By Josef Omorontionwan

AT yuletide, it is not uncommon to hear people proclaim that Christ is the reason for the season. This expression presupposes that our leaders must strive to be Christ-like in their leadership styles. They must emulate Christ in their actions and utterances.

This is, however, far removed from the type of faux pas and the obvious delusion of grandeur in which Dr. Doyin Okupe, the infantile Public Affairs Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan, found himself this past week, when he compared his principal to Jesus Christ.

After failed attempts by his backers to compare Jonathan to the likes of Martin Luther King Jnr, Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, Lee Kwan Yew, Okupe finally upped his ignorance by likening his boss to Jesus Christ. This is an arrogant height of blasphemy.

As it is in warfare, so it is in governance. The brilliance in each case is that no amount of eloquence or talk can explain away failure. In a war situation, a general has led his troops to defeat; lives have been wasted; and that’s how history will remember him. In government, too, leaders must be judged by the results of their actions; the deeds that can be seen and measured!

What people say about themselves is immaterial because people will say anything, anyway. Look at what they have done because deeds do not lie. In looking at defeats and failures, you must first identify the things that could have been done differently. This is where we are not in short-supply of where the leadership went awry in the out-going year, particularly as we approach another election year.

In good and bad times, good leadership must be by example. Leadership must not be insensitive to the plight of the citizenry. This presupposes that every life must be regarded as sacrosanct and irreducibly important. Elsewhere, nations are known to have gone to war because of the killing of a single citizen. But what do we find in Nigeria? To some leaders, some human  lives are not worth a kobo!

For example, On Monday, 14 April 2014, a generation of human souls was destroyed at the Abuja multiple bomb blast. Around midnight of Tuesday, 15 April 2014, heartless criminal elements broke into Government Girls’ College, Chibok, Borno State and carted away another generation of innocent female students. As we speak, the where about of those innocent girls remains a mirage.

At dawn on the same 15 April 2014, our President proceeded to Kano where he was later shown on national television dancing “political azonto”, apparently unperturbed by the loads of mishap bedeviling his country.

Elsewhere, we have shown how at the peak of President Barack Obama’s campaigns for the 2012 presidential election, there was the incident of shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut, which resulted in the death of 27 people, including 18 children. Obama quickly cancelled all his political engagements for the day and proceeded to make a nation-wide broadcast to Americans. That’s leadership!

Buhari and Jonathan

A leader must banish the spirit of fear from his mind. Listen to Carl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831): “Given the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do a thousand times more damage than audacity”. Every day, Nigerians in the Northeastern part of this country are being massacred by members of the Boko Haram. Apparently, President Jonathan cares less. Good leadership demands that Jonathan should have set foot, at least on those State Capitals, even if it means mobilizing the entire Nigerian army around himself on the days of such visits.

This column has reported how our President was scared off by Tompolo, an Ijaw ex-militant, when he wanted to perform the groundbreaking ceremony of the proposed EPZ project in the Niger Delta sub-region.

We hear that Tompolo has gone further nuclear! He is reported to have acquired several sophisticated gunboats. Our President is not moving a finger to nip the gunboats episode in the bud. A bold President would have stopped the acquisition in the first place.

Apparently, this President is fighting a sophisticated war with an unmotivated army. That’s where corruption has led us. We are told of situations where the military leadership would capture the entire military budget to themselves and push the soldiers to the war-front with toy guns, evidently to go and die. In just the same way that you can’t have your cake and eat it, no Commander ever goes to war with an unmotivated army and expect to win. Yet, we wonder why Boko Haram is having an upper hand.

What will this administration be remembered for? Surely it has excelled in corruption where it has apparently given up the fight. The so-called transformation agenda transforms nothing. The fight is too scattered to make any impact. The administration is dissipating energy, battling on too many fronts at the same time instead of concentrating on a few items and accomplishing them well. We remember Mao Tsetung (1893-1976): “Injuring all of a man’s ten fingers is not as effective as chopping off one”.

We want a leadership that will not be allergic to opposition and criticism. After all, nothing can be more helpful to an administration than constructive criticism. George Hegel (1770-1831) was essentially right when he said, “Man exists only in so far as he is opposed”.

We want a leadership that believes in God but which would not necessarily translate this to mean that pastors’ hands must be constantly glued to the leader’s head; a leadership that believes that, the only antidote to success is genuine hard work; a leadership that would pull our teaming youth population off the streets and put them in gainful employment; a leadership that would re-enact those good old days when every part of this country was safe for everybody; and above all, a leadership that would judiciously apply our resources, without removing stealing of public money from the corruption bracket, realizing that, after all, government is about human needs, the satisfaction of which is the sole justification for government!