Introduction
While growing up under an environment that was sprinkled with guided discipline, I learnt to cherish keeping to the time. Although my father had a time piece with an inbuilt alarm device, he had so made himself to arise from the bed without the aid of an alarm. I have not acquired such virtue during my years in the primary school. For a guide to waking early, I went to our local market to buy a time piece from the little money I had saved.
The “watch” I bought was very flashy and part of its specification was that it was ‘water proof’. Believing that to be true, I boasted to my close friends who had no such piece of technology that not even water can destroy my “watch”. They were inquisitive to find out how such was possible.
Not given to artifice, I was bristling with confidence as my friends gathered to witness the magic. One of them had brought water in a bowl.
I dipped my digital watch into the bowl filled with water. I allowed it stay for some time to prove its waterproof quality. When I brought the watch out from the water, it had stopped to function. I slumped into depression as I could not withstand the mournful jeer from my friends which exacerbated the wrenching sorrow that the event dipped me into.
That was my awful experience with a piece of trumpery good. The producer of that failed merchandise didn’t take into proper consideration the benefit of customer satisfaction. They lost in my loss, because I did not encourage another person to patronize them.
For products to come out with quality assurance, priority attention is paid to effective value chain. This process is not limited to the production and manufacturing economy, it has credence in every aspect of life. In the world of sports for instance, it is required that for a team to win in a competition, the coach and other members of the technical crew must ensure that quality players with winning mentality are fielded.
Once the recruitment process favours those that lack in merit, the team will flounder and lose in any competition. If thorough recruitment is golden in all areas of life for good results, nothing less would be ideal in the context of leadership. When leadership fails to meet its expectation, all blame must go to the recruitment process, through which leaders emerge.
In Nigeria today, failure in leadership has been the albatross of our national life. Politics governs all affairs of life. And when bad people are allowed to lead in any area of politics, bad governance will be the inevitable outcome. But when true leaders lead, good governance emerges. We shall take a look at effective leadership recruitment as the path to good governance with focus on Nigeria.
Leadership debacle in Nigeria
Observers and critics of leadership in Nigeria denounce it based on the fact that it has failed to live up to the expectation. Leadership in Nigeria has been on the throes of chastisement as a result of poor recruitment process. Arguably, corruption, a cause and an effect of bad leadership, is fast becoming institutionalized and systemic in Nigeria.
It will amount to naivety for many if one would stand against the manifestations (because in Nigeria, corruption at the phenomenological level has many faces) of corruption.
Everyone seems to lack the will to shun it, despite all campaigns against it. It has become a national tragedy.
For instance, in order to have power in Nigeria, one has got to find an alternative measure – buying power generating set, despite the negative environmental impact. For effective transportation of people and goods, there is the dire need for individuals to float self-sponsored road projects as the government has failed to construct new ones and reconstruct dilapidated ones.
To get appropriate healthcare in Nigeria, one must be too wealthy as to be able to afford medical tourism abroad or one constructs a private hospital despite the huge capital investment it requires.
To obtain quality education, one does not dream to have it in public schools: those who can afford it source it beyond the shores of the country or in the elite private schools where the amount of fees required for it would be better told the wealthy in the society and not the dregs of the society. In terms of worldwide corruption ranking, Nigeria is the 148 least corrupt nation out of 175 countries, according to the 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index reported by Transparency International (https://tradingeconomics.com/nigeria/corruption-rank).
That’s the magnitude of corruption in Nigeria. Based on analysis, corruption rank in Nigeria averaged 120.45 from 1996 until 2017, reaching an all-time high of 152 in 2005 and a record low of 52 in 1997. This is horrible. All these happen where true leaders are absent.
Bad leadership has dealt a deadly blow on Nigeria to the extent that those who make the law, enforce the law and ultimately interpret the law can only perfunctorily do their duties under the patronage of corruption. To kill this leviathan, there is a call for sustained vigilant interrogation of the process leading to the emergence of candidates that emerge as leaders in Nigeria.
For the fact that politics pervades all sections of our life as a country, bad leadership recruitment process cannot assume a pride of place. Rather it must have to be jettisoned in favour of an effective process.
We are all in agreement that politics is supposed to be used in advancing the wellbeing of the citizens by ensuring the greatest happiness of all without an exception. Politics would achieve its purpose of creating an egalitarian society if the right people are in power (Cf. T. A. Odisu, (2017) “Leadership recruitment process and the travails of development in Nigeria” in Journal of Political Sciences & Public Affairs, 5(4).)
To be continued…