By NICK DAZANG 

ON Saturday, February 25, 2023, Nigerians will elect a president and members of the National Assembly. The next Saturday, March 11, 2023, they will elect governors and members of state houses of assembly across the 36 states of the Federation. The presidency is the cynosure of all Nigerians and members of the international community.

This is because the presidential election is imminent. The Nigerian presidency is pivotal and crucial because it sets the tone and direction of governance at the highest level. And given its huge population of over 230 million people, Nigeria holds the key to Africa’s development.

Little wonder, Nelson Mandela, the world’s most acclaimed statesman, once asserted that Africa’s progress was contingent on Nigeria’s rising to the true meaning of its greatness and facing up to its God-given responsibility as the continent’s leader.

The 2023 general elections are taking place at a time when the country, and indeed the African continent, enjoys a youthful population bulge. A deft and judicious harnessing and deployment of the energies of these youths should unleash their potential and engender growth.

But even more significant, the 2023 general elections are coming at a watershed moment—a moment when the country is in a terrible place; a moment when the country is suffused with the grimmest statistics in all departments and facets of our lives. And a time when it is keeping up in important areas. Never before in our annals have we had it this bad: Inflation, youth unemployment, and  grinding poverty are at an all time high.

The country is deeply in debt. Insecurity dogs the country and constrains foreign direct investment, FDI. The economic headwinds are so formidable that the Economist Intelligence Unit, EIU, has projected that the naira will officially exchange at 470 to the U.S. dollar this year. Despair stalks the Nigerian firmament like a ghoul.

Against these unflattering and sorrowful backdrops, Nigerians must reflect deeply and vote prudently. They must vote for the candidate who has the stamina (mental and physical), intellectual acumen, and verve to deliver good governance and to do so timeously. No doubt, the challenges are legion, and they are uphill.

But a leader who knows his onions and is possessed of vision, savvy, and gravitas should be able to point the country in the direction of hope and progress. We are in a turbulent and tempestuous time. What the country needs at this moment is a candidate who exudes calm and confidence. Such a placid disposition should imbue his compatriots with confidence, calm their frayed nerves, and assuage their anxieties. 

Colin Powell, the military statesman and a Republican, endorsed Barack Obama, a Democrat, over John McCain, a Republican, in 2008 because of his (Obama’s) calm carriage during the electioneering campaign. Our various challenges call for a president with a Sphinx-like calmness, the type of rock-like calmness and sangfroid for which the former French leader, Francois Mitterrand, was renowned.

In my humble reckoning, voters should go for a candidate who is focused, like a laser beam, on good governance and is keen on delivering it in the shortest time possible. To accomplish this, such a candidate must be positively disposed to identifying and working with men and women of excellence and proven ability.

These should be people with track records and hard earned reputations who will not trifle with the good names they have made. As iron sharpens iron and as the deep calls to the deep, such a candidate must be able to summon the country’s “best and the brightest” to meet the country’s challenges. John F. Kennedy’s short-lived but memorable New Frontier is said to have achieved so much because it was star-studded. Mercifully, Nigeria boasts of a galaxy of stars in each of its six geopolitical zones.

In addition to rooting for a president who places a premium on excellence and results, Nigerians should be enamoured of a candidate who possesses technical ability and is prepared to soak up sublime and progressive ideas. That way, he will inspire confidence in his immediate subordinates and appear to be in control.

Besides, mischievous aides cannot run circles around a president who knows his stuff and is on top of his game. As we have seen in recent times, a lack of executive capacity creates a vacuum. And minions take advantage of this vacuum to advance their dubious agendas to the detriment of the country. 

Apart having technical ability and discernment, the president must show a sense of order and organisation. Once the presidency projects a sense of order and pro-activity, it sends a clear and unmistakable message to foes and friends alike: It says eloquently that Nigeria is in good and steady hands. It is widely speculated that it was the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan that emboldened Vladmir Putin to attack Ukraine.

Every nation has its highs and lows. It oscillates between ebbs and flows and goes through tragedies and triumphs. The President must seize each of these moments, either to comfort the country in its grief or to bask in its glow. The president must be someone who connects with the nation at all times, depending on the currents that serve it. No longer should Nigerians vote for someone so bereft of compassion and fellow-feeling that he comes across as a lusterless and uncaring robot.

Above all these, Nigerians should go for someone who appreciates that the presidency is a tough call and serious business. Rather than see the presidency as a mere addition to his resume or a vocation to be outsourced to opportunistic hirelings, the president must understand that his position calls for self-sacrifice and inordinate man-hours. We should thus go for a candidate who is determined to add value to his country, ameliorate the sufferings of his people, and do exalting things that will etch him positively in the consciousness of the people. 

The president we deserve must put in long hours of work and read beyond executive summaries. He must insist on the details and minutiae to enable him to take informed decisions. In the reckoning of the pundits, running an ambitious country like Nigeria, with its size, population, and gifted people, requires at least an 18-hour daily schedule.

Such a disposition and work ethic enable the leader to be fully briefed, to demand and have the bigger picture, and to take decisions based on intelligence and not sentiment. A reading of Michelle Obama’s well received book, BECOMING, gives a hint of the long hours a modern United States President puts in on the job. 

The diligence and commitment that Margaret Thatcher once brought to statecraft, which were recently recalled with nostalgia by David Dimbleby, a former BBC presenter, on Stephen Sackur’s Hard Talk, should give us a further inkling. So, too, are the eighteen years of pain and toil brought to bear on Germany by Angela Merkel.Merkel transformed her country into an economic powerhouse and responded valiantly to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our daunting challenges call for even more. They require the bulldog tenacity of Winston Churchill and the steadfastness that Theodore Roosevelt once canvassed passionately in his famous speech, “The Man in the Arena.” Our presidency is surely not suited for hedonists, the entitled, or the clueless who excel at issuing incantations and mumbo jumbos in the manner of the Oracle of Delphi.