Nigerians call for good leadership to move country forward

As Nigeria celebrates its 60th Independence anniversary, Nigerians have identified bad leadership as the country’s biggest challenge.The COVID-19 pandemic hindered the usual celebrations, making the government resort to a low-key celebration.

President Muhammadu Buhari in his independence day broadcast said the country’s survival for 60 years was enough to celebrate despite the unstable economy, division and security challenges.

Nigerians, however, disagree with Buhari and expressed their displeasure at the now-suspended increase in electricity tariff and increase in petrol price.

A poll conducted by The Guardian had about 3,000 respondents on its website and Twitter page.The poll had three options – corruption, insecurity and bad governance – for Nigerians to identify the country’s major challenge.

67% of the respondents said that bad leadership is the major problem Nigeria is facing.
However, 27% respondents said corruption from top to bottom is the major problem while 6% respondents said Nigeria’s major problem is insecurity.

Some Nigerians who commented on the poll Twitter said that the moment bad leadership is tackled, the issue of corruption and insecurity would be resolved.

Other Nigerians identified varying issues as problems that the country must tackle.

“None of the above in totality. It’s accepting the next Nigerian as is without ethnicity or religious bias. In order to foster unity through strength and intermarriages,” Kehinde Akinwunmi said.

But Dike Emmanuel said “We have to solve our mindset issue. Corruption, Insecurity and bad leadership are mindset issue. We cannot have good leaders while there is bad fellowship.”

Another respondent Olalekan Oni said, “With good leadership, corruption and insecurity will be taken care of.”

Although bad leadership topped the results of the poll, the issue of corruption was the most talked-about in the comment section. Nigeria is currently ranked 146 out of the 180 countries on the 2019 corruption perception index, according to Transparency International.

The index ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption in the opinion of experts and business people, using a scale of 0 to 100, where zero means “highly corrupt” and 100 means very clean.