador, wrote this piece from Onitsha