Nigerian State, Leadership Deficiency and the Challenges of Good Governance in the Fourth Republic.

Abstract

State is essentially created to provide and sustain good governance for its citizenry. The ability of the state to fulfill this fundamental responsibility is greatly depended on the physical, social and political capacity of the leaders entrusted with the management of the affairs of the state. Significantly, the nature and quality of leadership and governance in any state determines to a large extent how such state will be socially described, politically evaluated and economically rated among the comity of nations within the global community. Consequently, every state strives to ensure that its leadership recruitment processes is jealously guided and protected by the essential qualities capable of engendering good governance and ensuring effective service delivery system.  Nigerian state has been battling with leadership and governance crisis since independence without any strong hope of surmounting these unending challenges as poverty, insecurity, corruption and the like continued unabated. With this ugly and unceasing situation, one is forced to ask the following questions; one, despite various policy attempts and ceaseless use of resources at ensuring good governance by successive governments in Nigeria, why has it been so difficult to achieve? to what has been responsible for this never-ending leadership debacle in Nigeria in spite of series of implemented reforms on leadership recruitment? Based on the foregoing, the study examined critically leadership recruitment and governance processes in Nigeria with the intention of identifying the various factors that are strongly responsible for leadership deficiency and the apparent failure of governance in the last decades. The study adopted Elite theory for its analysis. The study employed the use of existing data from texts, journals, magazines, conference proceedings, newspapers, bulletins, published and unpublished theses and the internet to source its information. The study observed that leadership deficiency has been responsible for governance crisis in Nigeria, and therefore recommended cultivation of public interest, constitutionalism, integrity, accountability and transparency as panacea to good leadership and governance.