The Nigerian Context
While there is a glut of literature on the phenomenon of followership in the management sciences, there is a lack in respect of followership in Nigeria, especially in the sphere of politics. Discourses on followership thrive in the public sphere in terms of rhetoric, propaganda and buck-passing by the political leadership. One very old assumption about followership in Nigeria is the saying that the Nigerian people are very docile and that when beaten to the wall, instead of a fight back, they will jump the wall. Omorogieva Liberty Omoruyi (2022) argues that followership not leadership is the core problem of Nigeria in ways that underscore the charge of docility or apathy. He stresses the “‘It doesn’t matter’ syndrome that causes matters to arise.” He further argues that over time the masses compound the Nigerian condition due to their nonchalant attitude towards politics that ensures that the people neither scrutinise leadership aspirants nor vote for the right candidates. There is near abdication of the business of governance to those in positions of authority who employ it to aggrandise themselves. As he puts it:
The majority of the citizens leave the business of governance to the few who are in various positions of authority or in government and this is one of the chief reasons politicians are not accountable to the people. Governance becomes a secret business and shady deals are made; loans are taken without citizens’ consent (Omoruyi, 2022).
Omoruyi further notes that the negligence of the followers to participate in public affairs has only perpetrated enduring hardship. According to him, politics “affects almost all human endeavours and workings in society.”
He expresses the belief that “if the people rise, things will change for the best because evil and illegitimate government prevail because the people choose to be ignorant or are kept in ignorance.”
Two, Nigerians suffer from partial amnesia; we forget easily, and therefore, we allow history to repeat itself. Wole Soyinka (1994, p. x) speaks to this reality in his justifications of his book, Ibadan, The Penkelemes Years:
Underlying it all is also agonising, truly lamentable brief memory span that appears to bedevil my society. Well, perhaps, it is not so much a matter of mental retention as the seeming inability to extend meaningfully the effective span of memory.
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Three, the population, especially the youth are lazy. Instead of seeking productive engagement they are vegetating in action and seeking an easy way out of their hapless position. In relation to the third assumption, President Mohammadu Buhari can be credited for voicing ex-cathedra at the Commonwealth Business Forum in faraway London in April of 2018.
According to him:
More than 60 per cent of the population is below 30, a lot of them haven’t been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria is an oil-producing country, therefore, they should sit and do nothing, and get housing, healthcare, education free” (Ogundipe, 2018).
Earlier in February 2016, in an interview with UK Telegraph, the President said some Nigerians in the UK, mostly youth, were disposed to criminality and should not be granted asylum there. These charges underline the continuing relevance of the discourse on followership.
Indeed, the followership question has attracted the attention of many Nigerians and organisations. The Nigerian Guardian Newspaper in its editorial of May 7, 2018, while operationalising the relations of roles between leadership and followership notes that:
Recent happenings have come to query the leadership quotient of this country. Smarting from a carry-over of inept leadership and deliberate planlessness, Nigeria seems to have gravitated into a helpless state of inertia… Thus to avert the cascading mediocrity that is so deleterious to leadership, there is a need to build the capacity of Nigerians for leadership. It is not that this country does not have good forward-looking and result-oriented leaders, the problem is their absence from the political class… The problem of leadership does not rest with public officeholders alone. The vast majority who see themselves as followers also have a role to play. To paraphrase an old maxim, the surest way for evil to thrive is for good people to do nothing…That Nigeria finds itself in the leadership quagmire is partly traceable to the followership that condones maladministration and lawlessness, and is also apathetic of the state of the nation.
Beyond the reflections of The Guardian, other Nigerians have also preoccupied themselves with the Nigerian condition while affirming the leadership problem; they have equally indicted the followership in the Nigerian governance quagmire. Rotimi Fawole (2019), jotted by the allegation of the complicity of the leaders and the followers in the reproduction of the Nigerian problems, he argues that the followers must take an equal share as the leaders in the problem that has bedevilled the country. According to him:
The dearth of leaders of quality is often and correctly said to be the problem with Nigeria. But if we will be honest, we will acknowledge that we have a considerable followership problem as well, perhaps underscoring another truism – that leaders emerge from the general populace and not from some utopian leadership factory. In other words, the people produce their leaders and leaders are perhaps a reflection of their followers.
In a prescriptive tone, he notes:
It almost seems unfair to demand more from people most of whom live in multidimensional poverty, but if the theses of leaders emerging from amongst the people and all of society thinking alike are true, then it must mean that if we want better leaders, we have to be better people.
Omagbitse Barrow (2017) who claims to have interacted with the leaders and the led, comes up with some propositions, namely:
1) leaders do not drop down from heaven, they emerge from the people; therefore 2) If the ordinary people do not understand the role they play in creating future leaders then they too must be blamed for the pervasive rot that our society faces, and 3) We should be concerned about the attitude and mindset of the ‘led” or what others will describe as the “followers’ even more than we are concerned about the leaders – since it is the led that create the leaders that we have.
Barrow goes further to encode his prescription as CODE where C stands for courage, O for oneness, D for discipline and E for empathy. The blame game could endure for forever. But are the followers to be blamed? I shall explain in what follows.
Sylvester Odion Akhaine, PhD (London), sly.akhaine@gmail.com
Professor of Political Science, Lagos State University, presented this paper at the 2022 Annual Conference of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators of Nigeria (ICSAN) in Lagos – Nigeria
