For the Greek people, the first kind of people in any given society are the idiots. The idiot is not necessarily someone who is mentally deficient, he is someone who is a totally private, self-centered and selfish person. He is always out for his personal gain and interest. The idiot does not have a public philosophy, he has no knowledge, skill or character and no virtues to be able to live and contribute in a flourishing society and community. He is all out for his personal pleasures and treasures.
The second kind of people were identified as the tribespeople. Tribespeople do not necessarily mean the fact of belonging to a particular tribe, which is a good thing. It means a tribal or tribalistic mentality. The tribespeople are not able to think beyond their small tribe or their small groups. Their primary, only, and ultimate allegiance is to their tribe. Their tribe is their God and their religion is tribalism. They are always afraid of things that are different and a little alien to them. They are always suspicious and fearful. They deal with different people and difficult situations with intimidation, force and violence.
However, the Greeks identified the third kind of people as the ideal people whom the Greeks called citizens. In this instance, we are not talking about legal or political status of the word citizen, we are talking about the idea and ideals of citizenship. He is someone who has the skills and knowledge to live a public life of civility. He recognizes that he is a member of a commonwealth and thus strives for the common good. He knows his rights in a society but also knows his responsibilities to the society. He can fight for his rights but always with an awareness of and with the respect for the rights and interests of others, neighbours, the smallest of minorities and the worst of his enemies. It’s the citizens that make up the civilised society because citizens settle their differences with civility. They produce a civilised society that truly lives up to the meaning of the name society. Society literally means friendship and friendliness. Until Nigeria start producing citizens, it cannot pretend to be civilized. Until our leaders start imbibing the citizens mentality in leadership, we will never move forward as a country.
The nationwide hunger and hardship protest and the unfortunate Tinubu nationwide protest speech has vividly exposed the type of leadership mentality our leaders have. The first manifestation of the awkward display of profligacy of this government commenced from the forming of the cabinet of this regime. This President appointed 48 Ministers, presently going to 49, when constitutionally, he could have appointed only 37 to run the affairs of the government. The largest cabinet in Nigeria history at a time when the country is at its poorest simply indicated that this government doesn’t factor in the interest of the citizens at heart.
To compound the whole matter, the President, Chief of Staff, Chief Justice of Nigeria, Attorney General of the Federation, Minister of Petroleum, Minister of Finance, Central Bank Governor, Federal Inland Revenue Service Chairman, Controller General Customs, Controller General of Immigration, Accountant General of the Federation, Chairman Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Minister of Interior, Minister of Power, Inspector-General of Police, Chief of Army Staff, and many others are all Yoruba. In a nation that has more than 250 tribes, and about 200 million citizens, it takes only a tribesman mentality in a President to cede the economy completely to only one tribe – his own tribe. In addition, the President also ceded the headship of the two main security agencies to his own tribe too. Section 14(3)(4) of the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria warned that any President that toes this line may not likely be able to promote national unity, or command national loyalty of every section of Nigeria, and cannot give every citizen a sense of belonging. This nationwide protest should be a wake-up call for this President to re-adjust and adapt the citizens leadership mentality.
The weak attempt by the President to showcase that he’s not a tribesman was displayed in paragraph 6 of the speech. Hear the President “Under the circumstances, I hereby enjoin protesters and the organisers to suspend any further protest and create room for dialogue, which I have always acceded to at the slightest opportunity. Nigeria requires all hands on deck and needs us all – regardless of age, party, tribe, religion or other divides, to work together in reshaping our destiny as a nation. To those who have taken undue advantage of this situation to threaten any section of this country, be warned: The law will catch up with you. There is no place for ethnic bigotry or such threats in the Nigeria we seek to build.”
Really? If the President had this mentality, there wouldn’t have been any protest in the first place. Presently, there’s a movement that openly started campaigning that Igbo must go from Lagos. It’s noteworthy that when this ethnic slur started, President Tinubu and the Governor of Lagos State, Sanwo-Olu, didn’t immediately shoot it down. This is despite the fact that Ndigbo openly indicated that they were not part of the protest for reason that they want to avoid being made scapegoats of the protest. They believe they have already spoken out loudest against this regime through the democratically allowed method of changing regimes – through the ballot box. Moreover, if the protest was all about hardship, they had been suffering hardship since the Nigerian Civil War after which they were given £20 each no matter how much any of them had in the bank. The wisest thing this government would have done was to shoot down every ethnic slur against Ndigbo before the protest, yet one media aide, Bayo Onanuga, took to the airwaves to lie that it was Igbo Politicians with their supporters that are planning the protest, despite the fact that the protesters, through the “take it back movement”, had made themselves known and none of them is Igbo.
Its obvious that the #igbomustgo was simply the offshoot of the ethnic slur that Bayo Onanuga spued out immediately after the 2023 presidential election in which Tinubu lost Lagos State. He needed to cast ethnic slur at the Igbos in order to sychophantly book his place in Tinubu’s cabinet and he succeeded. In his words, “Igbos are aliens in Yorubaland;… they should never come near Lagos politics again,… Let 2023 be the last time of Igbo interference in Lagos politics; … Let there be no repeat in 2027”. There’s no difference between #igbomustgo and #igbosarealiensinyorubaland. Onanuga threatened the Igbo ethnic stock when he said “Let 2023 be the last time of Igbo interference in Lagos politics; Let there be no repeat in 2027”. He therefore portrayed himself as an ethnic bigot and a person with tribalistic leadership mentality.
If Tinubu is genuine when he postulated that “There is no place for ethnic bigotry or such threats in the Nigeria we seek to build,” he wouldn’t have hired Onanuga in the first place. But having hired him in error and seen that he is an unrepentant ethnic bigot, which he manifested in still accusing Igbo politicians and their followers as being the organisers of the #endbadgovernance protest even when the organisers were all well known, Tinubu must fire him immediately, or admit that he didn’t understand the meaning of paragraph 6 of his speech and wasn’t sincere that he will not have anything to do with ethnic bigots. In a saner clime, the media aides of Tinubu, after the leaking of his protest speech before being broadcasted, would have honourably resigned. The attitudes of the media aides of Tinubu have become a national and international embarrassment and if the President is really committed to seeing an end to these protests, they must all be fired immediately.
The removal of fuel subsidy from day one while waiting to adjust salaries of workers from year one depicts the level of lack of citizens leadership mentality of this government. When Abacha removed subsidy partially, he established the Petroleum Trust Fund to cater for some infrastructures with the savings from the increased price of fuel. When Goodluck Jonathan removed subsidy partially, he established Subsidy Reinvestment Programme, (Sure-P) to utilise the savings to provide essential services for the people. This government removed subsidy completely and established no programme to utilise the excess revenue for the benefit of the people. It is rather taxing the people the more. Electricity tariff was increased, cyber security levy was surreptitiously increased until Nigerians screamed for help, etc. The government promised to remove subsidy to liberate funds for security, education, and health care, yet it’s spending the increased revenue to provide N6b for car parks for the members of the National Assembly to enable them park the imported N165m prado jeep which this government bought for each one of 469 of them. It budgeted the sum of N21b to build a house for the Vice-President and N20b naira to equip the house of the Chief of Staff to the President, and billions to the unelected first lady, etc. This expenditure pattern reveals extreme selfishness in acquiring wealth for the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and less privileged. The Greek didn’t mince words in describing it as akin to the idiotic leadership mentality.
This government’s first budget never set out to address any of the problems of the masses. The regime can now use the golden opportunity of this nationwide protest to reset its priorities. Cut down the cost of governance, revise these harsh policies of removal of fuel subsidy, increase in electricity tariff, etc, repair the refineries and privatise them to capable hands, support productive enterprises, stop importation of frivolous items, sack incompetent and corrupt members of the cabinet, ensure security, and above all govern henceforth with citizens leadership mentality.