Kogiflame
A frontline Pan-Yoruba think-thank and advocacy group, The Yoruba Leadership and Peace Initiative (TYLPI) has said that people of merit and excellence abound all over the country and are not the exclusive preserve of any ethnic group or geographical area.
The group was reacting to an assertion by the Afenifere Leader, Chief Ayo Adebanjo at the Greater Nigeria Conference held by an Igbo think-tank in Abuja on Monday, to the effect that if Nigeria’s Presidency was based on merit, the Eastern part of Nigeria would have been producing, and would in perpetuity, produce the country’s President.
In a statement issued by its Director of Publicity, Mr Tunde Ipinmisho, the TYLPI said although Chief Adebanjo, like all Nigerians, had the inalienable right to freedom of expression, he should endeavour to always differentiate between his personal views and those of the entire Yoruba nation.
It also cautioned that leaders should take care not to allow their aversion to certain individuals affect their judgment when commenting on national issues.
The TLLPI noted that during the First Republic, Nigeria’s different regions were led by excellent and meritorious leaders who articulated and implemented people-oriented policies and were accountable to the people.
The statement expressed regret that today, however, politicians and leaders appropriate the people’s resources to serve their personal interests with no robust commitment to consequence management systems to effectively checkmate them, and that that tendency ran across all ethnic groups and geo-political zones in the country.
TYLPI added that the solution to Nigeria’s leadership challenge at all levels was for the nation to embrace true federalism by restructuring the country such that each unit, would exercise substantial political and economic, control over its affairs while yielding agreed powers and resource percentages to the central government.
That, the group said, would release for grassroots development, the humongous resources currently available but being misused by the different levels of the country’s power structure.
The group advised that as the 2023 elections drew near, politicians and respected leaders should dwell on issues of achieving development in a just and fair society, rather than promoting unproven theories such as domiciliation of superior meritocracy in one geographical or ethnic section of the country, which it warned could further polarise the nation.
