Building and managing a nation of people of diverse and diffuse rainbow characteristics is no less as challenging as putting together some of the awesome pieces of technological physical systems which litter the landscape of our collective socio-economic experience today. Physical systems such as a car, a house, a piece of furniture, a computer, etc, confront us with the challenges of evolving key components which are properly chiseled to shake hands firmly with one another, under the watchful eyes and guidance of creative manipulators, for achieving specific goals and objectives. The mindsets and disposition of the creative manipulations will either brake or ensure the emergence of a desirable and wholesome socio-physical system.
This is the ultimate challenge.
For most socio-physical systems in the global family, especially for us as a people, it is increasingly noteworthy that the bane of the emergence of a truly cohesive, self-regenerative, self-sustaining, egalitarian, empathetic and productive Nigerian nation is the acute shortage of creative manipulators (or purposeful leadership) at all levels of the Nigerian enterprise. And this unhealthy state of affairs has made it largely difficult for key components of the Nigeria enterprise to shake hands.
In The Challenges of Rebuilding the Nigerian Nation, I humbly submit that the collective paucity of creative socio-physical systems engineers and manipulators has continued to dominate the environment largely due to the vastly limited windows of constructive platforms for evolving, nurturing and mentoring creative leadership resources for effective management of the key natural components of an incipient Nigeria nation state.
I, therefore, contend that it is critical to the survival, growth and development of the Nigeria enterprise to evolve, encourage and sustain constructive processes and platforms for identifying, harnessing and projecting agreeable ingredients and values for building/re-building enduring, self-regenerating socio-physical systems which are fundamental to founding a true and abiding nation state.
Constructive Processes and Platforms
Any constructive process and platform for raking up that much-sought-after critical mass of best values construct for the recruitment of core leadership for rebuilding the Nigeria Enterprise will necessarily assume the following key responsibilities.
• A progressive process of core leadership mentoring;
• An engaging means of exploring and modelling innate leadership resources;
• A scheme for evaluating and transmitting wholesome normative mind constructs and values;
• A veritable means of challenging generally-accepted but largely corrugated assumptions about social, economic, trado-cultural and political relationships and stereotypes;
• A viable framework for re-appraising the process for defining true greatness and popular nationalism;
• A process for recreating a viable overall consensus on the acceptable, desirable and winning national mindset;
• A means of building the culture of induced national security, pride and survival;
• A redoubtable advocacy for crystallising the emergence of a truly admissible Nigeria total culture, value and identity;
• An enduring exercise for identifying, redefining and propagating the finer points of the real and wholesome Nigerian factor;
• A consummate process for establishing, pruning and projecting the basic frameworks for re-engineering the national leadership infrastructures.
Building Credible Institutions
A popular byline in equally popular democratic assumptions around the world today is “building credible institutions” to enhance prospects for the prosperity of nations, especially the so-called emerging economies. However, while I subscribe to that popular wisdom, I am persuaded to think that it will indeed take creative and credible people (leaders), in the first instance, to articulate and establish credible institutions of state for the eternal good of the people. The challenges of rebuilding the Nigeria nation, therefore, include the compelling need now to re-work the basic ingredients of the overall leadership fabric and entrench the best-values construct and not necessarily to create credible institutions per se.
The thesis enunciated above is sufficiently persuasive and overwhelming. The clarion call for desirable and creative leadership infrastructures and the best-values construct across the land has never been shriller and more pressing. They are most-sought-after products and the thirst in the land for them, presently, is clearly suffocating and effective demand is of groundswell proportions.
Effective, empathetic, resourceful and productive overall national leadership fabric and result-oriented best-values construct will engender the rapid production of creative leadership. Creative leadership will, in turn, naturally found and nourish credible institutions which will then drive the process of rebuilding and recreating the Nigerian nation of our collective dreams.
Ozioma Ezeogu, a knowledge entrepreneur and public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja.
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