Recently, I became the leader of my clinical posting rotation group of
10 students, by chance. The student initially saddled with the responsibility
had decided to pass it up claiming he will be unable to discharge the duties well
enough. As a group leader, all you really had to do is speak for the group,
make arrangements with the rotation coordinator, pass relevant info to the
group members and assign duties to each person. In essence, there is no privilege or perk attached to
it. While I do not support his abdication of responsibility, I found his
sincerity admirable and could not help wishing this could happen on our
political scene. When he handed over to me, he said and I quote loosely: “I
don’t think I’ll be able to function well as this group’s head, it will be
unfair on you guys if you rely on me and I am unable to discharge these duties.
I will appreciate it if you could step in in my stead.”
If we look around the world, we see examples of places where
people resign from office immediately their citizens begin to lose confidence
in their ability to discharge their duty. A recent example is that of the South
Korean prime minister, Chung Hong-won, who will resign from office following the
unfortunate ferry accident that claimed the lives of just 187 people with the
possibility of almost 300 more. He probably had nothing to do with the accident
in the first place, he is resigning due to the perceived ineffectiveness of the
rescue operations. South Korea, in all likelihood has an emergency management
agency of some sorts that will be in charge of managing such a disaster. I am
not trying to make a case for the prime minister, but surely, holding the prime
minister responsible appears far-fetched considering the circumstances.
There was a popular American TV show about a
counter-terrorist agent, Jack Bauer. In the show, he was the most patriotic and
dutiful agent, always willing to do anything, not minding the consequences to
himself or anybody, as long as it is going to protect America from terrorist
threats. I could go on and on about his patriotic zeal, but the really
eye-catching feature about this show, and many other American shows and movies,
is the utmost regard that public officers, administrators, law enforcement agents
etc have for the life of each one of their citizens. This may just be the
reflection of an ideal and not the reality of things but the apparent fact that
such an ideal exists is a remarkable thing. Sadly, such a thing is absent in
Nigeria. How do we explain a president who can still afford to go to a birthday party less than 24 hours after an explosion killed so many people in our
Federal Capital; or the same president going to canvas for votes close to the
town where more than 150 teenage girls were kidnapped while writing exams in
their schools? The obvious answer is visible to the blind and audible to the deaf: we do not have responsible leaders and we are in dire need of a responsible
leadership and an even more responsible follower-ship that will always demand
nothing less than the best from their leaders.
If we, as citizens of this country, could just look
beyond the perks associated with public office and see the truly enormous
responsibility inherent in making decisions that significantly impact the lives
of thousands, if not millions, of people; if we could so much as prime our
conscience to realize that anybody holding these public offices is, ipso facto, taking responsibility for the lives of many people; just maybe then, we
would be led by a purpose driven government that can formulate clear ideals and
targets that we, as citizens, would willingly give all our support to
achieving. That, I believe would be a giant stride, in realizing our true
potential as a country and as a nation; our potential to be the leader and
giant of Africa and even the world. Maybe some JackBauer-like attitude
from our leaders would be of effective help too.
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