Faulty leadership selection mechanism bane of Nigeria’s progress –Bugaje

Razaq Bamidele

Faulty leadership selection mechanism as well as inability of the Nigerian state to rise above the many challenges facing it has been attributed to its backwardness, said Dr. Usman Bugaje, the founding Secretary General of the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN).

The Don spoke as the guest speaker at the 25th Anniversary of the Sarkin Fulani of Lagos and chairman Council of Fulani Chiefs in the South West, Alhaji Mohammed Abdulahi Bambado 11 in Lagos, where he also blamed acute poverty, infrastructural decay, unemployment, insecurity and youth restiveness among others.

“The trouble is the quality of leadership or lack of it as it were and this is made worse by the fact that our current leadership recruitment mechanism is faulty and it will continue to churn out people with lower levels of education, higher levels of mercantile motives and a morbidity of conscience that allows them to do just anything, including drugging the youths, intimidating voters, maiming, killing and burning people alive just to win election,” he lamented.

The situation, according to him, calls for serious concern of those who really cares for the future of the country.

Speaking on the theme: ‘Pathways to peaceful co-existence and nation building’ Bugaje said unless the current leadership recruitment process is changed, the country will continue to have a situation like it does now were “our political parties on whose platforms and under whose watch all these atrocities are done, have gradually lost their character, their direction and their mandate as political parties and are becoming very much like the Italian mafia of the 1980s.”

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“In other words our political parties are becoming organised gangs with accomplice in security agencies and the judiciary for the purpose of looting the treasury.”

The concerned don therefore warned that there is urgent need to change the narrative of the nation’s development and not allow things remain as it is today where “nearly 70percent of our population is below the poverty line and in 10 years’ time World Bank has warned that we shall have 25percent of the total world poor population in our country, in other words we shall become the poverty capital of the world.

“This can only be made worse by the fact that our population growth, which is about three percent has exceeded our economic growth which is less than two percent. This only means that we shall continue to slip into poverty with each passing day.

“The dangers of this trajectory are heightened by the huge youth bulge. With about 65percent of our population under 35 years of age or 70percent under 40 years of age and largely unemployed, we don’t need a soothsayer to see what is waiting to happen.”

Bugaje said to achieve the kind of country that everyone desires, there is the need for a national consensus which must be led by Nigerian elites, saying “if you look at the history of nations that went down and had to start from the scratch and today are the envy of their peers you will discover that they all had to arrive at some national consensus and direction before they could mobilise their collective national energy in that direction.”

While calling for mutual respect among the peoples of the various ethnic groups in the country, Bugaje warned that the assumption of one race superior to the other and therefore wanting to dominate the others was unscientific and childish and will not give room for genuine progressive discourse.

Also speaking at the event which was attended by the governor of Lagos State, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-olu, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rt. Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, Managing Director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), representatives of the Oba of Lagos, among others, Prof. Usman Banu who gave the keynote address commended the Sarkin Fulani of Lagos for his leadership role in peace building between his people and other ethnic nationals in the state, urging other monarchs to also follow in line to ensure lasting peace in the state.

Governor Sanwo-Olu also commended the Fulani leader, assuring him that Lagos State will continue to work with him at ensuring lasting peace in the state, urging the Fulani community to continue to support the government in all areas as it works towards making life better for the people of the state.