Leadership Challenges In Secular Nations
By Hashim Suleiman
POLITICS DIGEST- Justice they say is expected to be served without bias but trust me as it sounds so easy to dispense, you’ll experience the most difficulty of it when you find yourself leading in whatever capacity in a secular society. Every part of the divide will want a 100% implementations of their wants and needs and unless that is served you’ll be perceived as being biased and you have to learn to manage such if you wish to succeed in such arrangement.
A classical example of definition of secularity is Nigeria. The two major faiths of the country require that the country be totally branded as belonging to their faiths, this is coupled with the counter arguments about which is more populated. The proponents of both faiths quickly forget you have taken an oath before God Almighty to uphold the constitution of the republic. They wish you suspend such oath occasionally for their whimsical tendencies and honestly unless you’re critical enough to guard your conscience, they could confuse you to assume if the religions have different rules regarding loyalty to oaths and pacts.
A cursory look into both faiths reveals that God commands justice and forbids discrimination and abomination, but in secular society you become faced with who’s place it is to adjudicate over who deserves justice or not. All the various laws have been crafted before various representatives were drafted to formulate a constitution that had been signed off by all before God. For people to now come in the middle of a game and request for the rules to be changed smacks of greatest form of unfairness and injustice that cannot pass for any godly test.
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These issues and more require that a leader of such kind of society must be fort-right and work to satisfy their conscience, otherwise it’s every difficult to lead. You would have to be seen to sometimes offend your kith and kin in order to serve justice but you can’t be bothered because you’re only upholding your oath before God to protect a certain pact of living together. Every statement is read from the prism of ‘them vs us’ as against a collective national matter.
These kinds of matter become worst when the society has been left over the years to get to the point where most people are scared to speak truth to followers for the fear of being vilified, mocked and insulted. Chaos takes the center stage, suspicion becomes rife, injustice becomes order of the day and you can never have a proper recipe for imminent implosion other than these. Nigeria is basically at this stage where even leadership is scared to attempt to institute justice without being hounded into a narrative of ‘us vs them’. This is most unfortunate especially that it is taking a dimension of no return.
However, some of us who have privilege of putting our thoughts to paper in order that someone may see and make a meaning of it would love to add a voice on this matter as relates to Nigeria and call for caution and opening up of sincere conversations with a view to ensuring a secured future for all. The bloodletting and free flow of it in our land is becoming scary and a pointer to a dangerous future. We must allow leadership to execute their oaths with God to implement the content of the constitution which in itself is a pact before God. We cannot choose to be holy in piecemeal, we have to be seen to imbibe the spirit of fairness and ability to place one another in others shoes so as to know where it pinches. The curses we reign on ourselves and leadership is enough to attract all the negative vices there can be. What is a society without leadership, in one scoop we blame all the problems on the leaders, in another scoop we condemn their efforts at trying to be just and manage implosions and crises.
The making of secular nations is an arrangement that has to be based more on initiating engagements and discussions to amend certain items of the pacts as against intolerance and mockeries that could deepen the fault lines and the consequences of it in the long run would not be beneficial to anyone, we’re almost there already.
A word is enough for the wise!
Hashim Suleiman
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