Leadership Civility

Leadership Civility: Leading in a disrespectful and divisive era is a major challenge facing the world and precisely, our nation today, which can be observed in our work places, religious gatherings, political parties, schools, associations, organisations, etc. While I seek to understand why this is so, it becomes so clear that one major ingredient is missing in this whole things.  No doubts, people are hurting and not many are paying attention to see this hurt in the lives of others . Employers make so much demand on the employees, the workers going on strike for not receiving the commensurate rewards for their efforts, parents putting pressure on their wards, lecturers failing their students and being joyful about it, the agberos and overload, the nagging of wives and husbands, etc. When all these are put together, we will wonder and ask, how come? Hurting people have one thing in common - they need to be loved. While it is not clear the true definition of love, yet I find a de...

One of the greatest undoing of the Western culture on the African culture is the freedom of information act that affords each player of the society equal access to information with disregard to age. While the typical African culture believes that the young must be accountable to old and the old accountable to the gods, it becomes imperative to question who these gods are. But on the other, the Western culture supposes that being accountable is something humans should do for themselves. As one of the famous Igbo adages posits, "Ala adịghị mma bụ uru ndị nze." Meaning that a group of people in the society benefits from the disrespectful and divisive nature of the polity of the land, which begs me to ask: Does it mean that youths are being incited to be disrespectful and divisive by some elders who take advantage of the situation or is it just in the nature of these young people to be disrespectful? Come to think of it, who raised these youths to become who they ...

There are two sets of people leaders must expect around them in public leadership, which if they do not take care may find it difficult to  maintain a balance for having already taken sides. Those who flatter and those who critique. Each of these is needed for stability to be maintained in leadership, and good leaders, instead of taking sides, rather use them as thermostats for effective leadership. I personally have made a decision not to flatter people in public leadership especially when I see that their achievements are an aspect of their statutory function. It is like applauding a man who just impregnated the wife, which to me is his statutory function by nature. Clapping for you when you do what you are supposed to do can be subtle sometimes and manipulative, because it begs me to ask myself, "what will I do if you then do some extraordinary things beyond your statutory functions?" It is important that leaders should begin to align themselves along the path that doe...

Deep in the roots of the African culture is the default setting for respect that can never be compromised, which supposes that respect is the statutory duty of the young towards the old. This statutory duty confered upon the young created a strong power chasm between the two, which is almost impossible to break. This divide does not just exist between adults and children, it is also between men and women, which has given rise to several schools of thoughts such as individualism, feminism, and the likes, especially, from the Western world. In the predominant Western cultures, respect is rather a traded commodity that must earned and never deserved unless the transaction is complete leading the contraptions like: "You must earn my respect." "Respect is reciprocal" Each of these contraptions defies the fundamental African culture, which has led to the invention of technology, the melting pot ideology, and most profoundly, globalization. While it may suggest that th...