There is something that the Living Faith Church World-wide led by Bishop David Oyedepo does which I suggest this nation should borrow from and adapt to suit us. When the Church selects or appoints members to undertake an assignment for the benefit of the congregation, it will one day call them out during a service for recognition and formal inauguration. After this formal introduction and commissioning to carry out the task, the leader is required to say in his acceptance speech a form of pledge or oath that “may this assignment not collapse on my head.”
Perhaps because of this faith-filled solemn pledge and the subsequent hard work by the leader and his team, in my 22 years of worship with this church, I have never seen or heard that a particular team appointed by the Church to oversee an assignment and ensure the success of a particular task has failed so signally that there have been murmuring, grumbling and complaining by members of the church.
It does appear to me that once a person or group makes this type of pledge and proceeds to work assiduously for the fulfilment of whatever goal they have undertaken to achieve, the Holy Spirit takes over and ensures he or they never fail(s).
Therein lies my suggestion that perhaps the time has come for the operators of this dysfunctional Nigerian system to borrow a leaf from the very progressive church which never believes in failure but continues all success, hence it is also known as “Winners.” Living Faithers or Winners win continually.
Several years ago I had wondered in a column that it looked to me like what we were seeing in our country was progressive degeneration in the quality of our national leadership; each successive administration was a notch worse than the administration it succeeded. This observation of mine held true for not only our national leadership. No, it is true of all layers of the country’s leadership. The man we all condemned as a failure yesterday looks like a fairly better performer than the man who is on the throne now.
I honestly think that if we are to make any progress, we should learn to become more statistical by immediately drawing up a Development Index (DI) by which we measure the performance of each administration. If an administration comes to an end, we should know how it scored on the Development Index in all the major areas or sectors of development. For example, in the economic sector, we should have something like Debt Repaid and Percentage of Debt Stock Left Unpaid; Unemployment, Quantum of Resources Generated and How Applied. In education, we should have something like School Enrollment and Number of Out-of School Children, Number of Competent Teachers Produced, etc. there should be such objective and easily measurable criteria in all sectors by which the success or failure of an administration can be assessed independent of political propaganda and mainly media success
The rule is that every administration should surpass the performance of its immediate outgone one in all the measurable areas. If you cannot surpass it, at least match it but never fall below it in any of the areas handed over to you. If out of school children was 30,000 you are required to reduce it by several percentage performances such that in the next few years, we shall not hear of anything like that anymore. If cows, goats and other big domestic animals were raised through open grazing and allowed to eat people’s crops you should tell us how many livestock was now raised in ranches under your watch. These are measurable indices of development, my friend. Don’t go about looking for 1950-something grazing routes, please.
We should ban the blaming of past administrations for all old and new sins. It should become an offense punishable by impeachment for any sitting administration to blame anything on any past administration. You are not in a competition for wrong doing. By your election to office you are called upon to contribute your quota to the development of the polity where you are in charge, No administration should be allowed to use the resources of state to engage in excuses and blame game of any kind because the energy which is used for inventing excuses are much more than the one needed to bring about development projects. None should say he is unable to match the performance of a previous administration because oil prices fell from a certain height to a low level. If oil prices fall, look for other commodities that will replace oil as a revenue earner.
If at the end of your government you are matched against your predecessor and you did not match or outperform him in all sectors, then we will declare that the assignment has collapsed under your head and you should be banned from holding public office for life. This is how we will eliminate excuses, inventions and poor performance from our public space.
It is not funny at all that we have watched our schools collapse, our hospitals and healthcare collapse, our economy collapse, our everything collapse as if nothing has been put in-charge of some people over the years. If we do not change one day, the whole country will collapse under our head; the engine will just knock and we will not be able to move. We will be in total disarray.
