I am writing this message as a person that passionately campaigned for President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015 and 2019 presidential elections. I am still a believer that Buhari was the best choice for Nigeria under the circumstances we found ourselves as a country in the year 2015. In this coming presidential elections I've also made my convictions known to the world that Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the next President of Nigeria. However, none of the above stated facts stops me from expressing the convictions I'm penning down in this open letter to the incoming president of Nigeria come 2023.
I am moved to write this as an open letter after I had carefully read through the revolutionary action plan manifesto of APC and its presidential flag bearer. I have already published my admiration for this epic document. Today, however I'm writing on one thing that is missing in the document which could lead to what I'll call a monumental failure of Tinubu's government which I'll hate to see happen. As much as I'll be the first to point to the numerous achievements of President Mohammadu Buhari, yet I'll also confess that in this one thing he has failed.
I, like millions of people who supported Buhari to become Nigeria's president had hoped we were going to get the 1984 disciplinarian version of Buhari/Idiagbon government. I had thought that Buhari clearly understood that the primary source of Nigeria's problem is in the lack of values and morals as they obviously demonstrated in their 1984 government. I'll say this democratic version of Buhari totally demonstrates that he had completely forgotten what endeared most Nigerians to him. I assume that he has come to believe what most Nigerians hold as a sacred truth that the major problem of the country is lack of a good leader. Hence since Buhari's supporters and Buhari himself believes he is a good leader then the major problem is solved. He was mistaken. This mistake or failure nearly led to the disintegration of the country under his watch, with the onslaughts from bandits, and secessionists taking full advantage of his weaknesses.
I too believe that in Buhari we surely have a good, humble and sincere leader. But as I've constantly maintained in my books and writings, a good leader isn't enough to take Nigeria to her promised land. As a matter of fact I'm convinced that bad leadership or weak heads of states is not the primary problem of Nigeria. On the contrary, Nigeria had been blessed by many good leaders in her history. Leaders like: Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ahmadu Bello, Tafawa Balewa, Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Mohammed, Shehu Shagari, Olusegun Obasanjo, these were great men with great personal virtues and character. Of course no one is perfect, but if you compare them with other world leaders you'll have to rank them very highly.
Nevertheless, none of these men was able to bring our country to the place most Nigerians hope the country should be by now. Yet, some people are still naively thinking that all we need is a good leader to make Nigeria fulfill her potentials. No sir, it won't happen, a good leader will not bring about the type of country we are all dreaming of. Our over sixty years of history should have thought us this lesson by now.
This brings me to what I believe is the biggest problem of Nigeria. The biggest problem of Nigeria are Nigerians, who lives without a consciously defined value system. Reading through the Manifesto of APC, (the best I've seen in modern Nigerian history), I could only see the big faith of Asiwaju in his economic ingenuity to turn things around for good for the country. This will end up doing a similar thing to what for the former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala used to do by quoting all the right figures of GDP growth, micro and macro economics etc, yet without any major transformation in the country. Unfortunately this is the economic philosophy the Buhari government also adopted. For some reasons generations of Nigerian leaders have put their faith more in some supposedly genius economic formulas than in building the core moral character of the people. The fact is that no matter what brilliant economic formulas we come up with, it is ordinary citizens that must live these things out daily in their workplaces and private lives. If the moral fabric of the people is collapsed as we currently have it in Nigeria, the people will end of sabotaging even the best initiatives. The only government that had a relative success in this area to mend was the Buhari/Idiagbon regime before they were butted out of office.
Without purposefully instilling high level morals and values in the generality of our people, the same people will end up dismantling anything you build no matter how glorious it is. Just as we see some Nigerians destroying and stealing the rails from the newly constructed railway lanes. Without a coordinated system of values to be systematically imparted to the totality of Nigerians, sabotage, theft and destruction of national assets won't stop even if we have the best military and police services in the world. A recent discovery of oil bunkering syndicates across the country is another proof that the problem of Nigeria is in Nigerians who live in their country without any understanding of values and virtues. Someone must cry out loud for all aspiring leaders of Nigeria to hear this principles of life that:
The Intangible is more important than the tangible. The content of character of our people is far more important than all our natural resources that we so much eulogise endlessly.
The Internal values of our people are more important than the external prosperity.
We must know that some things are more important than life itself: principles, values, character, standards. It is the people who have these qualities that go ahead to build great nations. When these things are lost we lose ourselves individually and as a nation. Those who live by values do rule the earth, because they have a superior inner morals and values.
Reading through the APC Manifesto I noticed that there was not a single policy consideration to reform our moral fabric as a nation. This to me speaks about the fact that this next group of rulers are again missing what is the major problem of our nation, which is our collapsed value system. As a matter of fact I'm not sure it was ever well formulated to the ordinary Nigerian in our history. The government of Shagari actually attempted to draw up a value system for the nation, but they were soon overthrown.
Any government that wants to rescue Nigeria must come up with a whole system of values that will effectively address the moral failure of our society. This is our greatest problem as a country. It is out of this we have all other issues including leadership failure. The point I am trying to pass across is that leadership is not the biggest problem of Nigeria. Our biggest problem is a corrupt value system. In the past few years I have personally taken it upon myself to develop a set of values for the Nigerian nation. I ended up with 20 of them. We have National orientation agency in Nigeria, we have National institute for policy and strategic studies in Nigeria, these national organisation's and others must be tasked to come up with a fully developed set of value systems to give the correct orientation to every citizen of Nigeria.
National values are a set of core principles ingrained into the mental and social structures of society, which help to dictate the action and behaviour of the citizenry. These are qualities, principles and behaviours every nation holds in high esteem as it seeks to achieve its ultimate objectives.
Let's get this straight. There is no point waiting for a miracle from the Tinubu presidency if he and his team don't incorporate this in their programmes. A miracle didn't happen despite the best efforts of this APC government of Mohammadu Buhari, no need to wait for such miracles from Tinubu's government if the right things are not done. Please let me prove this to you through an illustration. Any nation could be viewed as a pot from where the most active, zealous or talented representatives of this given society emerge as their leaders. If the pot therefore is corrupt, only corrupt leaders will come out of that pot. If the pot however is clean and righteous and everybody in that nation is living by righteous value systems, naturally the leaders that will be coming out of that pot will reflect the nature and the environment of the pot itself. They will be clean, they will be trustworthy and they will be righteous. This is the reason you dear reader will probably not be able to mention as little as ten heads of states presently in Europe. Because they don't need to have super leaders, since the societies are averagely upright, so it doesn't matter much who becomes the leader, anyone you pick will perform in accordance to the upright standards of the countries.
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If the generality of our people are corrupt in their values then this will be reflected in all areas of our society. Bad behaviour will manifest its ugly heads everywhere from bottom to the top. There will be evil and corrupt citizens everywhere. In such a situation even if the president is Jesus Christ himself yet the majorly corrupt citizens will sabotage his best efforts. As long as the masses of the citizens lack the moral virtues necessary for progress and development the best efforts of leaders will amount to nothing. As long as our leaders on every level is produced from this society whose moral values are completely broken down it means only morally broken leaders could emerge. The society will always produce leaders that reflect the state of that society. If it's a morally and ethically healthy society then these are the type of leaders that will emerge. If the society is corrupt and the thinking of ordinary citizens is that of selfishness, egocentrism and instant gratification then these are the types of leaders who will emerge to become their rulers.
There is sometimes an exemption from this trend though. That is when a remnant leader manages to prove his or her worth to convince the people of the nation of his good intentions. In such a situation when the populace accepts such an exceptional leader, his most important duty must be to change the nature of the pot by changing the value system of the nation. Our leaders come from our societies. The leadership of any nation is only but a reflection of the prevailing value systems of that society.
Sunday Adelaja is a Nigeria born leader, transformation strategist, pastor and innovator. He was based in Kiev, Ukraine.
