GBENGA ODEGBAMI
During electoral campaigns, the challenger usually emphasizes that he or she is a better alternative and in Nigeria, this played out as the APC political party drove home this message. I must proudly confess that I wholeheartedly and passionately supported the opposition for the presidency, not because the ex-president was necessarily bad (though he made basket loads of mistakes; least of which is looking the other way when it comes to corruption) but because Nigeria needed to break the jinx of the incumbency factor and also because the incumbent party needed a snap back to reality.
The summary above is the easy part of having to change mantras. The execution of the change is the “reality”. What do I mean by this? Unfortunately, most revolutionary change efforts tend to fail in government, societies and even organizations. Let me repeat, if you want to make any type of change that involves “deep structural changes” (For example, in culture, pattern of living, DNA, personality etc.), your probability of success is extremely low. This is just not my opinion but statistics over the years have shown this. Recently the Arab spring in Syria, Yemen & Libya destroyed the countries. I personally think that in Bahrain and Egypt they have changed their minds about the definition of Arab spring. Meanwhile, in Tunisia it seems like it was very successful; a lot of `other revolutionary movements in history have similar pathetic success rates.
Though, while the likelihood of success is tremendously low, it is not impossible.
Anyone can desire and seek change but not everyone can execute change successfully. Considering that revolutionary change can be perceived in a million different ways, I need to clarify that I mean change for good, i.e. positive change and advancement for the society.
In my academic pursuit, I had to read different write-ups concerning change. As I read, it became clear why it will be difficult to achieve the revolutionary type of change sought after by most societies. Firstly, most of the researchers claim that a lot of academic references do not exist to fully explain change and that change is relative to time and era of the study. Simply means that time can render any observation on change obsolete before you publish the report. Secondly, in an attempt to simplify the phenomena, researchers based their report on their area of preference for example; Biology, Physics, Mathematics, Psychology, theology and History to explain the 6-letter word (change). This shows that change is not a straight forward discussion. Thirdly, societal changes are typically not the same between societies and therefore, it might be silly to assume that what worked in Society A will work in Society B. The reason is simple; one is dealing with the unpredictable nature of humans. In the sciences, in order to validate an experiment, you have to recreate all the factors that can influence the experiment when you change location.
Considering the way, the cards are stacked against a successful change effort, one will assume that whoever is leading a revolutionary change in a society should adequately prepare himself for the challenges ahead. Unfortunately, you can’t know the challenges associated with such efforts if you know everything in the world except how to manage change. You can also forget any success if you do not appreciate that you are dealing with human beings with different levels of intellect, experience, education, prejudice, culture, economic status, age, sex and many more. To make it more complicated for whoever is leading this change, the society can change their definition of change at anytime and societies commonly prefer stability to changes anyway, regardless of how passionate the they clamor before the change.
Enough of the boring analysis, from my studies it seems as if, revolutionary change effort in societies is either extremely quick or exceptionally slow in order to achieve any measure of success. In situations where it is quick, it is usually experiences strong resistance or/and ferocious execution. The quick mode is likely to be very high risk and high reward, monarchs have lost their heads as a result of this mode and the journey of nations have been transformed where it has worked, for example Rawlings and Ghana, Constantine and Roman Empire. In the exceptionally slow mode, if the efforts are consistent, failure is usually rare, the monarch’s head is intact and the change typical transcend generations i.e. Singapore, Malaysia, USA, Dubai are examples of this type of change. The key ingredient for the slow steady mode is that a superordinate goal exists with a significant part of the population while for the quick mode, the vision belongs to the change agent. If the change agent is right, the future will reward him with external memories. Obviously, the slow mode works better and has higher adoption rate but requires consistency and patience to wait for it to succeed which we lack in Nigeria presently.
Bringing it back to Nigeria, I do not know the path we going regarding this our change but I voted for APC to figure it out and act on it. I have no doubt that APC desired positive change for Nigeria and really wants to move this country forward, this is a personal opinion and probably biased one. I also think, they didn’t have any concrete plan regarding how the change will happen and how they will manage it. Mandela is great because he knew how to manage the transition away from apartheid ensuring white, black and colored South-Africans love him.
If the government have a plan, they will be a quick-win that will be use to persuade people to have patience and not just talk about sabotage, oil price slump and corruption. They will not repeat the same excuses used by the previous government, this will only make the government lose trust and destroy the psychological contract with the people. They will develop and market a bright future even if it is only a dream for example, Martin Luther King. If they have a plan they will not, simply constitute government the way we have been doing it and it hasn’t really worked. Ironically, when we have sizable number of cabinet members that are below 50 years, we move forward faster than above that age. You need young and hot blood in any good team that will not seek to be politically correct at every junction. The developed world makes this case easily.
Assuming corruption campaign is the quick-win, we have nothing to show for it as at today because nobody has been convicted really. While judiciary bottleneck is a very good reason for this, to the common man on the street, this is an excuse and the longer this takes, the more trust that will be eroded. No trust means, no participation and that increases the potential for all the change mantra to be only a tune.
Based on the feedbacks from the streets of Nigeria, I am of the personally opinion that if the leaders of the Nigeria Change effort don’t act fast enough, Nigerians might change the definition of change again.
Finally, I stand with Buhari (Sai baba). His success is Nigeria’s success. I only wish he realizes quickly that the challenges we are facing as a nation cannot be fixed by the old generation no matter how brilliant, wise and reliable they might be. Millennial new thinking is required the same way this type thinking rebranded him to win the election based on the change mantra. We need the same magic. From black to yellow, from lepa to orobo.
That was what was advertised and that is the change we want.
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