Leadership: a conscious business

The miracle of institutional veracity

Just to get the curiosity over our current blog picture out of the way, this post asks Nigerians to think of a country like Taiwan as they head to the polls in the next few days. You will see why this may be a very smart idea soon enough. As we count down to Nigeria’s coming elections, it seems most appropriate at this point to give a lot more weight to the question of return on a nation’s leadership investment. Certainly, it is on this front that developing nations either begin to emerge towards the developed zone or continue to whirl around in the circles of underdevelopment. Institutional leadership makes all the difference here.

 Democracy in action – more than honchos in trendy gears

To effectively lead a nation and its governance institutions is much more than to dress well and make speeches. Great leaders preside over processes and institutions that have structural integrity and deliver strong results. At the executive branch of government, the key to institutional integrity is the capacity to vision and execute with know-how. An administration structured along this line is best positioned to ensure that its governance vehicles are process-based and mission-focused, regardless of the vagaries of  politics. Service (civil service) must stay civil and value-enhancing, even in precarious political settings. Think about this. What Nigerian institutions would you consider first-class, average, weak or utterly scandalous? Think for instance of the governance institutions that manage Nigeria’s oil wealth, power supply, security, healthcare, and infrastructure. Think perhaps of systems such as the police, customs, or immigration. Wherever these score high in terms of process integrity and service delivery, credit must accrue primarily to the executive branch. Should any of these be judged weak or scandalous however, the buck also rests squarely with the executive branch.

On the legislative front, the largest body of elected representatives of the people, the core question is on intellectual and emotional commitment to the national call. As a very prestigious governance arm, a legislature must be educated and savvy with regards to the capacity to ‘check and balance’ the executive branch. It must also be super patriotic and dignified with regards to putting the nation first in all matters. A legislator who does not act in ways that inspire confidence and pride in the citizenry is at best a thug with a government expense account. In Nigeria, the risk of the national call being drowned out by the primordial sectional ‘flu virus’ that tends to significantly afflict many unschooled legislators remains exceptionally high. Here is a question that sums this up. Do the candidates and legislators you support unequivocally demonstrate their belief in a corporate Nigeria? If not, are they perhaps part of the carpet-bagger brigade that has so far served Nigeria so very badly? For instance, if your legislators work productively for fewer hours than you do to earn a living, and yet make money off your country in multiples of what you earn as an upstanding professional in your own right, this can only mean one thing. Your so called champions of the grassroots have their feet in the clouds. You can then imagine where their heads are. Such folks are out of touch with the reality faced by regular citizens, drawing remuneration from the people’s purse that is way more than the worth of services rendered. Who pays government employees, or any service provider, this way? Additionally, in terms of real identity and standing, a legislature with a profile that is substantially skewed in this direction is no more than a secondary arm of the executive. As such, it is a drain on the nation’s resources since it will be weak at checking or strengthening its supposed co-branch of government. What we have, thus becomes a mafia system that unconsciously serves to under-develop the country.

In a democracy, a judiciary with backbone stands in position as the people’s most abiding line of defense, with integrity and independence as its sword and shield. Yes, you heard that right. Without integrity and independence, the judiciary can easily be reduced to an elevated but unholy platform for brewing and dispensing black magic in the name of justice. Here are some questions for testing the maturity of the judiciary as a vital arm of governance. Is the judicial sword active and upright against injustice on all fronts? To what extent does the judicial shield protect the nation and its citizens against the unlawful acts of both the small and the mighty? What do the best legal minds think of the judges and the systems they preside over? To what extent do money and influence cloud the integrity of the judiciary? If you have significant reason for discomfort on these scores, you can bet that the problem here is much bigger than what you sense, especially as an outsider.

The real price of a vote

In terms of return on leadership investment, it is estimated that no less that 95% of Nigerians agree that their country still has enormous pending construction work on all  three of its governmental floors – executive, legislative and judicial. This is the necessary and urgent work required to shift from a personality-based and self-centered governance approach to a people-centered, process-based, and value-driven system. To the extent that this work is pending, too many Nigerians remain victims of governmental justice delayed. While we will devote some time to this in future posts, the main focus of this piece is on the immediate economic consideration that should serve as food for thought as Nigerians begin to cast their votes in a matter of hours.

When Nigerians go out to vote this time, perhaps the greatest service they are called by the love of country and pride of purpose to render to their nation and loved ones, is to give more than a cursory thought to the value of their votes. What are we are asking the candidates we support to do with our collective destiny?  Get even richer by further impoverishing most Nigerians? What will Nigerians who vote for Goodluck Jonathan be asking him to do, and what will they be asking that he ceases to do? What will Nigerians who prefer Buhari want him to do, and what should he not do?

The question on what voters want is always an IMPACT and SUBSTANCE question. Candidates can easily be prepped to say the right things and dress in the right gears to IMPRESS voters, but until they are consistently doing the right things to IMPACT citizens’ lives, you might as well flip your television to the comedy channel and have fun with something brilliant and authentic. It is the ‘higher-ground’ national appetite for governmental justice that compels the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary to govern for IMPACT, from transparency and accountability to infrastructure, and from education and rule of law to human rights. Conversely, it is the inclination to govern on the unconscious floors that allows leaders to get away with both the social and economic sabotage of their nations, from dismal return on the people’s leadership investment to the large scale abuse of office. The point here is that the folks voters vote into offices are automatically handed power in the same way a gracious host may throw his/her doors open for a guest. This temporary power in the hands of committed captains can be alchemized to make a nation super strong, thus enriching citizens’ lives. On the other hand, the same power in the hands of dodgy actors is sure to be misused to further weaken the land, thus fueling mass disempowerment. Can you imagine your supposedly honored guest stealing toys, food, furniture and fixtures from your home? How is this different with executive, legislative, and judicial leaders who steal from their people? Whether the overall outcome of votes will result in positive or negative returns cannot be taken for granted anymore; Nigerians must really begin to think from higher ground now.

 Rethinking leadership – lesson from Taiwan

In economic reckoning, a country can be resource poor but make rich choices and become very rich. Taiwan is rich in this sort of way while Nigeria is not. Described as a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resource endowment, Taiwan still qualifies with ‘A’ rating as a conscious choice-making country. It has been said that the country even imported sand and gravel from China for construction, yet it makes no excuses about its conditions and circumstances. Rather than the luxury of mining deep down the earth for material resources, as Nigeria has had the rare privilege of doing, Taiwan mines its 23 million people; their talent, their energy and their intelligence. As a result, here is Taiwan’s economic leadership scorecard:

• 17th largest economy in the world
• Third largest holder of foreign exchange reserves
• 14th largest exporter
• 16th largest importer

Can you see the picture? Can you see why voting means more than sentiments and cheerleading? Imagine for a moment that Nigeria’s elected and appointed leaders were adept at investing single mindedly in getting good at mining the talent, energy and intelligence of over 160 million Nigerians. What dreams do you see coming true?

The problem with misused minority power

To look at what is possible for Nigeria through the lens of Taiwan’s uncommon leadership success, let us indulge in a necessary detour at this point. The goal is to reinforce the case that every-day citizens and well-oiled governance institutions matter much more than successive Nigerian governments and governance habits have tended to appreciate. For want of a tag line, we will borrow from a previous post and label this issue the .5% versus 99.5% case.

In governance, the .5% that constitutes the leadership class is to deploy its resourcefulness to unleash the genius of the over 99.5% that forms the majority block. Where the 99.5% is organized and engaged, this leadership-citizen ballet is an awesome value-minting marriage. The leadership has little choice but to be smart and focused, and the people serve as the cache of a nation’s renewable resources. On the other hand, where the leadership is substantially unconscious, much can go wrong. For one thing, if the 99.5% fails to engage in order to achieve the constant course correction that is an inherent requirement of every citizen-leadership contract, the nation itself remains severely undervalued. If the people habitually go on a ‘long vacation’ until the next election cycle, it is easy for the leadership to go rogue, acting as a class of overlords presiding over a conquered territory. The salient point here is that informed and engaged citizens challenge their leaders to be smart and sensitive to their needs, and that smart and focused leaders mine the talents and energies of their people, all for the greater and continuing good of the nation.

When over 99.5% of a population has not figured out an effective way to constantly challenge the members of the .5% to deploy their know-how in the service of the homeland, a nation is never as smart and strong as it can be: not its armed forces or law enforcement system, not its infrastructure or service standards, and not its public accountability or global weight. It cannot be smart and strong on any sustained basis because there is no compelling urgency for exceptional results. And there is no compelling urgency for such results because the enabling institutions are buried under the weight of an unconscious leadership culture. The result of this upside-down authority disarticulation is power shortage. No, this is not the power shortage often addressed by pumping more oil or generating more electricity. This is another story by itself, one that most Nigerians readers know quite a lot about already.

 Power trips and power shortage

Power shortage is often more about leadership hubris and blurred public service consciousness than about any real lack of material resources. It is a disease of the mind fueled by a level of poverty consciousness than cannot be cured by even the injection of more resources. Such additional resources simply go down the same economic drainage channel that is the reason for the power shortage. This is the biggest problem international donor agencies face when seeking to help countries with poor institutional frameworks. In the interplay of governance and citizenship, power shortage is the foundation for lingering corruption. Power shortage occurs when .5% of the population, with no inherent power except as is granted by the people, lives permanently on a power trip. This class is only able to do this where the real owners of a nation’s power orchestrate and exaggerate their own powerlessness. Of course this happens mostly involuntarily, propelled as it were by the often debilitating fear of the unknown and the real and immediate need for survival. This state of affairs is particularly troubling because, for a nation not at war, except perhaps with itself, ‘made in heaven’ citizen-leadership marriage is about thriving, not surviving. The real job for a 21^st century Jonathan or Buhari administration is thus to lead Nigeria away from the destructive fast lane that is paved with the fear and doubt of learned survival mindset, towards the thriving vast lane that is paved with leadership impact.

When a nation’s leadership, or any leadership class for that matter, operates on a prolonged power trip, the nation or entity and its people seem to perpetually exist to serve their leaders. The leaders in turn begin to rest on their oars, expecting to be served while doing less than their best in the service of the people and the nation. Whatever services and products that continue to disappear in this value-depleting arrangement must then be imported from elsewhere by those who can afford to – finished goods, talent, essential services, etc. In this mediocre paradise without a name, there is no firm platform for the battle of ideas, the dominant pastime being the perpetual musical-chairs shuffling on elite floors. As the advantaged and the connected jockey endlessly for vantage points from where to pluck the spoils of privilege, the business of leadership is quickly reduced to personal transactions. The idea of who should create what value is no longer the thrust of governance. Here, unlike the case of Taiwan, even with the abundance of resources, a blessed nation seems cursed. This subsists even as such a nation perpetually throws resources at officially declared wars against corruption.

Never enough jail space for the corrupt

The first reason a nation may repeatedly lose its war against corruption is that without institutions structured on a long-term corporate view of nationhood, such wars are often strategically set up to fail. For one thing, while these wars tend to suddenly spring from executive fiat rather than evolve from shared governance principles, they tend to be meant for ‘them, not us.’ Such wars are  often waged against targeted individuals, while the institutions and business cultures that form the breeding ground for corruption remain largely unaffected. This is akin to firing the cashiers in a public bank with serious internal control lapses, without remediating the control failures and getting compromised executives to step aside. The second reason losing is guaranteed in such dysfunctional dramas is that these so called wars are often waged with institutions and/or players either tainted or elevated by the same corrupt processes. This means that witch-hunting and misplaced loyalties must necessarily combine to crowd out genuine quest for justice. At best, the end product seems more like justified injustice. Will Jonathan reincarnate as a more inspiring and responsive leader, as well as a courageous warrior against corruption and mediocrity? Will Buhari re-emerge with a more inclusive and national outlook, less inclination to pious indignation, and a deeper understanding of economic justice?

 Rich country, poor people

Against the forgoing background, Nigeria’s current state amply makes the case that a country can be resource rich, make poor choices and become poor. Nigeria is rich where Taiwan can hypothetically be described as poor, but embarrassingly poor where Taiwan is actually rich. With a resilient and enterprising population and natural resources such as gas, petroleum, tin, iron ore, coal, limestone, niobium, lead, zinc, etc as its foundational working capital, those interested in leading Nigeria must spend more time working on how the country ceases to make the news as a prime example of a nation cursed by the fact of its blessings.

For Nigeria to stand any renewed chance of relevance in global affairs, as many votes as possible (for either Jonathan or Buhari) must be premised on the question of how Nigeria ceases to linger in global economic consciousness as a rich country with poor people. Even more importantly, win or lose in the coming elections, both candidates must return to the school of governance and, like serious students of leadership, begin to do some intense homework. For one thing, they must seek to score at least a ‘C’ grade in understanding why Taiwan seems blessed by not having God-given natural resources and Nigeria seems cursed by being blessed with natural resources. And they will do well to begin to take some advanced classes on why Nigeria is known to be the 12th largest exporter of oil and yet ranked among the 15 poorest nations in the world? Then they need to go back to our .5%/99.5 power shortage equation and really understand how both Nigeria’s problems and solutions are hidden there in plain sight.

For the longest time in Nigeria, the focus has been on the country’s natural resources and the welfare of the .5%. This time, the focus needs to shift to the 99.5% and the creation of enabling institutions. For too long, it has been widely acknowledged that a public institution can be blatantly corrupt without embarrassing the appointed chief executive or quickly prompting political leaders to raise enough questions to create the fear of real repercussions. The malaise is in full color as if on a large smart television screen, but we see neither collective outrage nor the institutional horsepower to do the necessary sanitization. If we take a lesson from Taiwan, here is how much better things can be.

We have seen that rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up for its .5% to scramble over, Taiwan mines its 23 million people and thus invests astutely in its citizenry. Nigeria can also invest in its human resources and mine its citizens, their talent, energy and intelligence; men and women alike. For the simple reason that Taiwan’s leaders do this, we wonder how they did the magic. With no oil, no iron ore, no arable land, no diamonds, and no gold, we wonder how the people of Taiwan got so lucky. Well, they did not. They orchestrated their own luck and the laws of citizen-centric leadership seem to have bent completely to the force of their national desire. Taiwan built the underlying institutions for development and developed the habits and culture of honing its people’s skills. This has made all the difference. This is the lesson Nigeria must now imbibe. It is at this level that as many Nigerians as possible should be reasoning as they cast their votes. Developing the habits and culture of honing the people’s skills is the most valuable leadership trait of today, as well as the only truly renewable resource in this 21^st century.

Governance and House-keeping: Nigeria’s lingering power vacuum

Let the race begin

….Every nation gets the government it deserves – and as such, the institutions and processes, the armed forces and law enforcement culture, the highways and byways, the actors and the detractors, the artists and the scientists, and the heroes and the villains that go with it. This is especially so for a democracy.

Easy goes the trick

Every nation covers only the miles it is willing to run. The miles can be likened to our access cards to libraries. Both are free. So why do some nations run while others seem to crawl for miles? Same reason why the library seems like home to some and like another planet to others! It is easy to run and it is also easy to go get a library card. But it is also easy not to run or drive down to the library. Miles of progress are offered to nations for free, but each nation is only credited with as much as it is willing to stretch to reach. Credits and credibility cannot be earned any other way; not by legislation, not by sectionalism, not by blustering and not by wishful thinking. Credit goes to the one who is daring and striving – beauty, brain, sweat, dust, blood and all. It takes everything a nation has to run for miles.

Every nation stretches to the level of fitness and greatness it dares. Every library patron gets up and visits the library every now and then. Notwithstanding what level of importance we may attach to what personalities, we don’t expect our librarians to bring us library books at home, not to talk of reading them to us in bed. The least and the most we are asked to do is to get up and drive down. In the same manner, nations cannot pass the fitness test and become great without a regime of regular pushups, stretching, and running. Nations on the cutting edge of leadership and institutional robustness seem to have organized their institutions and processes to the point that it is easy to do their pushups, and stretches, and running. On the other hand, nations that are lagging on the essential fronts also seem to have organized their processes and institution such that it is easy not to run or do their pushups and stretches.

If we have captured the essence of the gist from our last post, perhaps the following summary encapsulates the idea of running for real miles. For the leaders of a country to be inspired to race for great results, they must be running for miles (results) as if something or someone was chasing them.

Indeed, ‘something or someone’ had better be chasing leaders (across the executive, legislative and the judicial floors), or too many of them are certain to bow to such corrupting influences as narcissism and brazenness. And once a critical mass of a leadership class has been corrupted over a reasonable timeframe, the resulting imbalance persists in pulling down the overall batting average of the entire team, regardless of who is tainted or awesome. Whether it is a country or a government department, a system that is reeking of sleaze is bound to checkmate the best efforts of even the brightest angels of our time.

The real puzzle

With the coming elections, Nigeria once more stands on the action mark, challenged to get on with its vital pushups. Failing to take on this challenge, it will essentially be pushing off its date with greatness. It now stands on the podium, left with the option to aggressively fight its process corruption or to passively accept its large scale debilitating effect on its corporate integrity. While it is very well understood that to effectively tackle this virus is a monumental task for many countries, no nation can condone whole scale corruption and expect to score high on the greatness essentials. This fact is additionally troubling when we agree that a nation needs no more than a combination of .5% corrupt but powerful influencers and over 99.5% passive regular citizens to be stuck with a failing grade in terms of accountability and national development. The puzzle here, and it ought to be a real puzzle for many of us, is that for this house of cards to stand, the majority (over 99.5%) of citizens must get fearfully good at embracing their learned powerlessness. In turn, the power-clutching (less than .5% of) class must fully understand the psychology of powerlessness and use it to run-away effect. To this extent, corruption becomes a choice, the choice not to engage by the docile majority, and the choice to drive wildly and recklessly by a few fast-lane drivers.

The choice to choose, or to choose not to choose

Everything is a choice. Some choices are made consciously while many are birth from our unconscious actions and inactions. But even the most unconscious choices are choices nonetheless. Quite predictably, we may insist that fate befalls us by happenstance, and that we are often not responsible for how our world is unfolding. While this idea is clearly undeniable on many levels, here is what else is just as indisputable. Even when we are not responsible for our circumstances, it is often within our power to choose how we respond. So our responses to our circumstances are also choices; ones that make a world of difference on the results that color our waking movements and shape our lives. Has Nigerian been mostly on the conscious or unconscious side of choice-making?

The verdict is in and we have not won

Everything is a choice, and it is the mark of brilliance to choose consciously. With regards to things that matter the most, choosing consciously begins to approach the touch of genius. For nations, the struggle between the choice of genius and the slippery slope to mediocrity is a tough battle that requires a huge paradigm shift, from the grassroots to the palaces. Nigeria certainly has a huge motivation to extricate itself from this entanglement given its 27out of 100 points score (a ranking 136th out of 174 countries) in the 2014 Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index

While there is so much mileage to be gained through conscious choices, there is nothing better on the horizon until enough Nigerians choose to hit the road and start running and rooting for the nation. Until there is a metal revolution in which the vast majority of citizens wake up, wise up and reclaim their country, Nigerians will remain largely subdued by their choices, and thus continue to live the reality of their unconscious responses to their circumstances.

Nations get the leaders they deserve. This is the most liberating truth for citizens to embrace, and yet the hardest lesson to sign up for. It is the greatest truth out there because it reminds citizens of their power to raise their country’s flag and build themselves a nation worth bequeathing to their children and grand children. But it is also a hard lesson since it causes citizens of any struggling country the discomfort that comes with the reality that they have chosen to have ‘the state of the nation’ they currently have, in the case of Nigeria, with all the wasted opportunities and loss of mileage that go with it.

Nations deserve the leaders they have. If this is true, and there is no good reason to believe otherwise, then the jury has been in for a while and we were not paying attention. The verdict should, and must, render all previous ideas that Nigeria has better choices than Jonathan and Buhari nonsensical. Where are the better choices and why have they failed to emerge on the scene? If nations deserve whatever leaders they have, then Nigeria has always gotten the leadership it deserved. More importantly, the country is about to repeat what it has always done, with clear predictable results.

 The search for the top geniuses

While searching for its leading governance and process geniuses, Nigeria once deserved and decided on Shehu Shagari. You must remember the mild mannered Shagari. Then came Mahammadu Buhari and his blazing ‘right hand’ Tunde Idiagbon. Nigeria then deserved and got Ibrahim Babangida soon after, admiringly terming him the Maradona of a genius. As it turned out, the country did not deserve and could not keep late Moshood Abiola, but it did deserve and got late Sanni Abacha. Remember that big guy with few words? Then Nigeria deserved and got the second coming of Olusegun Obasanjo, deserved and got late Umaru Yar’Adua, and deserved and got Goodluck Jonathan. Now we are soon to usher in the second coming of either Goodluck Jonathan or Mahammadu Buhari. These are the men that have shaped Nigeria’s corporate face in the last several years; men, no women so far, that have emerged from cultures and processes Nigeria has deserved and ostensibly embraced. Have these not been the leaders at the helm of our less than .5% class; the razzle-dazzle class most Nigerians aspire to. And have we not been the sleeping 99.5% with the real power?

Citizens accept the leaders and build the nations they deserve; the hardest lesson out there and yet the most liberating truth there is. They may accept these leaders as hostages to their own learned hopelessness or as hosts to their own greatness. And they can choose to become central actors in their nation’s unfolding or acquiesce and play the fringes, but a citizenry can never plead sweeping innocence if the essential colors of the nation’s coat-of-arms are fast fading into irrelevance. It doesn’t work that way; citizenship and nationhood are shared responsibilities.

It follows from reasoning that just as with the leaders of any other country, the reason Nigeria’s leaders will either run for results or sleep on duty is not a new idea at all. It has depended, and will continue to depend, on what Nigerians are willing to live with. And just as with citizens of other nations, Nigerians will be willing to live with whatever they believe they deserve. They may not profess this belief vocally, but whatever they accept psychological and live instinctually says all there is to say. No steady electricity supply? Nigerians say they hate this state of affairs, but their actions seem to say “No problem, at least we have electricity generators and kerosene lanterns.” Not enough accountability? Nigerians decry this verbally, but they do not hit the tracks to insist that people get fired from public offices for defacing their nation. Rather, we seem to be hearing “No big deal, at least our country is not broke yet, and one day it will be my turn.” What about inadequate healthcare or security? Of course Nigerians hate this, but they keep on keeping on as if saying “No worries! Those of us still alive just have to make lots of money and keep paying our way out of each episode of our deserved dilemma.”

Can you see the double bind in all this? At fifty-something, Nigeria carries a face its sages believe should be more graceful, wobbles along on legs its children believe ought to be springier, and celebrates an ethos the world dismisses as badly flawed. Here then are the questions of the moment. If Nigerians feel they can get better than the current score, when do the collective pushups and stretching begin? When is the time to hit the tracks and start running?

Please stay tuned. Call to ACTION for our readers! Please share your thoughts in the LEAVE A COMMENT section below. Your ideas matter for the Nigeria of your vision. To follow light-trail, please click the follow link at the right lower end of the screen!

Nigeria’s Corporate Standing: time to run for real miles….

lightnigeria

The premise

The starting premise of our continuing dialogue on Nigeria’s coming elections is something of a bitter pill that some may find hard to swallow. Offered as a powerful prescription for an uncommon mental remodeling, it holds that nations get the leaders they deserve.

Nations get the leaders they deserve

 Do you agree or disagree with the idea that the leaders a nation keeps in office are the leaders they deserve? Why or why not? Please share your insight. We will explore this idea comprehensively in subsequent blogs, but we will lay the ground work in this segment. This is necessary given the fact that the loudest statement Nigerians everywhere make today is that they want a country that better supports their best view of themselves, their desire to be led to greatness, and their thirst for life, liberty and the noble pursuit of happiness. But they also acknowledge unequivocally that…

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Nigeria’s Corporate Standing: time to run for real miles….

The premise

The starting premise of our continuing dialogue on Nigeria’s coming elections is something of a bitter pill that some may find hard to swallow. Offered as a powerful prescription for an uncommon mental remodeling, it holds that nations get the leaders they deserve.

Nations get the leaders they deserve

 Do you agree or disagree with the idea that the leaders a nation keeps in office are the leaders they deserve? Why or why not? Please share your insight. We will explore this idea comprehensively in subsequent blogs, but we will lay the ground work in this segment. This is necessary given the fact that the loudest statement Nigerians everywhere make today is that they want a country that better supports their best view of themselves, their desire to be led to greatness, and their thirst for life, liberty and the noble pursuit of happiness. But they also acknowledge unequivocally that there is fire on their mountain right now because they have not had passable return on their leadership investment. So what is missing? Where is the bucket leaking from?

The wisdom call

Cerebral courage calls for making every key national matter discussable. This is chiefly important because it ensures that whatever battle there is to wage becomes one of ideas rather than of physical combat. Similarly, conventional wisdom calls for heightened urgency and less excuse-making when there is fire on the mountain. Run, run, run; remember that? The idea of running has become of pivotal import in Nigeria’s citizen-leadership arrangement. Here is how the story goes.

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.

It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up.

It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or gazelle.

When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

The triple play of running

When it comes to a nation’s affairs, there are three vital running tracks.

• There is running for public office, say by campaigning for votes and lobbying for public appointments and promotions. These are worthy endeavors that constitute legitimate paths to leadership positions.

To run for public office is to go to the public to make the case for your trustworthiness when it comes to living the vision of the public and working to actualize their dreams. The politician’s pledge is to enhance the people’s living standards, to uphold every citizen’s dignity, and to employ the most civilized approaches and unique talents to grow their commonwealth. In Nigeria, this is what all office seekers must pledge to all Nigerians.

• There is running once in public office, as in running to meet the people where their longing for better days and their legitimate needs of today converge.

To run while in public office is to strive to earn the public trust every single day while living on public trust and off the public purse. In other words, this is the race to deliver on pledges made while running for public office. Think about it. If the public is bankrolling your lifestyle, why would you not run on their behalf and vote for their best interest?

Politicians who get the message don’t stop running once they win elections or get appointed to public position; this is when they up the ante. Now they’re getting paid to run, and compared to 99.9% of their fellow citizens, they are getting very well paid so they can keep their eyes on the ball. For this reason they must go back often to prove their worth to their benefactors, reminding them of what they pledged to do, showing how well they have done, and pledging to maintain a run rate that best supports their patrons’ aspirations. If this seems far-fetched in the Nigerian context, that’s too bad. This is what democracy means.

• Then there is citizen agility, or the running by the people. This is the enlightened and active business of followership in lockstep with the leadership. Leaders never do well for their nations without this.

Citizen agility is the self-interest followership that aligns citizens behind the leaders they have tested and trust to lead them to where they want to go. Not where the leaders want to go, mind you. We’re talking about where the people themselves seek to go. To be led to their Promised Land is the only reason citizens need leaders. In this sense, leaders, whether they lead a country, a state, a village, a church or a market association, are promise keepers, not dream killers. And the people they lead must be their greatest cheerleaders when the keep the promise, and their worst nightmare when they go rogue.

Leading from every chair

Enlightened citizenship is about being responsible and response-able enough to lead from any station and bloom where you are planted; as a farmer, a police officer, a journalist, a teacher, a doctor, a priest, a nurse, a cab driver, a student. This is to engage like a bona fide and empowered citizen, with that inalienable right to be here to hear and be heard. It is about:

• Answering the twin call to courage and wisdom
• Doing the right thing
• Engaging actively, with conscience to the task
• Saying what you mean consciously, and meaning what you say
• Actively measuring the leaders’ performance against pledged and expected goals.

Contrary to the prevailing culture of speaking loud but saying very little, citizenship is about letting our lives speak. This way, there is no confusion about the quality of leadership we deserve and demand of ourselves and others. Citizenship is never about waiting for others to do the heavy lifting while we point accusing fingers at who ‘‘should have, could have, would have, etc., etc.’ It is with citizen engagement that a nation effectively leverages the power of talent, commitment and teamwork.

Organized people vested in their nation’s greatness keep their leaders straight and on mission only because they themselves are on task. Being individually and collectively on task affords citizens the impetus to actively measure their leaders’ performance against that yardstick of pledged and expected goals. This takes talented engineers, vocal priests, informed economists, creative carpenters, smart traders, revolutionary consultants, and what have you. The task here is one of looking out for our neighbors as we do for our families, looking out for our country as we do for our communities, and holding ourselves to the same standards we expect of our leaders.

When the Bottom-Line must become the Bottom Line

Given the above picture, here is the bottom-line. The perception of blatant corruption, either individual corruption in public office or institutional corruption as a country’s corporate culture, is not funny. At best, it is a cruel joke that the call to enlightened citizenship forbids patriots to tolerate. So, here are some questions for further reflection.

• Given all the brilliant and illustrious people that line up Nigeria’s hall of fame, why the enduring wall of shame?
• Why would smart and industrious people routinely tolerate the forbidden, whimsically elevate the irrelevant, joyfully promote mind-numbing mediocrity, and consistently celebrate the totally absurd?
• Why are the coming elections about President Jonathan, General Buhari and their PDP and APC friends?
• Why are Nigeria’s elections never about Nigerians and their nation’s corporate standing?

Stay tuned.

Call to ACTION for our readers!

• Please share your thoughts in the LEAVE A COMMENT section below. Your ideas matter for the Nigeria of your vision.
• To follow light-trail, please click the follow link of the right lower end of the screen!

Nigeria’s 2015 Election Plans: Setting the stage for a giant leap or settling for another arranged loveless marriage?

Had things gone as initially published, Nigerians would have headed to the polls on February 14, 2015, to elect the nations’ next president. The election plans have been moved further back, but since this piece was completed hours before the election date was moved, the hope is that you will still find the premise contextually relevant. One cannot clearly tell whether it was by coincidence or by design that the election was initially scheduled to hold on Valentine’s Day, the globally celebrated lovers’ day, but we’ll take the connection as a good omen. We want to. There is love in the equation of the day, and Nigeria badly needs a love story now. Can you see why?

For far too long, Nigeria’s stewardship story has been so ridiculously ill-dramatized that it is mirroring that familiar Shakespearean allusion to the “poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” You know the story right?

You remember that tale said to be told by an idiot and tersely summarized as a story full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. Everywhere you go, you are likely to find Nigerians arguing their voices hoarse on whether it is Jonathan or Buhari that must win the election, or else… But ask why the result should go one way or the other and here is what comes through. You immediately begin to see that people are too jaded to have given their preferences more than just jaundiced surface considerations. Nigerians have been served so badly by their leadership class that they would quickly plunge into trance-like squabbles on who must win the election, even if they were offered the choice of a deer or a cat as the two candidates on the ballot.

Given the above reality, candidates are hardly ever challenged to articulate their vision for the country with specificity and sense of mission. Just as confounding, there seems to be no enduring public urge to robustly audit for credibility and cerebral horsepower as part of the requirements for hiring for easily the most important job in Nigeria, if not in Africa. This is akin to hiring for a very important job without laying out the job description, and without calling for resumes and conducting job interviews. The nothingness of Nigeria’s stewardship story has become that uninspiring. In fact, the story has for long largely been about:

• The cookie jar tale of ‘who pilfered what public funds?’ from oil proceeds to pension funds
• See-nothing-hear-nothing despicable acts of abuse, and more recently, terrorism – and the lack of transparency and resolve in dealing with the double whammy state of emergency
• Endless and often rancorous political missteps and somersaults

It is perhaps for these and similar reasons that Nigeria’s stewardship story has been so misty that the fact that it lacks directional traction is no longer newsworthy. Under the stated atmosphere, love has become a scarce commodity in Nigeria’s existential instinct, whether love of country or love of neighbor. Before we dig any deeper into the challenge, however, let us first acknowledge that whatever Nigerians do with the next elections stands to set the stage for how the country must play thereafter in a globalized world. In view of this, we must now take a slight detour and travel some already fairly well charted waters of global politics.

Here is the point; Nigeria will not play the global game unless it fields a winning team. And it cannot field a winning team if it elects clueless captains. The question to ask therefore is whether or not Nigeria is ready, or at least relentlessly preparing to play as an adult nation in global affairs. The coming elections stand to accentuate the idea of a culture of nothingness if it does not ready Nigeria for greater things. Put another way, without some collective upgrading of the importance of governance to Nigeria’s corporate readiness for 21st century nationhood, the coming elections will amount to another hollow ritual in the worship of recklessness. Here is why.

In this era of people-centered governance and transparency, it is not that difficult to make convincing predictions about any country on the question of elections, electoral candidates, and election results. For one thing, it is well understood today that mere vote casting does not amount to a viable democracy. In fact, by looking at how a nation’s political parties arrive at what candidates run for elections, it is fairly easy to tell whether a country’s compass is pointed towards a bright and socially fluent future or stuck in the stagnant muddy waters of tacit ineptness. If ineptness is the verdict, then the nation itself has been sold short to those most unlikely to raise a sweat for the love of country, let alone care about its least empowered citizens. The clearest signals which way a country is headed can be gleaned from the following:

• Who are the candidates for elections and how and why are they the ones on the ballot?
• What are the credentials of the candidates – in other words, why do they qualify to run now?
• What defines the operational quality of the institutions and processes over which these leaders have once presided, or now seek to preside – in other words, if you had delivered dastardly unimpressive results in the past, why are you now qualified as ‘the first among the pack’? How on God’s earth are you the remedy to the mess you either created entirely on your own, or played an integral part in creating? Isn’t there something pathologically problematic here?
• If you have occupied a position of trust in the past, what testimonials from the public proclaim that you delivered acceptable returns to citizens on account of your stewardship?
• Where do these wannabe leaders rank on the global scale of leadership and accountability?

It should be obvious from the foregoing that with regard to leadership credentials, Nigerians need to lean less on paper diplomas and ‘been there, done that’ rhetoric. Where rubber meets the road is in solid and measurable accomplishments that make, or point to the potential to make, a notable difference to national renewal and citizen socioeconomic empowerment. Think of things like the overall quality of life beyond capital city highbrow districts, the education of the young and the motivations for their teachers, healthcare, employment opportunities, rule of law, etc. These are the clearly bankable leadership accomplishments that raise citizens up and put nations on the global list of countries to reckon with.

Sample a cross section of Nigerians across the national space and you may be surprised that the results they expect from their leaders are no different from what citizens of the most advanced countries of the world expect; service above self. While this is as it should be, it remains impossible to exaggerate the fact that Nigerians have zero faith in the odds of their leadership class putting the nation and welfare of citizens first. Sample Nigerians abroad, if you will, and the results are clearly similar. Specifically, Nigerians cherish the hopes of a nation:

• Where the provision of utilities like electricity and water supply is not elevated to the realm of unattainable dreams.
• Where peaceful political campaigns are not welcomed with hailstorms of stones and machetes and gunfire in some archaic tale of North-South, East-West misspent tribal energies. The reality here is a cocktail of greed and shortsightedness woven at great cost to the citizenry by players whose aim is to see themselves in control of the country’s resources, largely for their own personal gains.
• Where healthcare investment is not neglected for the reason that ‘leaders’ and the ‘elite’ can routinely hop abroad for publicly sponsored medical checkups. Destination countries range from South Africa to India, and wherever else money can buy in foreign lands that which ‘love of country and neighbor’ should have spurred these same people to create at home, for the benefit of all and at a much lower cost.
• Where university professors seeking basic encouragement are not belittled and left to languish on strike for the better part of a full academic year, largely because political leaders educate their own children elsewhere, from Ghana to the United Kingdom, and from Australia to the United States. Mind you, we are talking about a country that was once the preferred destination for education for the whole of Africa.
• Where citizens do not have to spend more on privately owned electricity generating sets than it would cost should love of country instruct their government to make the provision of uninterrupted electricity a nonnegotiable national priority. Beyond the immediate out-of-pocket cost of buying and running millions of electricity generating sets, try imagining the resulting environmental and health costs.
• Where huge public funds do not disappear repeatedly, storied to sleep with tall tales from the overused playbook of ‘seeing and hearing no evil’ while iniquity ravages the land.
• Where love of country and empathy for neighbor drive good policies and unequivocally police the excesses of privilege.

The list is a lot longer but who is counting? What is amply clear now is that for Nigeria as it stands today, status quo has become both dangerous and outrageously expensive. And if the outdated playbook remains Nigeria’s leadership reference manual, the obstacles to the country’s emancipation will only continue to calcify. The question that counts today is no longer who wins what election but how the country wins beyond feverish political campaigns and votes cast on the altar of unadulterated gullibility. As is well documented, the game of individual winners and losers in Nigeria’s politics and governance has only served largely to fuel corruption, enthrone mediocrity, celebrate under-performance and institutionalize half measures. With no signs today that essential lessons have been learned, the vital question for Nigeria now is when? ‘WHEN WILL THE BLEEDING CEASE’?

Who will stop Nigeria’s protracted socioeconomic hemorrhaging? Has either Jonathan or Buhari earned the standing to take Nigeria to the Promised Land, or should their parties go back to the drawing board? If the two gentlemen represent the caliber of leaders Nigeria needs in this age of Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and Narendra Modi, where are their blueprints and road maps? Nigerians need to review these for substance, and they need to ask hard questions before they vote? The goal ought to be for strong handshakes with proven goal-getters able to reverse Nigeria’s arrested development saga. This is the only reason Nigerians should be signing off for any candidate seeking political office, more so one looking to become both Nigeria’s leadership draftsman and chief public relations officer in a globalized world.

If Nigeria continues to bleed after the elections, the mafia dons would have won again. Here, whether it is Jonathan that holds on to the captain’s seat or Buhari that jumps back in to pilot Nigeria’s ship of state, Nigerians must brace for a continuing bumpy ride in a porously leaking and loveless boat. While, in the classic Nigerian style, the ‘winners’ would have earned the bragging privilege to pop imported champagne and marshal themselves and their key lieutenants into the club of the stupendously wealthy, Nigerians will remain unlikely to get a break on their most fervent wishes.

Will Nigerians lay the foundation for achieving their most modest wishes for their fatherland after they vote in the coming elections? Will their votes coalesce to herald a bold giant step into the future of possibility and progress, or sum up to another coin-toss throwback to the sad past? Can you predict what is likely to happen?

Let us wrestle this down in coming pre-election Light-Trail segments.

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Call to ACTION for our readers!

• Please share your thoughts in the COMMENTS section below. Your ideas matter for the Nigeria of your vision.
• To follow light-trail, please click the follow link of the right lower end of the screen!

Opening Africa’s Doors for Business: who is laying out the red carpet?

“Want to help Africa? Do business here!” This was Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s TED-Talk callout to the investing global community to write Africa into the prime global investment destination map. A renowned World Bank economist and Nigeria’s substantive Finance Minister, Ms. Okonjo-Iweala’s call is one that still merits re-echoing across the globe. Africa is desperately short of investment capital, and it is estimated that as much as an extra $90 billion a year is currently needed to spruce things up, just on the infrastructure front alone. But Africa is also underinvested and most vulnerable with regards to process credibility. This is one issue Africans must keep alive on their collective governance agenda, from Senegal to Zambia, and from Sudan to Zimbabwe. Nothing is as virulent an investment and dream killer as lack of process credibility.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately depending one’s point of view, Africa’s best hopes rest primarily inside Africa. It remains the case that Africa’s leaders have much of the responsibility for laying out the red carpet for investment capital inflow to Africa. For one thing, the stark reality of political shortsightedness and economic mismanagement in Africa is still quite devastating, and there is little that international investors can do to make a difference here. In order for foreign capital to find the requisite ambient climate in Africa on a sustained basis, the continent’s public accountability math must become less fuzzy and more auditable.

Africa is undoubtedly a rich continent, decreed so largely by providence. But this is no novel information; the world knows of the oil endowment, the mineral deposits and the growing, vibrant and enterprising population. Equally well-ventilated is the concern that Africa’s vast resources have served mostly to enrich the ‘feather my pocket’ class, perpetually stationed around Africa’s corridors of power, while appallingly impoverishing most Africans. Put simply, as a continent generously endowed with natural and human resources, Africa is a blessed continent; but as a community of brothers’ keepers and common humanity, it has failed every test in the books, whether you talk of the trade book or the one of sublime wisdom. As a result, a dizzying majority of Africans remains shockingly poor and economically defenseless, so much so that their leverage and purchasing power are severely lightweight. Think about what this portends in economics logic. If people with some measure of buying power constitute the market for any product or service, how does an international investor square the reality that 1% ‘political winners’ at the top of the totem pole brazenly cart away much of the continent’s resources while the remaining 99% continue to be psychologically strapped down on bended knees, worrying, fearing, praying and hoping, but too powerless to lay even the slightest of claims to their nations’ wealth?

Although Africa has all the potentials that should make for rapid capital inflow and growth, the overall verdict is that the continent still needs to wage a decisive war against corruption in both politics and business. This is vital because without some clearly focused reordering of priorities in which resources are effectively channeled toward creating the enabling environment for African entrepreneurs with no political tentacles to thrive, much of the African continent will continue to gasp for air. Add the emerging reality of the growing threat of terrorism, and the fact of Africa’s visionless and distracted governance landscape begins to graduate from troubling to really scary.

Perhaps one equally urgent and most starkly absent ingredient for Africa’s economic resurgence is dependable electricity. Besides corruption, the crippling shortage of electricity in much of Africa continues to be a major impediment to business development and overall quality of life. Regular blackouts and huge family and business investments in alternative power sources continue to serve as compelling reasons for flushing Africa’s meager savings down bottomless drains; ones that enrich the foreign countries that manufacture both cheap and expensive environment-polluting electricity generating plants. Even so, there is still the ‘salt to injury’ factor. Here, citizens who are already paying through sweat and dust to provide their own electricity are routinely billed by government sanctioned electric power monopolies, whether or not these monopolies actually supplied any electricity. Heaven help you if you do not pay these essentially fraudulent bills.

The reported metrics on power poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is intimidating. Over 70% (600 million people) of the population is without electricity. Compared to the United States with 3,360 Mega Watts per million people, sub-Saharan Africa barely ekes out 91 MW per million people. To bring this stats home, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) data shows that over the course of twelve months, a refrigerator in the United States uses six times more electricity than an average citizen of Tanzania. Equally as stunning, it takes an average Ethiopian two years to consume the amount of electricity an average American uses in just three days. On this count, you hardly fare any better as a Nigerian or a Nigerien. Electric Power Poverty in Africa is a huge downer on all fronts, from education and savings to healthcare and return on business investment.

On another front, Africa’s leaders need to begin to think seriously about increasing the tempo of development funding, whether through the African Development Bank or through focused national entrepreneur funding initiatives. This is not a task to be left for Africa’s capital markets, since too many of these are still very fragmented, with most very small and illiquid. With regards to local bank lending in Africa, there is hardly any real hope for small businesses, which cover much of the continent’s enterprise landscape. Not only are local banks dismally failing to meet demand for affordable loans, too many bankers still come across to customers more as loan sharks than as financiers of dreams and opportunities.

It can hardly be overstated that there is no debate on the fact that Africa’s economic potential is compelling. The continent boasts of:

1. A growing young population itching for recognition and respect on the global professional playing field
2. A growing population of middle class families with ambitious hopes for their children
3. Swaths of highly sought after natural resource deposits

But even with all the promise, Africa’s leadership frame of reference is still largely set on the archaic and collective progress-sabotaging clock. The list of democratized African nations is certainly longer now, and this is quite something. But there are still countless miles to run before Africa can begin to outrun the lingering megalomaniacal instincts that fuel the recycling idea of power without principle. There are clearly some encouraging signs that a number of African countries are building some solid bridges to the future, but there are still too many patronizing and power-hungry leaders with a ‘do as I say, not as I do, and definitely do not ask any questions’ mentality. Also, a few African countries are definitely making positive news on the international airwaves with regards to good governance, but there is still an unacceptable level of African leadership actors who confuse their personal interests with those of their countries. And while Africa’s best and brightest, in the molds of Okonjo-Iweala and others are proving that Africa is not all about rent seekers and dashed hopes, we still see too many entitled political landlords, often tone-deaf and disconnected from what Africa’s growing younger generation needs to succeed in a global world.

While it is indeed a sound approach for Africa to look for partnerships from the global market, African countries must begin to forge stronger ties across Africa. There is no cash-and-carry alternative to this. It is vital that Africa’s leaders begin to find ways to effectively manage their continent’s enormous resources without ceding responsibility for their destiny to others. Just as is the case with the Americas, Europe and Asia, Africa’s best hopes do not lay abroad; they must blossom from within. Yes Africa’s potential as an investment destination is undeniable, but this is largely a potential vested in the dreams of young Africans with hardly any political influence but with lots of resolve.

The younger generation of Africans holds the key to Africa’s future. There is no question about this, but there is a cruel irony. Younger Africans are better educated than their leaders, and yet are more likely to be unemployed and disempowered. They are the ones who will eventually decide the continent’s future, yet their leaders largely operate without their interest in mind. Younger Africans who have seen the larger world, whether live or on the Internet and cable television, and like what they see are Africa’s best hope for tomorrow. It is on their behalf that both global and heavenly forces are calling on their leaders and elders to pay attention. It is with the young and restless that Africa’s potential rests, and the people currently positioned to stimulate or sabotage their dreams are their mentors and leaders, currently too distracted heal their land of the toxic malady of abject underperformance. The time to cease wasting Africa’s enormous opportunity is long overdue.

Call to ACTION for our readers!

• Please share your thoughts in the COMMENTS section below. Your ideas matter for the Nigeria of your vision.
• To follow light-trail, please click the follow link of the right lower end of the screen!

Managing the Wealth of Nations: when leaders lead, nations rise

On Tuesday, January 6, 2015, former State of Virginia (USA) Governor Robert McDonnell was sentenced to two years in federal prison and two years of probation. Once a rising star in his party, the former Governor was convicted of taking a bribe; he had accepted sweetheart loans and lavish gifts from a businessman seeking to promote a dietary supplement. McDonnell who received a shorter sentence than was sought by prosecutors was convicted along with his estranged wife, after a trial that largely besmirched his state’s reputation for clean government.

Reputation for clean government! That’s the point of this narrative. It turns out that when leaders really lose sleep and sweat in the service of those who put food on their tables and pay for their privileges, they bless their national space and grow the wealth of their people. If on the other hand leaders simply master the art of taking their people for a ride, they run the risk of eventually outdoing themselves.

A sustained reputation for clean governance is the master key to enriching a nation’s citizenry, to national greatness, and to global clout. When leaders use this key effectively, they open up their countries for solid outcomes that empower citizens to do well and be well. If on the other hand leaders operate without this key, their hours on the public stage steadily approach the status of organized crime; organized against the citizen patrons that hire and sustain them. This is not good, and here is why.

To a very great extent, leaders, whether they are presidents, governors, legislators, or heads of public institutions, have largely the same singular sponsoring task that our bank and investment managers have. They are in office to create, manage and sustain the enabling mindsets, processes, products and institutions to grow their client’s resources. This is the ONLY credible way leaders can justify their hours on the public stage. National leaders are tasked with growing the wealth of their nations and constituents, not with becoming prodigious wealth kidnappers adept at impoverishing their clients. Here is a basic leadership test: if the nation, or state, or organization is not humming, the leadership  players should go take some serious performance and accountability lessons. Or perhaps just take a hike if they are not relentless learners. Results are what leaders lead for, nothing else.

For Nigeria’s leaders at all levels, the task that is still substantially untouched is one of producing results that have concrete implications for enabling the vast majority Citizens to begin to walk the path of eventual success; as professionals, entrepreneurs, artists, artisans scientists, parents, students, etc. What is clear at this point, and most unfortunately so, is that while well-costumed actors come and go on the leadership stage, most Nigerians are practically holding heaven (not their leaders) accountable for results. Duty without responsibility? What a fundamental misalignment! What a free path to a free fall!

Whether the observed force field of low expectation is attributable to lack of a collective sense of ownership, or perhaps has to do with the constraining forces of a cultural outlook that turns lethargic when it comes to challenging itself to keep upgrading, Nigeria’s leadership national outcomes remain largely mediocre. From electricity and water supply to education quality and national security, and from infrastructure and long-term economic prospects to public accountability RESULTS continue to lag far behind Nigerians’ collective aspirations and intelligence. Rich or poor, most citizens repeatedly or occasionally suffer the ‘sweat, smell and dust’ consequences of mutually accepted low expectation. While such encounters invariably tug viscerally at recipients’ sense of what ought to be, even so, the gods seem to continue to conspire to ensure that the good, the bad, and the ugly remain intricately interwoven and too often celebrated in the puzzling tapestry of Nigerian’s largely tethered national soul.

Whether the Nigerian think tank decides to start on the winning trail with a respectable return on investment in electricity generation or road networks, or whether it starts with a concrete healthcare revolution or with security, what is of utmost importance NOW is that Nigeria begins to look credible on at least one or two meaningful leadership fronts. Until a critical mass of Nigeria’s leadership actors begin to point proudly to respectable metrics on the basic fronts, they will be sitting on Nigeria’s growth potential while their lavish lifestyles are staggeringly being bankrolled by the fact of the impoverishment of those they ought to be leading. They may not attract jail sentences on any count whatsoever, but by granting themselves sweetheart privileges from their suffering clients’ estate, they are surely subjecting these clients to harsh life and death sentences. This is not good, not on any level.

Call to ACTION for our readers!

• Please share your thoughts in the COMMENTS section below. Your ideas matter for the Nigeria of your vision.
• To follow light-trail, please click the follow link of the right lower end of the screen!

Nigeria: Good luck with the National Project….