THE NATIONAL LANGUAGE OF CONTINUITY

I have always believed that life becomes a struggle when we start repeating thing that had already being done. Someone once said that the purpose of inheritance is for two generations not to suffer the same thing.

As a nation, the reason life has being reduced to a struggle for us is because we lack the continuity spirit. Every leadership that comes introduces a project discarding the one he met, no matter how laudable. This is the formula for failure.

Until we start having national team players in leadership positions, success may continually elude us as a nation.

This lack of continuity syndrome is not a gender thing, even the female folks are toeing the line also. Every leader that comes on stream wants to be carry the toga of ‘initiator’. They falsely believe that this is the best way to put your name in the sands of time. Lie!

Once upon a time, there was Late General Sani Abacha whose wife came up with the FSP (family support program). Not long afterwards, General Abdulsalami Abubakar’s wife came out with hers. In 1999 when Olusegun Obasanjo came into office as President, his wife Stella came up with hers: Childcare Trust. Eight years after, Nigeria got another President whose wife, Turai, wanting to follow the trend and desirous to be one the first ladies who have founded a ‘pet project’, came up with an entirely new one: WYEP (women and youth empowerment program).

Why do we have this continuity problem? To my mind, this is a sign of weakness and not strength. Any man who cannot follow through another man’s vision is not suppose to come forward for leadership. It is not a personal acquisition we are toying with, it is the future of a nation [over 140 million people]!

Every leader wants history to record his as a “Founder and Initiator”. This country has remained the way it is because of the selfishness of a few. Selfishness is the reason we have several wonderful but abandoned visions and projects littered everywhere.

Selfishness is the reason most political office holders try to make a rubbish of their predecessors. Selfishness is the major reason no government continues with the [beneficial] policies of its predecessors. Faithlessly however, this is manageably done if the predecessor is a political ally. Continuation of his projects or policies by a new regime will not be as a result of deep conviction, but a tactic of compensation or a ploy to hide his inadequacies. The several probes we see today in our country is just a n excuse to abandon the visions of the past government. Every new regime comes as a saint, and this goes on and on.

How long will our leaders keep playing games with the collective destinies of the Nigerian people?

Once upon a time, when a certain government came into power, she made lots of noise of where it was taking the country to by the year 2010. That was how the Vision 2010 anticipation started. The smoke [seem to have] ended with that regime. Several years down the line and with 2years to 2010, no meaningful reviews has been made by the government of the day; evaluating areas where there have been failures and areas where successes have been recorded, with a view to plotting a better and enhanced roadmap for the progress and future of Nigeria.

Shamefully but frankly, we have consistently produced leaders who sincerely and unapologetically don’t believe in this country and her destiny.

On May 29th 2007, a new president was sworn in. We all believed [and still do] in him, due to his track record as a governor. I think one fundamental flaw he has made, which may hunt him in future, is that he has abruptly downplayed the fact that there was already a target and a picture of where the country was headed as formulated by previous leaders and other other statesmen who should know better.
What are we going to do with Vision 2010? Suspend it, dump it or add it? Kill it?

President Umaru Ya’ardua’s government has come up with her own projection for Nigeria; Vision 2020! Why are we moving in circles? Couldn’t we have pursued the 2010 vision to a logical conclusion, before formulating another from there? Is it not obvious that we don’t believe in the labours of our hero’s past?

What is wrong with us? Why are our leaders be poor students of history?

In another 3years, Nigeria may(?) have a new president, chances are that the new President may want to impress himself and follow the wrong paths of his predecessors by coming up with his own “Vision something something”.

We don’t just need a principled, educated or religious person as our leader; we need a “National Team-player.” Friends, what makes for an outstanding leader is not just his ability to build a vision but his ability to synthesize with the ‘picture’ he met and bring it to completion, or at least to a logical conclusion.

An exceptional [national or state] leader is one who is able to connect to ideas he met in motion, previously stirred or formulated by his predecessors that were not brought to a logical conclusion before their leadership terms expired. Our leaders must learn to be national team players. To my mind, a good criteria to know if someone will be a good leader is to check how well he had worked under someone in leadership position. How loyal, how efficient and how humble he had been as a subordinate.

When you abandon your predecessor’s vision, yours will equally be abandoned, and the nation will keep experiencing retardation. No matter how defective you think someone’s vision is, there’s always something to learn from it.

The problem of food scarcity we are experiencing today would not have being. The government before had formulated certain agricultural development programs that have not been followed through by their predecessors.

No man has the monopoly of knowledge. The question is, what is our approach to national development? Is it a must that we even start new things?

There are so many laudable abandoned visions that could be ‘resurrected’ to move this country forward. Let’s swallow our pride and do it.

For this country to move to its long deserved height, we need selfless and visionary leaders. Not just fantastic talkers. We must stop doing things to consciously write our names in history, let our results and positive impacts locate us in history.

May Jehovah Nigeria bless you!