Leadership is a critical factor in the building process of any state. We can all agree that the most challenging problem we have in Kogi state is not the economy or politics. The problem with Kogi state is that of leadership. Dr Sani Shaibu Teidi has developed a political vision for Kogi through his philosophical group called the TEIDI Movement.
The movement understands that state building is always a work in progress, a dynamic process in constant need of nurturing and re-invention. It also believes that state builders never rest because all state are constantly facing up to new challenges. The recognition of this building process of our state and the leadership constraints we have witnessed over the years, the TEIDI Movement came into existence. The group propagates the vision, commitment, competence, honesty and integrity of its benefactor, Dr Sani Shaibu Teidi.
The group understands that state -building is always therefore the product of conscious statecraft, not happenstance.
It also preaches that state don’t just happen by historical accident, rather they are built by men and women with vision and resolve. New states have replaced empires as the basic unit of human political organizations.
This group seeks to build for our state a common sense of purpose, a sense of share destiny, a collective imagination of belonging. A leadership quality which our benefactor, Dr Sani Shaibu Teidi is known for politically.
For a state that is in need of leadership nurturing and re-invention includes his understanding of a complex state called Kogi. His vision for Kogi state is about building a state for all. He believes state building has many important aspects.
First, it is about building a political entity which corresponds to a given territory, based on some generally accepted rules, norms, and principles of a common citizenship.
Second, it is also about building institutions which symbolizes the political entity – institutions such as the bureaucracy, an economy, the judiciary, universities, a civil service and civil society organizations.
Teidi also believes that state building is therefore about building the tangible and the intangible threads that hold a political entity together and gives it a sense of belonging.
This attributes is what is lacking in Kogi. He seeks to build the institutions and values which sustain the collective community in these modern times even in these days of globalization and rapid international flows of ideas and people. He believes having a viable state remains synonymous with achieving modernity.
He seeks Kogi greatness not only through its population, Agriculture and precious solid mineral wealth as to him the call of Kogi being confluence state is astrictive but by scientific and technological skills, industriousness, productivity and above all competitiveness. He sees these qualities as the major determinants of national power capabilities and greatness.
Teidi sees as perturbing the questions which remain in Kogi, why the state has underperformed in her more than 20 years of state building, and why repeated efforts to re-jig the political and economic structures, despites our enormous human and natural resources endowments has been so difficult and the frits so patchy?
He categorized the answers in this critical areas as follows:
A, threats and challenges posed by the environment for state building.
B, the quality of leadership that has confronted theses challenges.
C, the fragility of political and development institutions.
Teidi believes we need to understand the environment for state building in Nigeria so that we can clearly identify our strengths, weakness, and core challenges. We also need to revolve a system of leadership recruitment and accountability which produces the sorts of leaders that will confronts this challenges of the environment in a way that is beneficial for state building. He has always argues that, state are a product of the human will, ingenuity, imagination and the institutions that sustain their collective exertions.
He has a vision of making Kogi succeeds in building a state nation through objective and rigours analyses to locate the dynamics –positive or negative. Kogi need a leader who would build and not allow a small fire to become large, but a leader with cognitive consistency to differentiate between symmetric and asymmetric warfare. And I believe that leadership is the one and only Dr Sani Shaibu Teidi, the Olimene Attah Doga.
– Comrade Yekini Bello writes from Okene, Kogi state
