A chieftain of the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC), Salihu Lukman, said for Nigerian democracy to drive processes of nation building, political parties in the country must develop the capacity to recruit leaders like Allen Onyema, CEO of Air Peace.
Lukman made this suggestion in reference to Onyema’s address to Super Eagles player onboard Air Peace to Cape Verde for their World Cup Qualifying match on Monday when he pledged an award of N20 million once the team win the match.
According to him, such a gesture was a demonstration that there is some inspiring exception that gives hope that notwithstanding all the challenges, there is a good prospect for a Nigerian nation.
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The Director General of the Progressive Governors Forum (PGF) in a statement in Abuja said, Onyema’s inspiring words of encouragement to those young Nigerian players, among many other positive factors, must have contributed to the 2-1 victory of the Super Eagles against Cape Verde on Tuesday.
“We need more leaders in this country like Onyema. In particular, we need more leaders like Onyema in politics.
The big barrier against recruiting them into politics is that debates about expanding membership of political parties are limited to protecting the personal ambitions of political leaders.
“Largely because the political debate is almost all about ambitions of political leaders, nationalists of the mode of Mr. Onyema may just be limited to being financiers and sponsors of candidates for elections, and in return get rewarded with contracts, etc”, Lukman said.
Lukman also said if the Nigerian nation is to be developed, there must be leaders who are broadminded enough to campaign for justice, equity and fairness beyond narrow group interests, insisting that a major challenge of nation building in Nigeria revolves around how to produce truly national leaders.
The APC chieftain wondered why Sheikh Ahmad Gumi is preaching that government should grant amnesty to bandits in the North just the way the administration of late President Umaru Yar’Adua handled Niger Delta militants.
He stressed that anybody who argues this way is already part of Nigeria’s national security problem and called on Nigerians to rise to the challenge of regulating the conduct of so-called leaders, including religious clerics.
“Being jaundiced makes most of these leaders be antagonistic to initiatives towards nation building. Beyond religious clerics, there are other category of leaders in the country with similarly jaundiced views.
“Individuals, who in their own rights count as elders and have paid their dues to this country have become very vocal almost virtually against every decision and action of the government. Ideally, elders should speak with strong moral voice based on the capacity to say more than the ordinary on account of their lived experiences.
“But when elders speak with the same voice as that of politicians, it weakens their authority and diminishes their influence in society. If the weakness of politicians is that they are unable to project a national identity, how different could elders whose mission only seek to entrench divisive politics in the country?”, Lukman queried.
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The PFG Boss said the recent lamentations by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, that the situation of conflicting court orders was making the exercise of the Commission’s regulatory responsibilities difficult should not be taken lightly.
“…Beyond these conflicting orders, the need to sanitise Nigerian judiciary should be broadened to cover issues of ensuring that judges with underlying political interests don’t preside over political cases in which their interests conflict with their judicial responsibility.
“Once judges with underlying political interests are allowed to preside over cases in which their interests are already in disagreement with their judicial responsibility, their decisions can be predictable…there are judges whose political leanings can be confirmed by merely looking at the judgments”, he added.
