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In contemporary history, leadership transcends the frontiers of one man ordering people around military-style. Leadership is about sacrifice, innovation, vision and ability to recognise that even the best of diamond was first coated with dirt and dust. Great leaders are therefore those who see opportunity in oppression, who turn adversity to advantage and those who see today what others will see tomorrow.

A middle aged man, Terseer Angyo, has been arrested by the Benue state Police command for allegedly beheading a 13 year old girl, Mnyorhan Asase, at Aliade in Gwer local government area of the state.

As the cliché goes, all this would have been laughable if it is not so tragic. In the heat of the subsisting venom and vitriol, it seems nobody now cares that the first set of “deportees” from Lagos were no other than Yoruba indigenes of Oyo and Osun states. I say this because this knowledge is not reflected in the way and manner protagonists have been conducting the debate on the so-called “deportation” of Igbo from Lagos.

I had the ugly experience of reading the infantile postulations of a former minister of aviation, Mr. Femi Fani –Kayode, headlined, ‘The bitter truth about the Igbo’. I wept for Nigeria as I remembered that such a character was once a member of the Federal Executive Council under Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidency.

One lesson I learnt over the years is to ignore rabble rousers no matter the degree of their provocation. The recurrent decimal that defines political failures is their unalloyed penchant at deploying religion and ethnicity in craving for a seat on the political gravy train. The irony is the success rate of this tactics notwithstanding the damage it does to the polity and national cohesion. Are politicians really ready to learn or is the number the most important factor no matter the character of coalescing individuals?