Just think of the damage Bad Leadership can do!

Do those who run for political office really understand what it takes to transform a country. Do parents lead their children in the right way? Bosses know that the company or organization depends on their leadership capabilities.

Bad Leadership can do the following evils to a family, religious organization, community, country or even company: Bad leadership:

1. Costs you time: A bad leaders would waste time at unprofitable ventures ignoring those things that need to be done. And all the people s/he leads would suffer for it so will the organization. Nigerians who are in their 40s and 50s will realize that very little has been achieved in our democracy these 19 years. The stories are still the same.

2. Lost Opportunities: Definitely opportunities are lost when the leader lacks the skills and vision to lead the entity through a crisis situation or to make the people achieve a commonly desired state of being.

3. Lost Momentum; Some African countries got independence around the same time that the so called Asian Tigers got theirs. Today there is a world of difference between us. At some point in time we derailed. How can we be so blessed but so poor at the same time?

4.Lost Money: Its amazing how bad leadership will cause business people, givers in a church, customers to a company or even opportunities to a family to disappear. I just cant imagine how much money Nigeria has lost. The thieves who are leaders take our money to countries like Switzerland , UK and US and when they come back home we welcome them like heroes. Part of the problem is with the follower ship.

5 Damaging peoples' Values. The present young generation is in chaos over what is wrong and what is right. We used to have dignity in labor, but there are a lot of youngsters who just want to eat without working; they seem gambling, gangsterism and cultism as a way of life.

6. Damages generational wealth: The war in Syria is such that a lot of the houses, artifacts and investments can never be recovered again. Boko Haram and Killer Herdsmen continue to wreck serous havoc in Northern Nigeria and Government appears to be helpless to stop it.

7. Damages High Standards: These days people are willing to take short cuts in services, industry, governance and even parenting and the results are obvious. Standards fall and the outcomes are horrible.

8. Destroys accountability: Bad leaders feel that they are not accountable to anyone. They do whatever they like and tend to get away with it. But it bounces back on their followers. Parents who are bad leaders will raise children without values or a sense of purpose, bad leaders of a country will waste the resources and not care about it. Bad leaders defy accountability and dont care about the people who follow or look up to them.

Inspired by Bishop Tudor BIsmack

Who is responsible for budget 2018?

It took our leaders in government eight months to pass the budget. Now that they have passed it into law, its not out of place to ask who is responsible for the document that would to a large extent guide us in our spending and development processes for the next one year. I am a bit confused here, and perhaps those of you who read this would be able to clarify: what role does the legislative have in budgeting for this country called Nigeria? Recently, the law makers increased the budget of N 8 Trillion to N 9.3 Trillion. They also raised their own recurrent expenditure from N125 billion to N139 billion. Why are their expenses going up? Are they increasing their own salaries? To add insult to injury, they cut financing on major roads all around the country and budgeted for their strange constituency projects.
When you look at the components of the budgetary allocations that they made for their own spending you would wonder if they are not rivaling governors in their various constituencies.
The National Assembly, like the Governors in the states are becoming lords unto themselves. Nobody seems to be able to check them. Their sundry idea of empowerment is to conduct seminars on agriculture and give Tricycles to their constituents. My question is: should all of this come from a federal budget? Industrial sewing machines, grinding machines etc?
I have seen tricycles in Lagos with the names of Legislators inscribed on them. What does this mean? Do we believe that the money actually comes from their pockets? Or is it from their constituency allowances? How do they decide who should be empowered among the multitudes in their constituencies?
In all this, I blame our rather intellectually indolent Attorney General who should be able to challenge some of the actions of the legislative in court and forget some of these strange cases he has been filing. Abubakar Malami has again failed in his responsibility of safe guarding the FG from constitutional embarrassment. Are our legislators now playing the executive function? Should they stop road and bridge projects from being completed just to satisfy their personal dispositions? Someone ought to challenge them. Pray, who is responsible for budget 2018? Why should the president complain publicly and appear to be asking us for help? Why does President Buhari seem to have signed the document reluctantly?

Zamfara, Lagos: backwardness and development

There are two kinds of people: Those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group, there is less competition there- Indira Ghandi.

I often feel ashamed discussing how Nigerian leaders have been unable to articulate and justify the reasons why they are in the positions they find themselves. One of our poorest reference points in Nigeria today is Zamfara State, a state where the governor recently cried out that he could no longer perform the duty of chief security officer of the state because herdsmen and armed militia keep coming into the state to sack the villages. That could be an honest declaration, considering the state of our security in Nigeria.

Zamfara is not strange to the news. The Chief Executive of the state, Alhaji Abdul'aziz Abubakar Yari was elected Governor of Zamfara State, Nigeria in the 26 April 2011 national elections. His greatest claim to newsworthiness is when he wantonly declared that the state was attacked by and outrage of meningitis because of the lifestyle of his people. His belief was that God was punishing his people with the ailment because they had been sinful. Zamfara is one of the most backward states in Nigeria. It has a penetration for vaccination as low as 2%, it also has the highest occurrences of child marriage among girls who have barely reached puberty and the lowest number of students who have attempted WAEC in the country. Simply put, in spite of fertile land and massive farming potentials, Zamfara is still way out in the 19th century. A former governor of the state Senator Ahmed Yerimah has been accused of marrying under aged girls on more than one occasion. Yerimah is the architect of the Sharia Law in Zamfara state which he governed for eight years during the Obasanjo administration.

Alhaji Yari the current governor of Zamfara is also the Chairman of the Governor’s forum of Nigeria, an association of which every governor in the country is a member. You can’t help but wonder the kind of banter that would occur in a association of governors with such leadership.

There are states in Nigeria that are far more developed than Zamfara. In fact Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Lagos poll as some of the top states in the area of development. But again we need to be very clear in our analysis. How quickly are these states developing? What trends are their chief executives taking note of and who are they benchmarking? State Senate leader Kevin de León recently claimed at the Democratic National Convention that California in the United States has "the sixth largest economy on planet Earth." This hypothetical comparison rests on California's $2.4 trillion GDP, which moved slightly above that of France and Brazil in 2015 to sixth in the world. Lagos probably has the largest economy in West Africa with a monthly IGR that borders the N34billion mark Lagos State governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, has described the state as the fastest growing mega city in the world, just as he revealed that it’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has hit $136 billion. This all sounds good but In spite of these figures, much is left to be desired in Nigeria’s economic development. Nigeria is in flux. Public spending does not show enough investment in the teeming population in the country. Health care delivery is at its lowest ebb, transport is mainly by road, Apapa Port the nations gateway to import and export is permanently in a gridlock, electricity is unstable.

Certain questions arise from the gaps in development from one state to another. Why are the gaps in state development so wide and far from each other and with so few in between? Even with Zamfara as our worse and Lagos as our best much is still needed to be done. The answer is of course leadership! African countries cannot be said to lack resources. In fact Nigeria is an example of a country that has all the resources that can be thought of but with little or nothing to show for it. Ghana is another. Mensa Otabil a Pastor and Chairman to numerous corporations in Ghana described leadership as “the process of influencing others to realize beneficial aspirations”. Most Africans leaders and indeed Nigerian leaders lack this skill. The country needs leaders that are not Czars and Emperors like many of the governors tend to appear. Leaders who are not oppressing, not suppressing but are willing to promote goals and values that influence a majority of people, so that people would follow them, not for their power and money, but for their vision. Nobody seems to thinking about the future. How do we occupy our restive youth population? What should be our plans 10 or twenty years from now? Zimbabwe in spite of all the economic and political trouble it has faced recently convened a group of experts to discuss how the country could have an economy worth $500billion! Nigeria is buy grappling with N9trillion and we cannot seem to see beyond that. Are these leaders forward thinking?

A former governor of the Zamfara state, Senator Ahmed Yerimah has been accused of marrying under aged girls on more than one occasion. Yerimah is the architect of the Sharia Law in the state which he governed for eight years during the Obasanjo administration. Yerimah is now in the senate and yet his state is even more backward than he left it.

As we totter in a fragile economy that depends mainly on oil exports in which our budget and planning office is celebrating 2% growth, we all ought to be worried about the future. We keep reminiscing over the impact of our founding fathers: Awolowo, Azikiwe and Amadu Bello. Perhaps its because we have not seen such politicians in the current breed. How long will our economy depend on oil to balance things out? How long will state governors wait for allocations from Abuja before they can pay salaries, let alone develop their states. There is a big gap in the intellectual prowess of today’s politicians. They seem to think once they are comfortable, then everything is okay.Peter Drucker, management guru, captures it in a quote:"Chief executives are not there own masters. They are servants of the organization whether elected or appointed, whether the organization is a government a government agency, a business, a hospital, a diocese. Its their duty to subordinate their likes, wishes and preferences to the welfare of the institution." Nigerian leaders seem to think different.May God help Nigeria. We simply cannot continue this way.