Leonard Karshima Shilgba
Thanking God for giving each of us another year of opportunities of
service to him would be appropriate. As leaders in our various corners
and at variegated levels, we need a pause and self-examination to
ascertain if we have used our influence well: Have we used it
strategically in the distributive decisions in order to ease material,
emotional, and intellectual distresses of the people that God has
blessed us to interact with, or we have rather invested energies and
extraneous resources to pursue vanities? The stature of a leader is
measured by two major metrics, namely, the positive power of personal
example, or what is often called moral authority, and the strategic
problem-solving skills. A leader who has become a problem rather than
being a problem-solver has compromised trust and threatened potential.
Why do people indulge in vanities? When their understanding is darkened
they are separated from the LIFE OF GOD. The darkened understanding is
also called IGNORANCE. They are genuinely convinced of the rightness of
their choices and journeys in life no matter how injurious they may be
to the common social cause. You may ask, “What is the cause of this
ignorance?” The answer is simple: The blindness of the mind.
When the mind of the leaders is blind their society loses direction
because there is no clear vision, which is the sight object of the mind.
We must intelligently and modestly determine how much is ENOUGH for us
personally on the recovery trajectory to escaping the crude lusts of
this life. It is only this escape that frees a man from CORRUPTION.
Quite a number of us leaders in Nigeria profess religion, but not all
religion is godly. If we do not care for the oppressed or keep ourselves
from the blots of the world, our religion is neither useful nor helpful.
We must learn from history. One generation of leaders comes and goes.
Ours will pass one day. Are we ready for the Great Day of Accountability
(GDA)?
Our obscene accumulation of material wealth far in excess of our
discernible or legitimate streams and means of income is not only a
testimony of the blindness of our mind, but has also become an irritant
to the preponderance of neighbours who believe we have abused the
opportunities they have given us, and, consequently, widened the lake of
material poverty into an intimidating ocean of poverty. Nothing earthly
continues in perpetuity. Either we have an epiphany of needed awakening
or the mass reaction will stop our inner corruption. The latter would be
more damning, while the former would be more self-satisfying. The choice
is ours.
Permit me to be selectively specific:
The art of legislation requires nifty minds and persuasion, and if our
legislators lack both, social injustice and poverty become prevalent.
What is the legislative agenda of the present national and state
legislatures? There is no strategic direction I can discern. Yet,
brilliant legislative work can reduce poverty and check the excesses of
the Executive. It is not the work or duty of a legislator to go to their
constituency or district to distribute packages of food and a few wads
of money to their constituents (who have been deliberately and
strategically impoverished over the years) while they have not cobbled
any pieces of legislation to address, for instance, the excessively high
cost of borrowing to finance business ideas; high cost of production and
living instigated, in part, by the cocktail of high VAT increase, high
electricity tariffs combined with epileptic electricity supply and
distribution by a privatized sector that has so been for more than 7
years, hiked cost of common fuel, and official but artificial
devaluation of the naira; disorderly and dismal quality, but high cost
of medical care without an effective public health insurance law;
horrible national and state infrastructure such as roads and trap
bridges; poor services Nigerians suffer at the hands of service
providers such as telecommunication companies, cable TV companies, etc.;
insecurity in the nation, etc.
Legislators who understand their briefs can craft intelligent laws and
put up effective oversight signatures to solve the above problems. If
they only lament like the masses, and throw up their hands helplessly
while passing blame around, they have failed, and are undeserving of
both their present offices and higher ones.
Many State Governors in Nigeria have killed the local government system
and thereby worsened poverty in Nigeria. For instance, they do not
release the monthly FAAC allocation to the Local Government Councils
(LGCs) in their State. Consequently, those councils are unable to
provide the poverty-reducing services required of them by the 1999
Nigerian Constitution (See the Fourth Schedule of the Constitution).
Besides, those governors hardly allow stability or public
accountability of the LGCs, as they are often changed soon after they
are INSTALLED. No transparent elections hold, and so the people are not
involved in electing the council members, who are thereby accountable to
their governor, not the people in their Council Wards! By this impunity,
the governors have destroyed democracy, worsened poverty, and stolen the
national revenues of the Local Governments Areas.
How can an enlightened mind justify the shutting down of public
universities in Nigeria for more than eight (8) months? How does this
benefit the students or the university system? I think the National
Universities Commission (NUC), which has the overwhelming statutory
responsibility to manage and oversee federal universities, must sit up
to stop such and similar academic compromises henceforth:
1. If a university (public or private) shuts down in the midst of an
academic calendar (due to staff strike action or student riots) for a
week, due NUC accreditation visitation should be denied for three (3)
months; if it shuts down for two weeks, due accreditation visitation
should be denied for six (6) months; if it shuts down for three weeks,
due accreditation visitation should be denied for nine (9) months; if it
shuts down for four weeks, due accreditation visitation should be denied
for one year, and NUC must not accredit any degree programs at such
universities until the Vice Chancellor is removed. Furthermore, NUC
should blacklist from its visitation panels (whether Accreditation,
Resource Verification, or statutory Visitations) professors and other
senior staff from universities that have shut down in the midst of their
academic calendars.
2. If a federal university has shut down for at least four weeks, the
salaries of its staff who are striking should be paid to its students
during the period as compensation.
We the leaders of Nigeria (academic, political, religious, business,
and traditional) must amend our minds before we are forced to.
Leonard Karshima Shilgba
© Shilgba