Jesus’ Servant-Shepherd Leadership Framework as Springboard to The Nigerian National Project

Abstract

Jesus Christ developed a leadership model which has proven efficacious for the stable growth of his counterculture, Christianity. He taught it to his followers to pass it on to succeeding generations of the counterculture that is intended to eventually engulf the entire world. Although many Nigerians in leadership positions are members of this counterculture, since her amalgamation in 1914, Nigeria has been having difficulty struggling to build a united nation out of its numerous nationalities, largely due to lack of effective leadership. Leadership in Jesus‘ teaching is a relational means of ensuring the wellbeing of all called human. But effective leadership is a necessary product of leadership framework. Nigerian leadership is oriented on the framework of kingship with its sovereign disposition which negates the tenets of community ecology due to its exploitative and domination-control tendencies. For Nigeria to attain nationhood, Nigerians must reorient their leadership ideology from royal sovereignty to a follower-focused relational model. This study recommends the =servant-shepherd leadership model‘, built from a synergy of pre-colonial traditional Nigerian leadership ideas and Jesus‘ servant-shepherd leadership lifestyle. Towards this end, the study analyses the leadership conceptions of Nigerian nationalities and Jesus‘ to derive indicators of effective leadership.

Keywords: Royal ideology, leadership ecology, Nigerian national project, servant- shepherd leadership, and indigenous Nigerian leadership.