Most people would agree that a good leader must first be a person of character and integrity. Too often, however, many do not follow through on the need of a leader to be a good citizen or realize that he or she practices in a profession that is ethically bound to promote the health, safety, and welfare of the public.
Alike for the nation and the individual, the one indispensable requisite is character—character that does and dares as well as endures, character that is active in the performance of virtue no less than firm in the refusal to do aught that is vicious or degraded.—Theodore Roosevelt (1900)
Leadership is a skill learned by observing those who have shown by their actions that they are able to inspire and motivate others to bond together to achieve a desirable result. Leadership can also be learned by reading the words of historical leaders and studying their actions and the impact they have had on their community and country and not such leaders that write letters and rhetorics from on top of a rock in Abeokuta or the one that speaks unguarded after taking whatever he smokes at Bourdillon.
As Nigeria grows, its people, who have won success in so many lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit.
The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought can in part be developed afresh from what is roundabout in the New World; but it can be developed in full only by freely drawing upon the treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning.
it is a great mistake and a proof of weakness in any nation, not to be anxious to learn from one another and willing and able to adapt that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and
productive therein.
A nation such as ours—an effort to realize its full sense government by, of, and for the people—represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with great responsibilities alike for good and evil.
The success of nations like ours means the glory, and our failure of despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or very few men, the quality of the leaders is all-important.
If, under such governments, the quality of the ruler is high enough, then the nations for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that type of national greatness.
Long-term success requires that the leader, no matter how talented he or she is, to nurture, encourage, and challenge his or her colleagues to dream up and embrace new ideas. The leader should create a
collaborative culture in the nation. Let someone drum this LOUDLY in president Buhari’s ear.
The average citizen must be a good citizen if our nation is to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore, it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
Each of us must be a good citizen if we want Nigeria to succeed. For average people to keep up their commitment to the country, they must have good leaders to aide them in their quest to become better
citizens.
Only through a propagation of strong values can a nation succeed. One of the greatest functions a leader must serve is to lead not only in knowledge but also in ethical behavior. What matters is not what
leaders say but how they themselves adhere to a clearly stated code of values. In other words, it is important to maintain integrity at all times, even when it may not contribute to the bottom line of the nat.
To don as it is with President Buhari. A leader must focus on people, innovate, originate and develop ideas, inspire trust, have a long-term perspective, ask the questions what and why, and challenge the status quo and not the rhetorics as been chunned out to us.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in a nation such as ours, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes of people who have excelled in at least one trade or profession or the other and not
some retired opportunists as has been the case in this republic; those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals.
There is need of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character—the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor. Of more importance than ability to fight at need, is it to remember
that chief of blessings for any nations is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. I then wonder what land we have to bequeath to the generation after us. The land soaked in tears or the one stained with blood?
Character must show itself in the man’s performance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man’s foremost duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being; it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this has been done that he can help in his movements for the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength to be of use to the general public. It is not good to excite that bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a burden to those nearest him;
who wishes to do great things for humanity in the abstract, but who
cannot keep his wife in comfort or educate his children.
The truth is that, after a certain measure of tangible material
success or reward has been achieved, the question of increasing it
becomes of constantly less importance compared to the other things
that can be done in life. It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and
to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser
standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in
and for itself. But the man who, having far surpassed the limits of
providing for the wants; both of the body and mind, of himself and of
those depending upon him, then piles up a great fortune, for the
acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit
to the nation as a whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far
from being desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the community:
that he is to be neither admired nor envied; that his right-thinking
fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of citizenship, and leave
him to be consoled by the admiration of those whose level of purpose
is even lower than his own.
If a man’s efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense,
then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to
the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities,
serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that
man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of
others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships
these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of
whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no
difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is
shown. It makes no difference whether such a man’s force and ability
betray themselves in a career of moneymaker or politician, soldier or
orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man works for evil, then
the more successful he is the more he should be despised and condemned
by all upright and farseeing men.
There remain the duties of the individual in relation to the State,
and these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist
where the effort is made to carry on the free government in a complex
industrial civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary
citizen, and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to
remember in political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire.
The leader must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve
them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so
lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and
indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less
often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the
real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet
does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and
desires of those who strive for better things.
Woe to the empty phrasemaker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of
making ready the ground for the man of action, turns against him when
he appears and hampers him when he does work!
