by Segun Alade (MBA, ACA, ACIB)
Congratulations to the peoples General and the Nigerian people. Mr President-elect, may the Lord be with you and grant you wisdom, strength, grace and audacity to take Nigeria to a really great height. I, as one of the Christians in this country prayed to the Almighty God to give us a leader of His choice for our nation. And on the dawn of 1st of April 2015 when the noble professor declared you as the President-elect, I believed that you are the answer to the prayers Nigerians prayed to God for a true leader (apologies to those who think otherwise).
Daunting the risk of this letter not been received or read by the peoples’ General due to numerous high dignitaries’ letters that will be trooping in to his table right about now, I beg to still share a few thought with the President-elect.
As you set out to the big challenge of Nigerian leadership, kindly know that Nigerians will not forgive you if you also fail in drastically improving Nigeria especially in our infrastructural development. I will not bother wasting my time pointing to you one by one the infrastructural deficit or how to solve these massive singular problem that has kept our country as a third world nation for decades, as I am sure your have so many developmental analyst around you who must have already pointed that out to you.
However, it is not only painful that successive governments have failed woefully in our infrastructure development. For example, it is more painful hearing the kind of excuses the successive government kept giving as to why they kept on failing in delivering on electricity. The solution to electricity sector already currently exists in Nigeria, and we have only asked your predecessors to ‘copy and paste’, yet that was too much for them. What do I mean? Some organisations in Nigeria like Redemption Camp on Lagos/ Ibadan expressway generate 24/7 electricity and yet this is an institution bigger than some LGAs in Nigeria, why then is it too difficult to ‘copy and paste’ these already existing solutions in bits to smaller units (such as LGAs) of Nigeria. This is one of many examples that can be given across all developmental sectors. I hope nobody will come here to tell me that the dynamics are different! Only a lazy farmer will keep complaining about his hoe. And Mr President-elect sir, Nigerians are not interested in those promises of bogus megawatts as being done in the past, Nigerians are simply interested in how many hours of electricity per day consistently your government can give us before end of the year 2015, how many hours of electricity that will increase to in 2016, 2017… as we do not expect anything lower than 20 hours of daily electricity in the next four years. And such is equally our expectation of your performance in every other developmental sector. Please sir, don’t let anybody deceive you that developing Nigeria is rocket science. It is NOT rocket science as many corrupt and lazy thinkers in the successive governments have made it look.
Looting of Treasury:
Kindly note sir that, the looting of the Nigerian treasury this country has witnessed in this past five years will most likely be nothing compared to the looting that will happen in the next two months before May 29th day of handing over. Also note sir that, the only peaceful way forward is for you NOT to be vindictive of your perceived political enemies (including those who wished you death during the campaign season) as that will only make you a petty leader. Nigerians however expect that you aggressively collect back every kobo looted from the treasury in these past five years by any government official either through stealing or corruption, failure to do so in the name of forgetting the past, you would have only succeeded in convincing Nigerians that you also expect the coming government after yours to also forgive any intending treasury looters/ robbers that may exist or want to show-face in your own government too. I am sure your amiable vice president can shed more light on the danger of the ‘PRECEDENCE’ this would create. Only if you vigorously go after all these treasury looters, collecting back all the billions of dollars (translating to trillions of Naira) they have stolen, and thereafter jailing them if you so wish, would you have sent a strong signal to the people in your own government from inception that there are always consequences for their actions and inactions.
Political Jobbers:
One of your first temptation in office is to want to compensate all or most of your kingmakers by way of appointments. This is perhaps one of the major failure and strategic-development blunder your predecessor committed, leading to all sort of laggards heading government parastatals, which ultimately led to what many Nigerians perceived as his incompetence or epileptic performance.
Kindly note sir that as against the popular theory or general belief, Excellent Leadership is simply about ‘ONE MAN’, as history all over the world has proven time and time over. Before management theorists begin to ask for my head, let me shed more light. Leadership excellence is about one man, Chairman of INEC; it is about one man, Governor of Central Bank; it is about one man, Director General of NAFDAC; it is about one man, head of so so and so parastatal; it is about one man, minister of so so and so ministry, it is about one man of absolute integrity and great audacious capacity heading each government ministries, departments or agency. Leadership excellence has always been about one man and it always will be (apologies to the senior management theorists who think otherwise). I very much align with those that opine that ‘There is no such thing as a bad crew, only a bad captain’. And just like the proverbs from the elders says “a herd of sheep led by a lion will certainly defeat a group of lion led by a sheep”.
Mr President-elect, as far as Nigerians are presently concerned through the majority of vote cast for you, you are simply their ONE MAN! And your own most onerous and critical task in this next two months before your swearing in is to equally find those ‘ONE MANs’ that will change the history of Nigeria for great everyday within the next four years. Please sir, don’t work so as to get re-elected in 2019, work with such a sense of urgency to make Nigeria a force to reckon with in the world and you leave your re-election to the good people of Nigeria. Four years is perhaps too long to put Nigeria on top of the world, for any government that knows what it is doing.
Once again Mr President-elect, I congratulate you on your great feat and the dawning of the new day for our great nation. By the grace and mercy of God, Nigeria, my beloved country shall be greater than our widest dream and imagination. Shalom!
Olusegun Alade
1st April 2015
