Nigeria Is Merit Incorporated – TYLPI
BY SEGUN ADEBAYO – A Leading Pan-Yoruba think-thank and advocacy group, The Yoruba Leadership and Peace Initiative (TYLPI), has described Nigeria as a merit and excellence saturated country on all fronts.
Consequently, the TYLPI submitted that not being the exclusive preserve of any ethnic group or geographical area, people of merit and excellence abound nationwide.
The group was reacting to submissions by the Afenifere Leader, Chief Ayo Adebanjo at the Greater Nigeria Conference held by an Igbo think-tank in Abuja, to the effect that if Nigeria’s Presidency was based on merit, the Eastern part of Nigeria would have been producing, and would in perpetuity, produce the country’s President.
Speaking through its Director of Publicity, Mr Tunde Ipinmisho, the TYLPI said Chief Adebanjo, like all Nigerians, has the inalienable right to freedom of expression, but he should endeavour to always differentiate between his personal views and those of the entire Yoruba nation.
The TYLPI also cautioned that leaders should be careful so that their aversion to certain individuals does not affect their judgment when commenting on national issues, noting that during the First Republic, Nigeria’s different regions were led by excellent and meritorious leaders who articulated and implemented people-oriented policies and were accountable to the people.
Expressing regrets that today, politicians and leaders appropriate the people’s resources to serve their personal interests with no robust commitment to consequence management systems to effectively checkmate them, the TYLPI said such awkward tendency runs across all ethnic groups and geo-political zones in the country.
However, the statement said the solution to Nigeria’s leadership challenge at all levels was for the nation to embrace true federalism by restructuring the country such that each unit, would exercise substantial political and economic, control over its affairs while yielding agreed powers and resource percentages to the central government.
The group said with such an arrangement in place, the humongous resources currently available but being misused by the different levels of the country’s power structure would be released for grassroots development,
For the group, it is important that as the 2023 polls draw close, politicians and respected leaders should dwell on issues of achieving development in a just and fair society, rather than promoting unproven theories such as domiciliation of superior meritocracy in one geographical or ethnic section of the country.
It, therefore, warned against dangerous narratives and selfish postulations that could further polarise the nation ahead of next year’s general elections.
