The first step towards success in Public Office is to surround yourself with intelligent persons and creative minds.
In all democratic settings across the globe, manpower planning characterized by normative considerations abysmally fail to address the yearnings of the people.
A political leader who is desirous to succeed in public office should be extremely careful of his political recruitment process.
A scenario where a political officer allows his intellectually empty brothers, family members and close relatives to handle sensitive exercise like political recruitment for him, the entire political system will be saturated with mediocrity.
At all levels, Political Office-holders should be Lions. Thus, lions do not move with flocks of sheep. In all human societies, a mediocre and unintelligent person also associates with persons on same pedestal. Similarly, a 419 person identifies with his former and new colleagues in the illegitimate covenant of defrauding people.
In all serious governments around the world, recruitments around the lion(political officer) should be Lion-lion and not lion-sheep thesis.
Specifically, sheep has nothing to offer in the domain of lion in terms of policy initiation and agenda-setting. This such misplaced synthesis is responsible for abysmal failure of some administration in Africa.
Its pertinent to state that when the right persons are put in the right place, the challenges of administration is 80% solved. When primitive considerations overrides this grand rule, the prediction of failure of a political office-holder can easily be be done by market women selling crayfish and pepper.
What’s the panacea?
1. The masses should resist imposition of unserious persons on them during political process.
2. Political Office-holders should understand from the onset that Administration is not handled by academic pedestrians and unintelligent persons anywhere in the world. Hence, such persons should not be allowed closer to recruitment table. Otherwise, they will saturate the political system with Mediocrity, Blackmailers, Political Jobbers and Praise- Singers. No human community has ever developed by supplanting and sacrificing intelligent persons in the community and promoting mediocrity.
3. Political Office-holders should note that Public Policies(education, health, agriculture, security, environmental, infrastructure, employment, science & technology, workers welfare, wealth creation, etc) are undoubtedly the dressing-mirrow through which they are adjudged to have succeeded or abysmally failed to justify their mandates. Hence, we evaluate your performance via the instrumentality of your “Policies and Programme Implementation”. We follow laid down international procedures by adopting some development(political and economic) indicators.
However, its sometimes sad to see touts and area boys at the mainstream of Administration in some political system. What can such persons offer to the system? Can there be any development in a political system where ‘drivers’ of policy process cannot develop policy documents and grossly lack cerebral capacity to write even a page of any policy issue/directional tempo in the State?
Such category of persons should be involved in other spheres of political process and not in mainstream of Administration of the political system. Such primitive/backward approach to governance discourages youths from acquiring higher education.
The youths, implicit in the enthronement of such primitive considerations in a political system, unarguably see education as waste of time, energy and resources. This is largely because, those to determine the directional tempo of their Local and State governments on the long run are most likely to be intellectually ill-equipped opportunists previously recruited by some Political Office-holders. This must be resisted to safeguard our existence as a people.
