NIGERIA: Deliver us from restless idealism, By Folabi Ogunleye

Look ehn, me, the people I dread the most to be in positions of power are the barely tested talkers – including the ones who spend more time going on about what is wrong than what, specifically, they will do to fix what is wrong.

It is worse when these people are lone-rangers who have no established support system of ‘made men’ and women – of established and experienced lieutenants to help them manage the complex challenges of leadership in times of peace and in times of great complications.

Usually, all they have is their unruly army of angry chihauhaus that constitute a tail wagging the dog, snarling and barking at one another without any heirarchy of order or respect for process, making them very susceptible to insurrections and anarchy. They simply find a poster-child for their reckless agenda and hold him hostage to their whims.

The truth is that some of the devils we know in our society today are far better than the so-called saints, pushed forward from behind the scenes by professional anarchists and their gullible and impatient children of perpetual anger who have no regard for painstaking process to achieve long-term objectives.

For the imaptient and entitled children of anger, everything is ‘now!’ – as opposed to long-term strategizing towards realistic goals.

While some of the ones who have come forward to claim leadership in Nigeria today have spent years building their network, the idealists simply wake up on a random day with an inexperienced poster-child who has no support system for their so-called radical change, pushing the society that allows them to have their way into foreseable anarchy.

All over the world, it is the same result of failure after such impatient and artificial approach to what should otherwise be a natural evolution towards progress and development: They start a dumb, reckless insurrection but their inexperience usually cause things spiral out of control. And the next thing is widespread anarchy. Think ‘Arab Spring.’

That is exactly what happened in the case of their much vaunted EndSars campaign, which dome of these folks are using as reference point for their latest strategy. It had no leadership, and it had no commitment to a specific end goal. This is why it easily began to descend into full-blown anarchy, before the elders stepped-in to shut it down lest it consumed everybody and his mother.

Of course they tried to label it a “massacre,” and so many of us practically bought into the claims but the lie of a thousand years was sooner defeated by moments of quiet truth.

It is the same approach they are bringing again to the forthcoming 2023 elections. All the ingredients are there for the objective to see: blind shortcuts out of impatience for long-term process and order, banal idealism and sundry emotional blackmail.

Yet, again, (kì ń ṣ’èpè: it’s not a curse) all that awaits these reckless idealists down the road is failure and disappointment. We cannot cheat nature: Before the chicken comes the egg. Before the child is born, there must be a period of gestation. Change does not come overnight. It certainly doesn’t come a few months to a Nigerian election for president.

May Nigeria be spared the leadership of an overnight celebrity, propped-up by naïve children of anger, high on pitobious ganja.