GENERALLY, the leaders we have now in Nigeria are splendid men and women who only are splendidly interested in their selfish hearts. Recently, ex-president Obasanjo called them robbers and armed robbers. You may not like the Owu Chief, but at times, he has a way of rubbing it in, a way of rubbing abuses and insults to the wounds of those he detests. But his descriptions of his present fellow-farers, who are now fully in charge of our affairs as political leaders, is, perhaps, the best, the most truthfully and the most plainly told in recent times.Only armed robbers and bloody thieves could carry on the way and manner they are carrying on the business of governance in the land, in the polity. They lack creativity. They simply don't know what or are not aware of what creative leadership or creative governance is. Definitely, they are the most unpatriotic band of leaders Nigeria has ever known. And they cut across all the parties.They are the rough men and women, the maddening exploiters of the masses and people of Nigeria who deserve more than a rapping over the knuckles to render them harmless from hand-robbing or arm-robbing us further. Their splendid knuckles need chopping off. But then the job will only be less than half done. The full job will be done only when we compel them to quit their splendid work, and retrieve the fruits of their ill-gotten power and leadership posts.We need the fruits to help change and improve the new vision, the new life that we envisage and which must come to strengthen the power of the wind of the about-to-happen social forces in Nigeria. The Nigerian intellectual and the worker and the masses must brace up for the splendid forces needed to strengthen our new destiny.Nigeria needs, now, leaders who must carry in their patriotic hearts the positive burden of altering for our collective good our currently absurd destiny. We need leaders at all levels of governance, from our schools, colleges and universities to the highest posts in the polity who must alter their bourgeois mentalities.I am not a Marxist, but if need be, because of our current circumstances, we must hunt for leaders who are hungry to build a new Nigerian society not by exploiting the mass human material of our nation, but by thinking and creating positive ideas devoid of sordid, rapacious capitalism. If we must borrow from Lenin to achieve this, it is all well and good.If we can go to America to get us the ideas of very virtuous individuals gifted in the ideas of producing nobly patriotic frames on behalf of their people, it is all well and good. We need virtuous men and women who must halt the political distrust in the land and polity. We don't need ethnic and tribal jingoists as leaders to halt our political stride. We want leaders who can strengthen Nigeria as a nation.We are currently facing an emotional, spiritual, economic, social, educational, judicial and political shipwreck as a people and nation. We need an Obafemi Awolowo, a leader with the heart of a lion and the positive vision to give Nigeria what is right. We want leaders who can halt our years of exploitation, serfdom, slavery, stinking capitalism, of every conflagration of every person against his neighbour.We want leaders who must say never again to any religious war of any hue. We want leaders who must say never again to any kind of pogrom in the polity. We want leaders who can refine our crude ways and distinguish us from the old, deadly path.If you ask me, simply I will say it is now time for the emergence of leaders who will give us a Nigerian utopia which shall be the envy of even the big, huge and super-power nations of the world. Obafemi Awolowo, where are you' We need your apparatus for our new Nigeria, our new destiny, our utopia.Yes you have used the correct term. Our current political leaders are truly recruits. They are recruits via the processes of tribal, schoolboys and girls, occultic and cultic affiliations and associations. They are generally recruits of different brotherhoods and sisterhoods. They are recruits from the schools, brotherhoods, and sisterhoods and ethnic-hoods of mediocrity and of murderous exploitations. They are never concerned with what is right with Nigeria or what should be right with Nigeria.In point of fact, ex-president Obasanjo recently raised this issue. That was the best statement I ever heard from the General and ex-president. Quite a transparent statement, which, unfortunately, came from some opaque place in his heart. What did he do when he was twice the lord of our mansion' What was the nature of his own recruitment of men and women whom he used to help devastate the land and polity'Maybe, he was speaking from hindsight, and giving an open thought and consideration to what he would have done differently. Yet we must say it loud and clear that he cannot absolve himself from the bourgeois pains and conditions, which essentially derived from his questionable enterprise of political recruitment.Self-gain, diabolical enrichment of self and other incongruous acts of the political bosses in the land compelled them to recruit accomplices who are too squeamish not to obey every act, right or wrong, of their masters and leaders. And the accomplices are mostly low-brained men and women. Forget the fact that some of them possess tall and huge degrees, which in many cases, were fraudulently gotten. Please allow me the indulgence not to cite examples.Everything I have averred above contributes to why we have the leaders we have, and why they will never perform. But when the time is ripe they will be marched out. Their various rituals can't help them any longer in power. In fact, they are not performing, and they can never perform owing to their firm belief in the power of some gods and deities they are appeasing from time to time.They should go to Gadaffi, formerly of Libya, if they can find him, and discover from him that such exercises are futile in the end. In fact, recently Senator Roland Owie gave us pertinent revelations in this wise in an interview he gave to Sunday Vanguard newspaper. The leaders generally engage in bourgeois politics sustained by juju. That's one fabulous reason that they cannot perform, and why they will never perform.In the dead of night they are in the shrines of demonic babalawos. In the daytime they are in the altars of prayer contractors who assure them that nothing will touch them. Of course, they part from them with their blood money, and go on thereafter and as always with their political acts with impunity and reckless abandon.The reckoning hour is near and here, however. The law of justice, of retribution, is an unfailing law. The doctrine of non-political performance backed by greed built on diabolical rituals is going to be consigned soon to the dustbin of by-gone days. Yes, soon. For now it is silence and further silence.Afejuku, poet, scholar and columnist wrote from the Department of English, University of Benin (UNIBEN),
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