Waiting for Nigeria’s next CEO

Next Saturday, a number of us will not be going to cast our ballots at the polls for several reasons. There are those who will not for the reason of relocation from where they had lived during the 2011 elections.  There are those who couldn’t get their PVCs from the Independent National Electoral Commission, despite the extension of time which a revered columnist and TheCable’s Publisher, Simon Kolawole, has cleverly coined as ‘Dasuki Break’. There are also those who will not cast their votes, because they just didn’t believe voting for any of the candidates will change their situation. I am in the second category.

But, there is one thing that is the highest common factor (HCF) to all of us just like the elementary class arithmetic; we are all waiting to know Nigeria’s next Chief Executive Officer.

Believe me, whoever wins or loses in the next Saturday’s election between President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari will never forget that there was a campaign, if I’m permitted to have a parody of Chinua Achebe’s book, There Was a Country.

Without doubt, it has been a roller coaster presidential campaign Nigerians have witnessed since 1999, with mudslinging, wrangling and threat that have dragged on for months.

But what is important to our countrymen at the moment is to find a leader who will be faithful, loyal and honest. A leader who will not be a ‘rent lord’ for the purpose of sharing Oil blocks and collection of tributes. Nigerians are tired of a bully like former President Olusegun Obasanjo, a President do-nothing like late Musa Yar’Adua, a clueless comrade like President Goodluck Jonathan, an armchair leader like Ernest Shonekan and an abuser like General Muhammadu Buhari.  We are waiting for a president who will empathise with us, meet several unmet expectations and enable an era of shared prosperity. Nigerians are tired of hearing there’s one overnight rich man now in Ikoyi or Kano who is listed by Forbes because he has been allocated Oil blocks at the disadvantage of others. What I’m simply saying is that we want a nation of equal opportunities, where there will not just be the rich and the poor but  a room for all the social classes and opportunities for people in those classes to move progressively from one class to the other based on shared prosperity.

I have heard the former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Mallam Nasir El-rufai speak about how he got his first contract by merely responding to government advertisement — a call for bid in the newspaper — just a few months after he graduated from the university. I have heard Dr. Wale Babalakin and a host of others talked about opportunities from the time they were students at the University of Lagos. I have heard about the opportunities that made the Vice Presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Pastor Yemi Osinbajo and what more, I have heard of how a man could be enlisted into the Army on awaiting result based on a recommendation from the school head. Now, I will like to see those opportunities return so that Nigeria’s best can emerge as leaders when we come to the next election cycles.

A few years ago when I read about an intern who became an executive director at Goldman Sachs in London just under 10 years of joining the company, I started looking around for such stories in our country, I found none. The names I found were people who got to such position, because their fathers had big stakes in the companies as shareholders or they are the owners of the businesses.

In Nigeria, it’s man-know-man system. So how can an intern become an executive director in a company his father has no idea how it all started?

Many eggheads are in the country that could fast-track the growth of this nation, if the era of equal opportunities is returned just like in the past, but how can this be without a President that can make the institutions work?

And because the institutions are not working, we have all turned miracle seekers. Are you surprised that even the best person for any job/position in this country relies on miracle?  The principalities and powers in those institutions wouldn’t just allow for merit, so miracle does it. It’s the reason every family in the country has got at least a prayer warrior.

The next president must know that Nigeria is an underperforming business entity that needs a turnaround and the next CEO must come to the office thinking above the cloud. If after Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan’s regimes our political campaigns are still dominated by issues around road, water and electricity, it is pathetic.  With 15 years of democracy we should be discussing serious economic and foreign policy issues that will make other nations to watch our presidential campaigns with keen interest just the same way many of us follow the United States and United Kingdom’s electoral process, because we know the policies in those countries can alter our lives drastically.

Finally, whoever becomes the next CEO must reorganise Nigeria in such a way that during the 2019 elections there will be no need to sign violence-free accord like kindergarten pupils. Since this is an important election to win for Jonathan and Buhari, because whoever loses will recede from political life, I like to end with the words of Joel Trammell, a Forbes contributor,  that “CEOs and diamonds are a lot alike: Most are flawed in some way, all are hardened and formed under crushing pressures and intense heat, and they are judged by degrees of quality. We’ve perfected the art and science of judging a diamond’s quality via the four C’s: carat, cut, color, clarity. I assert that quality CEOs must have three C’s: credibility, competence, and caring. The difference is that, unlike diamonds, there is no leeway with CEOs: They cannot lose even one of these traits and lead effectively.”

*This article first appeared in THISDAY