ARISE O’ NIGERIAN YOUTHS: THE FUTURE LEADERS OF TOMORROW
At a time when Nigerian politics is being sprinkled with sentiments and wrong notions, when the messes and their interests are marginalized for the glory of a few messiahs, when the oasis of justice is manipulated to spring forth injustice, the greatest question to ask is, is this what we really want? Is this where we really want to go as a nation?
Once as a growing young man, I had pondered over the word of a great philosopher, who lived about 2,500 years ago, in a faraway country in the Middle East. HE is called Jesus Christ. HE said “…whosoever wants to be a leader among you must be a servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be slave of everyone else.” At first, this was for me the path of an idealist not meant for my world of realism, until the day I read a book that convinced my doubt: The Last Hours of Ancient Sun Light by Thom Hartmann. Then I realized that long before Jesus even defined a perfect leader, the people of the tribal cultures had followed this path of leadership for over 200,000 years; a period of the earth’s history geologists often call the Pleistocene epoch. I realized from the book that leadership was obligatory not opportunistic in those years. It dawned on me that a true leader is not the one with most followers, but one who create most leaders.
However, this virtue was truncated when man some 7,000 years ago, fell into the illusion of lust for power and wealth, when man gave up the true mastery of himself. This period marked the beginning of a new form of leadership characterized with self-glorification, greed, corruption, and brutality, as in Nigerian political system where corruption, election rigging among other vices are applauded. This was the victorious beginning of rulership over leadership. It was this wealth-power-drunk rulership that ushered in the ancient