Vice Presidential debate: another Nigerian exercise in futility.
“A good leader leads the people from above them. A great leader leads the people from within them.”– M. D. Arnold
We can go into indepth analysis of the recently aired vice presidential debate, we can scrutinize nuances,we can attempt to discern true intent,we can tweak,turn and twist the narratives as much as we deem fit,but the apparent vacuum in the “unticked” box for true visionary leadership was one far too obvious to ignore.
The incumbent vice President when pressed on issues bordering around his administration’s failure to deliver on campaign promises resorted to laying blame on the past sixteen years of opposition leadership,when in truth,results after nearly a complete term should be able to answer for whether the country has taken a turn for the better,or was moving a bit too closely to the speed of stagnation.
And on the side of the main opposition party,theirs was the empty and baseless name dropping of developmental strides of China,a rhetoric that failed at the honest attempt of outlining a similar course,and how it’s implemention would follow a properly crafted plan to achieve set goals step by step. Just blind rhetoric,a frail attempt at the application of fallacy by association.
For the representatives of the other parties,well,let us say they didn’t make much of an impression in a positive sense,and for the general impressions they made,let us just say they didn’t do much service to their parties and running mates,so we won’t dwell on them too much,because the real side show were the conspicuously absent element of true leadership.
The cricial quality the debate lacked was a candidate with the required trappings and well honed paraphernalia of a genuine leader. An individual who distinctly possesses a deeper understanding of the fundamental human capacity deficit our society is fraught with.
On both sides of the divide,respective supporters believe their candidates to have fared better,but from the grey regions in between,more should be expected of those we entrust with leadership,more should be demanded. Then again,our people have always been quite slow to pick up the finer points on issues.
Those finer points border around issues such as ways to unshackle SMEs and improve the flexibility of doing business,the outlawing of multiple taxations,that in most cases stifles or outrightly decimates the development of new businesses,tackling the problems with our men in uniform, adapting a more holistic approach towards bringing essential reforms to the behaviour and character of our police and military,who have taken the term incompetence to a new low, and of course the delivery from rot and decay of our mammoth albatross, the Nigerian judiciary.
Like amateur boxers there was a lot of dancing around,without any of the candidates taking the initiative to properly lean into his opponent with a killer combination of strikes to land a knockout, and both parties had more than ample loopholes in the respective standpoints of their opponents to do this. None of them possessed the dead eyed accuracy of a marksman that had cornered his mark,what both possessed was jejune footworks and the penchant for dancing about with no real heavyweight end product.
But this has always been the Nigerian situation hasn’t it?
Our best is usually a near success syndrome that eventually unravels into an exposure of our unpreparedness and mental frailty. So we fall short time and again,and the world keeps moving further away.
We can’t keep hoping for the best when our majority input is simply hope. No.
We need leaders that can lead from amongst us,men who carry a vision that is in tandem with the aspirations of the few sensible Nigerians left,men who would seek to build leadership institutions for the benefit of the youngest generations who have not been corrupted yet,and protect the sanctity and integrity of such institutions,because anything short of this facilities our doom further and further.
There is time,but just a little,let us see.
Boma princewill.
AFRICA THISDAY 