In the twilight of forgotten promises and the din of abandoned communities, leadership’s failure no longer knocks—it storms the gate. The crumbling reality of governance in many developing nations, Nigeria especially, reads like a familiar funeral hymn: loud on arrival, silent in delivery. Every pothole on our expressways, every child learning under a mango tree, every hospital without syringes, is a public monument to failed leadership. When leaders trade the burdens of the people for the comfort of sirens, the nation’s pulse slows, and ordinary men begin to bleed in quiet dignity.
Time after time, the ballot becomes a gambling table where the highest bidder wins, and the masses fold into silence like soaked akara paper. The masses are not stupid—they are simply exhausted. Exhausted from voting hopes and eating regrets. The elected turn elected ghosts, vanishing from the streets that birthed their campaigns. It is a tragic irony: the same hands that shared rice during elections now fold in indifference while their people drink water from potholes.
Governance, if it must mean anything, must first be local before it becomes national. But what we see today is a theatre of detachment—a system where policies are brewed in air-conditioned conference rooms far removed from the stench of slums and the rhythm of marketplaces. A leader who does not smell his people’s sweat cannot design policies that cleanse their wounds. A politician who never touches the red earth of his village has no business controlling its destiny. Leadership is not Abuja; it is the crying child in Ibarapa, the collapsed classroom in Zamfara, the unpaid teacher in Idah.
Great leaders—those whose names echo across time—were not known for escaping their people’s pain but embracing it. Lee Kuan Yew walked the streets of a then-underdeveloped Singapore. Nelson Mandela sat in the same prison cell that his people feared. In contrast, many of our leaders today ride tinted dreams, armored from reality. They live like flying birds who have forgotten the taste of corn on the ground. And when a bird forgets the ground, it soon becomes the prey of the sky.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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