‘Nigeria of our dream will come if we eliminate greed, selfish interest’

Independence means a lot, and one of the basic criteria for assessing it is your nation’s building ability.

It’s important, because when we say a nation is independent, the first thing we should ask ourselves is have we been able to build a nation?

And I think that we have not really succeeded in building one yet.

And to that extent, we are failing to realise the true potential of our being independent.

It is also one reason it has been difficult for us to leverage on our potential in the global arena.

It is also responsible for why we have been unable to develop economically and also develop our human capacity to a level that would become enviable.

The major problem that is confronting us, as a nation, is leadership, and this is down to our leadership recruitment process.

It’s the process that promotes mediocrity over merit; promotes selfish interests and greed over collective interests of the nation.

And that is why what we see emerging from that process are leaders who lack the capacity to even conceptualise a vision to project into the future.

It is one reason the country is not thriving and why everything we do is faulty.

If we are going to change it, we need to review that leadership recruitment process.

We need to have a process that gives room for diversity of ideas and vision; that promotes intellect; merit and disavows nepotism and all the frivolities that we have at the moment.

If we are going to get leadership right in this country we have to transform the nature and quality of our political parties.

Our political parties need to be parties that are membership based, driven by membership interests and collective vision.

Let me say, we have been able to build what seems a national consensus.

But more often than not, we simply have negotiated settlement among mutually antagonistic quantum of the ruling class.

And that is why those consensus breakdown every now and then as we approach every general election.

What we have is individual politician trading with personal interests, and in that kind of manner, it is impossible to arrive at a durable and sustainable national consensus.

In any case that national consensus excludes the majority of the people.

It does not include the interest of the 83 million Nigerians, who are poor today in a country, where we also have the richest African and the richest black woman in the world, yet it has the largest concentration of poor people in the world.

That is a huge contrast. This means ours is a country with the greatest inequality in the world.

And that shows very clearly that we have not succeeded in building national consensus in the country.

If you look at our constitution, and all the ones we have had since 1978, it has articulated a national consensus but the problem is that we lack the leadership with the courage to implement that national consensus.

Chapter 2 of the 1999 Constitution is actually the basis of a national consensus.

The problem is that we have individual leaders whose own personal interests are at variance with the collective interests of Nigerians.

And therefore, are determined to promote their individual and selfish interests.

For citizens, they need to go back to Chapter 2 of the 1999 Constitution and build a movement for the implementation and enforcement of that section of the constitution.

It is only if that is done, would we be able to get a citizenry that is enabled and empowered enough to challenge, as well as, put pressure on the leadership to implement that section of the constitution and take the destiny of the country into our own hands.

Gaskia, the Convener, Take Back Nigeria Movement (TBN), is a presidential aspirant on the platform of Sustainable National Party (SNP).