FEATURES

LIBERATION OR FRUSTRATION

It became an issue when the acclaimed colonizers who spread the wings of neo – colonialism into the landscape of Africa were fought and disputed. We are now left with an option to choose whether their action is really a propellant or a reverse gear. I sometimes want to ask if it was the land that is wrong but I still subscribe to the fact that nothing makes the land wrong than the people living there. We said that the perpetrators who we call the colonizers were despotic which made our heroes and heroines labour for redistribution of powers, not until our own leaders even became subjugators.

Late Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean aged President who ruled for 37 years and rose to leadership consequent to being a champion of anti – colonial struggle died on September 6th, 2019 at the age of 95 years old. He was forced to resign in November 2017, at the time he was the world’s oldest Head of State and one of the Africa longest–serving leaders. He pledged pragmatism and reconciliation, which made him take power from the white minority-ruled Southern Rhodesia after protracted civil wars. Zimbabwe, known as one of the largest world producers of corns and the breadbasket of Southern Africa, descended to share in the tears of unemployment, hunger, hyperinflation and disease. Among many other atrocities, power made an erudite that bagged different degrees and honours sponsor thugs, hoodlumism and assassination. All for the sustainability of power, a human entity became haunter and desperado.

The throes of opposition for confronting some of these leaders for the kind of their leadership even surmises if it ever worth their kind of person to fight for independence in the first place. Records and performance has revealed that they are nothing better than what they condemned in the past. Contrasting neo–colonialism with post–colonialism era in Africa shows that the major constraint to African countries development is leadership. Africans have witnessed different structural developmental plans and as splendid as some these plans or goals appear, many were not able to see the light of the day. It is not enough to have good intention but to bring plans and objectives into action. Using Nigerian political system in a contest like this tells much on how some orators or critics of the past also failed woefully on a little trial of leadership. Every youthful Nigerian begins to know this day that it is easier to cast stone than to lay it with our kind of polities.

If really we want changes in today’s political system or leadership as a whole, I think we better perceive that talk is enough. I never dispute the fact that we still have good and capable hands in Africa but many of these ones are hardly supported or funded. We rather see leaders wanting and claiming more opportunities, even in the face of a misused one. Good intention is not enough, we could be religious as a nation or continent but we need to be more genuine.

Enough of nepotism and egoism, leadership with self–censorship has not taken us anywhere further than this. A good leader is also a good listener. A perfect leader is the one that bears burden not the one that rebirths another woe. Let us embrace leadership not only with tenacity but with good acts and heart.

~FUNCY-D-PEN