Photo credit: the conversation
The only difference between an average Nigerian politician and a chameleon is straightforward. While the former is a human being the latter is a reptile.
However, the Nigerian politician has a disease, the disease is called Borderline Personality Disorder. When BDP infects someone, they display The Chameleon Effect.
When a person has a chameleon personality, there’s usually an unconscious change in the person’s ‘self’ as they struggle to fit in with their environment or the people around them.
Check out the so-called progressive politicians in the southwest. Nearly all of them are playing to the gallery.
Many of them even dress like the great Obafemi Awolowo, who made waves as premier of the Western Region in the First Republic.
Among other things, Awolowo operated a free education policy in the then-western region, which also included the present-day Edo and Delta States. He also built the multi-story Cocoa House, the Liberty Stadium, and the first television station in Africa.
Television stations were established when some European countries had yet to dream of having television stations.
Awolowo also established farm estates and even agricultural institutes. He went on to develop relevant industries.
But what do we have now?
First Class pretenders!
Politicians will pretend to be progressive, while their performances will prove otherwise. That is why things are getting worse in the southwest.
Since it is affecting the southwest, it is spreading across Nigeria. The reason is that the West used to be the first among equals. Indeed, there used to be healthy competition among the three regions. With the creation of the Midwest region out of the Western region, it became four regions.
The West was so advanced that the other regions sent delegates to study its secrets. In fact, even the Europeans praised Awo’s style of administration.
But ideology was also the basis of the administration. The ideology of the ruling political party in the West at that time was democratic socialism.
A critique of democratic socialism will be done later. However, the party could be identified with one ideology at least.
Who knows which ideology(ies) today’s political parties are practising?
Similarly, in those days, parties were identified with their manifestos. Even in the Second Republic, there was a popular song,
Free education
Awolowo lo le se!
Free education
Awolowo will do this
People paid their taxes without any need to be prodded. They were seeing what their taxes were being used for.
Since politicians today are not known to espouse particular ideologies, they tend to fall for anything. Nothing can be regarded as anything. That is why we continue to have rudderless leadership everywhere.
Today, the PDP is being blamed for the country’s ills. Pray, who doesn’t know that a great number of the people in the APC were part of the rot in the PDP?
The idea is that once a politician joins the party in power, his sins are forgiven. They call it, ‘Any government in power’, AGIP.
But I will always blame the citizens. The reason is amazingly simple: Anyone who wants to be a leader starts as a citizen.
If we fail to build institutions that will enable us to mentor quality materials for leadership, we shall keep on having, garbage in, garbage out, GIGO.
Of course, the chameleons will keep on having a field day!
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