By Olukorede Yishau
In ‘Adú’— a Netflix movie about how the destinies of a six-year-old boy and his older sister intersect with an environmental activist and a civil guard—an immigrant falls to his death while trying to jump a barbed wire fence that separates North Africa from Europe. The Immigration officials at the border are tried for his death. They are set free. One of them carries out research on the dead man and discovers he was a political prisoner from an African country. When he shares this fact with a colleague, one of his reactions is that the Europeans erected the fence to remind Africans to solve their own problems. These problems are about the development of the continent, of which our dear Nigeria is supposedly its giant.
If you have had the opportunity of travelling around Nigeria, you will know that it is a nation in need of development. We need roads, we need drainage channels, we need to stop desertification, we need to end banditry, we need to end terrorism, we need to combat corruption in public and private lives, and we need to fix so many things.
There are so many villages and towns in the country that do not have electricity. The towns and cities that have electricity have to use generating sets as their main sources of power while the public supply has turned to an unreliable source.
Many areas are inaccessible because of bad road networks. This does not mean that roads are not being built; it also does not mean the railways are not getting better. What it means is that the pace of our development is slow. Terribly slow. So many are the challenges facing us as a nation that we cannot make much progress if we walk instead of running! Sadly, we are not even walking fast enough; in fact, we are crawling.
Amid these deficiencies in our national life, we concentrate on the mundane when leadership is being discussed. We are a country blessed with many ethnic nationalities, and we live in a world that is filled with several races. We all together make the world colourful; we also make it dangerous and we make it acrimonious with unnecessary superiority contests.
There are ethnic groups that believe they are superior to the other, and there are races that think their places in this world were specifically carved for them by the heavenly bodies. They carry on as though others are slaves and should serve them. Maybe God revealed that to them via the still voice!
But let’s look at this fact: In Nigeria, we speak Ijaw, Hausa, Nupe, Igbo, Yoruba and plenty of other languages. The Ijaw are in the Southsouth, the Hausa occupy no mean space in the North, the Nupe are also in the North, especially Niger State, and the Igbo call five states in the Southeast and some states in the Southsouth home. The Yoruba are the Lords of the Southwest.
From this pool, we pick our leaders from time to time. Being a very religious and multi-ethnic society, how we worship and what language we speak play a significant role in determining who gets our support during the electioneering period. It would have been wonderful if we could pray poverty away, pray good roads into existence and pray corruption into extinction.
Some ethnic groups, especially the Hausa/Fulani and Yoruba have had more shots at the central government, producing presidents more than other ethnic groups. The Ijaw got a rare shot when President Umaru Yar’Adua died in power, his deputy, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, took over, went on to win his own election but lost his second term bid to President Muhammadu Buhari. The Igbo, save the short-lived military regime of Gen. Thomas Aguiyi Ironsi and the ceremonial presidency of Dr. Nnamdi Azikwe, have tried unsuccessfully to lead at the national level. There are so many ethnic nationalities, too, that are far away from the powerhouse.
One lesson that has been clearly shown by the Yoruba, Igbo and Ijaw men who have been at the powerhouse is that what you do with power has nothing to do with where you come from and how you worship God. The development of society is more about having a leader with the milk of human kindness. A poet puts it succinctly when he said no matter the language you speak development has nothing to benefit from it. It is either you know what you are doing or not. A man is a man and a race, a race! Development thus benefits more from the quality of the man than where the man comes from.
A man who does not understand the economy will fail at managing the economy no matter his ethnic group or religion; a man who is security illiterate and also unwilling to surround himself with those who understand the security architecture will fail woefully no matter his ethnic nationality; a man who has no milk of human kindness is bound not to see the need to make life abundant for his people. In fact, he will derive joy from their sadness and he will continue to steal as if there is no tomorrow without his bottomless secret vaults being filled with cash.
We are at that stage of our national life again when leadership dominates discourse but, unfortunately, ethnic nationality and religions are taking a chunk of the time spent on discussing this all-important topic. It should be about the deliverables.
My final take: I have absolutely nothing against political parties deciding to zone seats to areas so as to give a sense of belonging to the people. But what I abhor is a situation whereby we make it look like the ethnic nationality or the religion of the person we are putting in power will have any impact on his or her performance. No, it has no effect whatsoever on it.
Care must be taken to ensure that in agreeing to allow an area to produce the leader, the dreg does not end up getting the job. The best from the area where the power has been ceded should get the prize because, in the long run, what will determine the person’s performance is his ability and not ethnicity.
• Yishau is a newspaper columnist and author of’In The Name of Our Father’and’Vaults of Secrets’.