Former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Professor Attahiru Jega says Nigeria needs competent and assertive leaders and not necessarily strong leaders.
The former INEC boss, who said this at the 58th Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association in Abuja on Monday, maintained that an incompetent leader who is strong will end up destroying institutions.
Jega said, “What we require most are the competence and capacity of leaders to take decisions and be assertive in ensuring that those decisions are actually implemented. So, we have to be very careful in thinking that a strong leader can really help.
“Just like a weak leader can wreck an institution, a strong leader, who has just that power and courage, but lacks the capacity, ability and competence to lead, can also wreck strong institutions.
“Competence of leadership is a very important variable in bringing about the stable political transition, good governance and deepening of democracy.”
Jega, who superintended the 2011 and 2015 general election, said politicians must stop treating elections as a do-or-die affair.
He recalled that a former President once said elections must be do-or-die, an incident he described as most unfortunate.
Jega also said there was a need for agencies of government to shun partisanship as this weakened institutions and eroded public confidence.
He added, “We must emphasise professionalism, impartiality and non-partisanship. This is because quite too often, you have good and strong institutions, but once partisanship is introduced and partiality become the norm, as many public institutions in this country, then those institutions would not be able to deliver effectively on their mandates.”
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