The fault game is as old as man. If you think I’m wrong, ask all the accused at the garden court of Eden. Passing the buck is the easiest form of defense and in Nigeria, we have become masters at the art. From the highest office in the country to the humblest home in existence, the problems and challenges we face are always caused by others.
“Everything rises and falls on leadership,” says the famous leadership guru John Maxwell.
In Nigeria, we have been saddled with a prolonged crop of leaders who keep finding reasons, and in recent times extremely absurd ones, why their tenues failed to deliver any form of relief to the citizenry. The state of a nation, or any organization for that matter, is the responsibility of its leaders, and to point fingers or blame others is, and will always be, an abject form of irresponsibility. We know that any excuse concocted is accountability denied and our leaders have made their inability to lead us salient by their incessant finger-pointing.
Worse still, is the blatant disregard for the well-being of our nation and its citizens who live, in most cases, in abject poverty, by leaders who live in obscene wealth. This is a far cry from what a democratically run society is meant to be. If we were living in a monarchy where the leaders are elected by some alleged divine choice or any other form of imposition which eliminates individual choice, our situation may make a little bit of logical sense. But for a society where the leaders and elected officials are voted into office by the same people they rule, we are a complete enigma.
We are a people under the oppression of the servants we employed. Every one of us, either through our direct action by voting, or inaction by not voting, is a part of the hiring process. This present administration was voted in, both by the majority of Northern citizens who came out to vote and the majority of the East/South citizens who stayed at home. The primary responsibility of choosing leaders ultimately falls on the citizens. Whether the votes were bought, stolen or genuinely obtained, they were done by citizens. It was a citizen that received money to sell their vote, while another stole other people’s votes for the aspirants, and yet another went out to vote. Our collective choice is what sits in the different offices that make up our government.
I would take the liberty to assume, that as a nation we are now tired of cutting our noses to spite our faces; tired of selling our permanent well-being to purchase temporal relief that we don’t have means to enjoy. We should be tired of giving lottery tickets to selfish individuals who eventually use our resources to wall themselves off in ornate edifices, hire our collective security agents to become their private bodyguards while living in palatial heavens as demi-gods. These are the same people who were at our doorsteps during campaigns, begging us to vote for them, to employ them, to give them a job.
It is our responsibility as citizens therefore to choose our leaders. Until that first action of standing behind a booth and voting is carried out, there is no excuse or justification to pass blame.
We have another chance to right this outrageous wrong come 2019 to decide the people who not only to run our affairs but also to represent us to the rest of the world. Let us not only choose wisely but let us actively make a choice by voting. Get your voters card now and decide to vote.
“let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country”– Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Be responsible!
Click on the article below to locate the PVC center closest to you:
https://connectnigeria.com/articles/2018/01/pvc-registration-centers/
