Ituah Ighodalo is the pastor in charge of Trinity House and founder of African Leadership Group (ALG). In this interview, he speaks on the leadership challenges confronting the nation and other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU reports
You have a platform for discussing leadership traits that can benefit government and governance. What inspired its formation?
The African Leadership Group (ALG), under the auspices of the Tri Africa Foundation is our response to trying to solve three or four issues in Nigeria and in Africa or in Africa and in Nigeria. Number one, what are the people’s thoughts on an effective and efficient society? Number two, how do we resolve our leadership question and get the right leaders?
Number three, how do we better inform the people about what is going on around them? And then, number four, how do we identify leadership potential and potential leaders. That’s what the ALG is set up to do and it does that through three or four different kinds of activities.
The first activity is the discussion that we have once a week, where we identify people who speak on the subject matter that we have identified for that day in terms of leadership. We do this through this conversation and that conversation informs and identifies potential leaders and advises leadership.
Number two; we have some town hall meetings, where we go around the whole world educating Africans and Africans in diaspora about what the situation is. Number three, we have some training so large in the school of leadership and development and then the activities that we do. Also, the community impact activities that we do. And then now, we also have a fund, Hope Alive Fund that we use to empower indigent people who qualify.
Adewole Adebayo and Peter Obi were one of your guests; what is your assessment of their grasp of the issues affecting the country, and do you think they have the capacity to lead?
I think both Peter Obi and Adewole Adebayo have the capacity and the knowledge and the determination to lead the country. Peter Obi is not even young anymore.
He’s 64. Maybe, relative to what we’ve experienced in Nigeria, he may look young but 64 is not young. Adebayo is 53 years, he is young. He has the energy and the strength and the knowledge. What he probably may not have is the wide bandwidth of interrelationships and connections. But that is what a party system does for you.
If for example, he was in a party that was a broad-based party, a strong party, they will make up for his lack of bandwidth, they will pull the party together and promote him as a good candidate. Adebayo speaks very well. He’s very knowledgeable although I have not tested his capacity to implement things. But in terms of his knowledge, his enthusiasm and his roadmap, he speaks very well.
Peter Obi is another individual with a huge followership. What is your opinion of him?
Peter Obi has the added advantage that he has been tested before as a governor in Anambra State. He claims that he left a very good record there. When you talk to the people of the state, they’re in two opinions. Some think he did well, some think he could have done better. But he’s a hard-working man. He has the reputation of being frugal, a good manager of money and so on and so forth. I think he could have done a decent job as the president of Nigeria.
But I still think that in Nigeria we’re still looking for that man who has the capacity, wherewithal, compassion, determination, energy, genuine and sincere love for Nigeria as well as really wants to turn Nigeria around. Younger person; a person with energy, you know, maybe you need maturity also. So, you can’t be too young.
I think a person between the ages of 45 and 65 should be able to do this job. I think there is need for some maturity. A candidate below 40 might be a bit too inexperienced and not have the network and the broad base to handle a complex place like Nigeria. But if we have 40, 45 years and above and is surrounded by a very good party system or good social system, good team of advisors who have seen different aspects of Nigeria, such candidate should be able to run the country.
What does it really take to effectively govern Nigeria?
It takes understanding of the history of Nigeria; the background of Nigeria, the formation of Nigeria, the different tribes and persons and their complexities, their interests and the religions of Nigeria. You must be a very accommodating person. The person must be honest, corruption-free and hard-working. He or she must be a visionary, who sees a great future for Nigeria.
He or she must be bold, have the capacity for international relationships and interconnections, and must be determined to see Nigeria work. The person must not be a greedy, selfish, self-oriented person, which is the unfortunate lot of a lot of our leaders today. They’re more interested in themselves and what they want to do for themselves and not the collective good of the average Nigeria.
Looking at these leadership qualities, do you think we have someone, who can fill into this gap?
I just said that we’re still looking for that person. But I can assure you that people like that exist. It’s just that we may not know them. We may not know them because they’ve not been loud people, they’ve not made noise all over the place, they’ve not been exposed to public attention and all that, but they do exist. There are very competent people in Nigeria.
The banditry is horrible, the insecurity is disastrous, the level of infrastructure is so poor. But all these, things can change very quickly if we get the right kind of people who are saying the right kind of things
And if you go all over the world, a lot of Nigerians are doing extremely well. They are available, which is part of what we are trying to do at ALG, to find these people to bring them out, to talk to them, to find out where they are, what they are doing And even if they are not president they can be support material because to run Nigeria, you need quite a good team. You need a good team of different kinds of people.
Nigeria and leadership challenge. What’s the way out?
There’s a way out. We are just in a moment in time. We don’t know what’s going to happen in 30 years’ time. Nigeria is evolving and definitely there is a way out. Right now, we have even a new crop of young Nigerians below 25 and their thinking is different. In another 30 to 40 years, they’ll be the ones in leadership. They will be able to clear us out. This cannot continue. But what I think for the present time, what we need to do is number one, educate Nigerians.
A lot of people get away with what they do in Nigeria because a lot of people are not informed. They’re not educated. They don’t know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. So, if you educate Nigerians and get them informed, they’ll be able to take a much stronger stake in their well-being and in their production.
This is what changed France and took them out of feudal rulership of kings and monarchs. It took them out of the monarchy because over time the French people became much more educated, much more aware and much more informed.
And one day, there were enough informed people who led the revolution against the king, Louis XVI. He was beheaded. His execution by guillotine on January 21, 1793, at the Place de la Révolution in Paris, marked a dramatic and irreversible end to centuries of a continuous monarchy, including the earlier feudal period.
That kind of thing will also happen in Nigeria. By the time more people are well informed, they will stand and say, we are not going to take this anymore. They will define properly the kind of president or leader they want and they will not allow their votes to be bought. Not allow votes in records to be manipulated and then taking advantage of. It would happen over time, then you have enough people that are educated and bold enough, a lot of what is going on now will not be possible in Nigeria or anywhere else in the world.
The second is that by divine providence, something can happen that can put some body of reasonable quality and depth in leadership in Nigeria. And it has happened before, at least three or four times. Divine providence brought in General Olusegun Obasanjo in his first time. God also brought him again the second time. A lot of things are providential. And then, somehow, God can also make that happen again.
Divine providence made Goodluck Jonathan President. If Jonathan, on his own, had stood up to say he wants to be president of Nigeria, it never could have happened based on his exposure and his background at that time. Even our present president, Bola Tinubu, again was pushed in there by divine providence. To become governor of Lagos State, it was divine providence and that changed the trajectory of his life.
That hand of providence is still working and has not failed and will not fail. Nigeria is too blessed. Nigeria is too important to God. Nigeria is too favoured for it not to succeed. There is a lot of hope. To be honest, if we look at the country critically, one can still go out there and work and make some money. It’s still a big economy in spite of the level of not so good leadership because God has been extremely gracious to us.
There are many worse countries than Nigeria. Even in terms of human rights, the record is not terrible. The banditry is horrible now; the insecurity is disastrous, the level of infrastructure is so poor and so on and so forth. But all these, things can change very quickly if we get the right kind of people who are saying the right kind of things.
You mean Nigeria is not doing badly despite economy challenges, perceived genocide against Christians and terrorists having a field day in the country?
Well, there’s a lot of poverty in Nigeria but thank God it’s not at the level of starvation. There are some countries today where there’s a whole lot of starvation. You can’t live in Gaza right now.
There are some parts of Lebanon you can’t live in. You can’t go to Southern Sudan. It’s terrible. And there are some parts of South Africa with black people living there that are really horrible. But in Nigeria, there is a lot of resilience and people still keep coping. Lives are wasted, no doubt.
People are hungry, no doubt but people keep going. So, I’m even grateful to God that we are not at the point of war or the point of starvation where we experience disease outbreak. That gives us a lot of energy and a lot of hope and a lot of potential. Honestly, if we’ve a bit of orientation, we can up our game very quickly. There’s nobody in Nigeria that cannot be productive. To the insecurity, it’s all politics.
Some people are using religion and banditry and destruction of people to play politics, to make some places ungovernable for people, to make some people lose elections, to make some people look bad in terms of governance. That is part of the origin. Then some people are insisting that except they have power in one way or the other, they will continue to foment crisis and make Nigeria look terrible until they are in power.
The third is that some people are misled in terms of their religion thinking that this is the right thing to do, but some people know the right thing, but they are deliberately misleading others and getting them to cause this havoc. But the most painful thing now is that people are making money from it. People are making money on both sides.
The bandits are making a lot of money. They have never seen that kind of money before. Then, the people sponsoring them are making money and then the people who are supposed to capture them, some of the leaders in security forces are making money. They’re doing their best to make sure that they sabotage the process. It is going to take a lot of determination. It will take a very sincere, determined and objective leader to change this scenario.
