We have toyed with the devil in the past, now we are being hunted. Given the kind of leaders we have today, one may be persuaded by the weakening structures of the country to conclude that at a point in the past, which history could attest to, our supposed leaders have had sex with the devil without condom (apology to Olamide). Offspings: unending leadership crisis, ethnic and political jingoism, deluded populace and very confused people.

Nigeria is enfeebled and humiliated by lack of dreamers and visionaries. Much more despairingly, for the past 50 or so years, primordial and even primitive considerations have been at the bottom of leadership selection in Nigeria. For instance, Obasanjo was supposed to lay a solid foundation for Fourth Republic democracy, but due to the limitations of his vision, his temperamental unsuitability, and the constriction of his unpresidential heart, he was incapable of laying a foundation for a modern society he could not conceive. He worsened the problem by foisting the wrong kind of leadership on equally prejudiced, fearful and passive electorate.

Nigerian rulers nay denounce the pessimism of their countrymen and even live in denial of the looming apocalypse. They may continue to affirm the indissolubility of the country and whoop that the country’s unity is non-negotiable. They may believe that by and by, the constitution, if tinkered with, may deliver the utopia we crave, in spite of the indiscipline we are noted for. The fact, however, is that the fabric that holds the country together is straining badly, and will sooner or later give way, for it cannot be held together by words but by action, action which we have refused to summon.

I think it is time once again to reiterate the point that it is not projects, roads, education and health, etc. that drive a country’s greatness. The first grand task is to find a leader with an inspiring vision capable of freeing the country from the mediocre orbit in which it is locked. It is ideas that beget projects that beget greatness. Ask American how they got to the moon. There is no other order of precedence. We must find a leader who has been to the mountaintop and has conceived in his mind the heights he wishes to take the country. He must be clear in his mind what the dimensions of the Promised Land would be, and must also be able to articulate how to get there. He must understand the kind of democracy required to midwife a great country and be a convinced democrat himself, not a democrat as an afterthought. He must understand how comparably high the shoulders of his countrymen must be in relation to the other peoples of the world.

You do not have to belong to the opposition to know it was a tragedy enduring eight years of Obasanjo, three or so chequered years of Yar’Adua, and now halting, half-hearted years of Jonathan. What actions are required to weld the country together and make it flourish? Two options present themselves: either the people join hands together to lift the country; or a leader emerges to lead the charge. Most people have given up on the possibility of a visionary leader emerging, and have therefore reposed faith in the ability of followers to do the job. I entertain no such nonsense. Followers are never capable of creating and sustaining a vision for national identity and greatness. They could never summon the consensus that would bring it about. In the late 1930s, for instance, Britain was amenable to appeasing Hitler’s irredentism. It took Winston Churchill’s bitter challenge to galvanise his country in the opposite direction. France was, after defeat in that same war, resigned to fate; it took the single-mindedness of Charles de Gaulle to convince them otherwise.

We must note, contrary to the ersatz patriotism of emergency nationalists, the nation is fatally misaligned and would require substantial structural realignment. That observation remains as true today as at any other time. In fact the structural damage is much worse, thanks to homespun malignant engineers of structural chaos and systemic dysfunction.

This is the time we need YOU as a Change Engineer in order to deliver us from our past sex escapade with the devil. Note that your Spartan discipline and integrity will often be mistaken for intransigence and intolerance by those accustomed to easy life and shabby compromises. They will forget that your intransigence will serve as a historic counterfoil to a more pernicious intransigence; and that your intolerance is simply an intolerance of intolerance. In any case, without these attributes, the political space which your detractors are currently abusing and even shamelessly threatening to contract would never have opened up. While your patriotic supporters will be dying in the trenches, our current democratic avatars will be up to their usual game of dubiety and duplicity. Set against their own record, their sanctimonious preachments about patriotism and integrity will then ring hollow and utterly hypocritical. You don’t need to be discouraged, move on!

It is me, @Obajeun

Jonah Ayodele Obajeun is a professional with a multinational. He blogs @www.obajeun.com. Reach him on twitter via @Obajeun