Nigeria: Real Trouble With Nigeria (I)

30 November 2012
column

It is something that has been said in the past, and is being said today again and again; and has been captured and popularised by Professor Chinua Achebe so much so that it has now become virtually a cliché--that the problem of Nigeria is a leadership. And so it is! And so what?

But in any case, it is not entirely true that Nigeria's problem has always been a failure of leadership, though it is understandable if that is said by Achebe, who needs that to validate a later thesis. Whatever else anyone will say, First Republic leaders were true giants, and even if tribal giants, giants all the same, compared to all post-First Republic leaders, whom the late Dr Yusuf Bala Usman once called "these thieving midgets." He should have said "these thieving, visionless, unaccountable midgets," and he would have been more right

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