Accidental Leadership Syndrome: The Nigerian Experience
By Ogiri John Ogiri I stand before you today with a huge sense of responsible humility to speak on an experience that has almost become a norm as far as leadership is concerned in our country. That norm is what I have chosen to title "Accidental Leadership Syndrome," a syndrome that has characterized our leadership experiment and experience in Nigeria. With your permission, I would like to take you down memory lane. As many of us are aware — whether such awareness was obtained through armchair participation by reading history books in schools and colleges, or through active involvement in the past historical experiences of our own kind of leadership experiment — it is common knowledge that the nation called Nigeria today was brought into existence on January 1st, 1914, via an audacious and ambitious amalgamation of the Northern Protectorate and the Southern Protectorate by the colonial administration of Lord Frederick Lugard. After about 46 years of colonial rule in Nigeria, ...