Nigerian Leaders: No Place Like Home

It has been said many a time through different platforms that leadership is the curse on Africa, and the very cause of miserable failures our eyes have witnessed in Africa. Would a nation exist without leaders? Certainly, not even in the animal kingdom will an existence of lives be, without proper leadership and direction.

Leaders have been recognized far and wide to be responsible for the progress and backwardness of any human circle. When a child is wayward, for example, the leadership of his home is blamed as it is believed like father like son. The "stuffs" any leader is made of will invaraiably manifest in the form of hardship, yawning unemployment, hunger, hopelessness, insecurity, theft, and hatred speeches. To put it differently, the situation of the country will show the leadership or the leader.

For those of us with broader awareness, we are sure of the daily sleeping thought in almost every youth. "To leave the country" or " to leave their home" almost permanently. Embassies are replete with frustrated faces of citizens who just need another home. If you ask what is wrong with their Nigerian home, one thing they say "bad leaders". Doctors and nurses have left in their overwhelming number, same as many others who could muzzle up the opportunity to leave. Some leave to secure another home for their children ;while others for education since the education at home has been bastardized with strikes and outmoded facilities. Some, simply to secure a good life or a meaningful well being. We are all shamefully scattered across the earth, making the green passport and the carrier to be gazed upon as an object of pity, sadness and ridicule.

If not strike, it will be fare hike. Our plights have continued to appear to be unsolvable. If they were, how come some nations solved them and moved beyond them. Our problems are long over due. Ours is a river of problems. Little wonder, our leaders jet out of the nation for official leave. Leave can't be observed at home, because there is no more home. When a diasporian mutters the thought of coming back home for reasons of the good people he left behind, quickly, a more overpowering thought creeps through " there is no home".

The first wave of covid further justified the title of the piece 'No place like home'. Sad stories of how leaders could not jet out for medical attention stabilized themselves on the screens. Some heroes, if at all they were heroes truly, took a bow from the life stage. It is shocking how our leaders could point at what they have endlessly achieved and ignore the thuggery, money politics, kidnapping, maiming, mudslinging, padding, recession , terrible price hike and massive youth outburst they have orchestrated. If you continue to destroy our collective home, then, will there be no home for you and us. It is time we knew America is not our home, nor is Canada one. Rebuild our home, Nigerian leaders!

Ogunnaike, Samuel
Wrote from Lagos