Nigeria as a Nation.!.!.! Challenge of leadership:: Different countries define their areas of specialisation; not Nigeria. When you think Brazil, you think football. When you think of Cuba, you think Olympic boxing. When you think of Jamaica, you think of world class sprinters. When you think of Japan, you think electronics.But when you think of Nigeria, nothing of excellence comes to mind. When you think of Nigeria, you think of corruption, kidnapping and armed-robbery. When you think of Nigeria, you think of 419; “yahoo yahoo” and other scams. We only specialise in the negatives. We have not yet decided as a nation to be good at anything or to be known for anything good. In 52 years of independentexistence as a country, we have still not even decided to be a nation. And yet, it is a decision that can very easily be made. All it requires is a leadership that can challenge Nigerians to excellence. There is no question that Nigeria is full of remarkable people who are exceptional in virtually every area of human endeavour. You will find them all over the world, in key and strategic areas of the economies of foreign countries. But you will struggle to findthem in Nigeria. The same Nigerian who fails to pull his weight while working at the FederalMinistry of Education, undergoes a metamorphosis when he moves to the British Council where he puts up a stellar performance. “We choose to go to the moon,” declared JohnF. Kennedy as President of the United States in 1962, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” By 1968, United States had landed a man on the moon. That is proof of leadership. A decision is taken and resources are marshaled to bring it to fruition. By the same token, Nigerians can and should choose to excel in something for a change. We cannot continue in the current pattern where we chose to go to the Olympics and aredetermined to win no medals whatsoever. The last Olympic outing was nothing short of disgraceful. We tried our very best to fail and succeeded. The best sprinters in the world arenaturally produced in Nigeria, the same way the best middle-distance runners are naturally produced in Kenya and Ethiopia. Nevertheless, we continue to watch on the sidelines as a small country as Jamaica, with only 6 million people, dominates the sprints in the Olympics. Football prodigies:Nigeria is a nation of footballers. Visit any major Nigerian city on a public holiday, and you are likely to find that many streets have been converted to makeshift football pitches. However, since our local football league is still under mismanagement, Nigerians adopt clubs of the foreign English Premier League. The London clubs are the most favoured, especially Arsenal and Chelsea. As a matter of fact, the European Champions League is hotly contested in Ibadanand Enugu. Comparative advantage There is no reason why a Nigerian team cannot win the World Cup in football, and yet, we even fail to qualify for participation. Nigeria has a comparative advantage in producing excellent footballers. For some reason or the other, we produce quite a number of world class footballers who give good accounts of themselves all over the world. Nevertheless, we fail again and again to put together a world-class national football team. When we manage to qualify for the World Cup, we choose our coaches four weeks to the competition and train a ragtag team for no longer than a fortnight. Is it any wonder why we always come back with eggs on our faces? Finally, after a 19 year hiatus, we won the African Nations Cup this year in spite of ourselves. We did our very best to ensure failure as usual. But somehow, we succeeded most unexpectedly against the odds. The coach, Steven Keshi, claimed he only had five weeks to prepare. He refused to include some of the country’s best players in the squad. By the quarter-finals, word had reached him that he would befired, something that must have been very good for team morale. Having won the cup against the odds, he immediately decided to resign before the Minister of Sports successfully prevailed on him to stay on. Something needs to be done about this failure-driven Nigeria. Something needs to be done about our penchant to be mediocre. We need to stop squandering our riches. Nigeria needs to become a serious country. A country where a chronically sick man is “selected” President and then dies in office is not a serious country. A country where a man like Alao Akala becomes the Governor of a state is not a serious country. A country that cannot increase its power output in eight years, in spite of spending 16 billion dollars for that very purpose, is not a serious country.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 11:52:37 +0000
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