*A PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICAL CHANGE*


The national cry is in the need to have a new crop of leaders in governance. The players in our current political landscape begs for an urgent change. The core of our political leadership has been in the business of leading this nation since her inception, that is long enough if you ask me.

The change in leadership (politics) cannot and will not happen by merely wishing it did. In order to change the present echelon of the leading political structure of our nation and make way for a fresh breed of young, patriotic minds in governance, we must be strategic. By being strategic I mean we need to develop a workable plan.

By we, I mean a collection of mostly young people (we are the majority when it comes to the demographics of our population, not to mention the fact that democracy is a 'game' of numbers) and not necessarily the whole bunch of young people in this nation.

From personal research and survey, I have developed a strategic template that I believe is workable. It is presented as follows.

I. *Create a round table* : Change on a national scale begins when some selected few who come together to have an egalitarian discussion on how to move the nation forward regardless of individual prejudice. That is what the framers of United States (popularly acclaimed as the most successful democracy in the world) and our founding fathers understood.

If we are to move forward and bring new faces into the political playing field, young people desirous of change must sit down and discuss Nigeria as a critical entity and how to build her up thence.

II. *Develop an Agenda* : Our discussion must be deliberate and intentionally directed towards developing a workable agenda, unlike the National Conference of 2014 where we had several discussions but no workable plan emerged therefrom.

It is glaring that we young people have no national agenda. The mistake our founding fathers made was not developing an agenda for the nation's prosperity and posterity as an integral part of the nation's lifestyle.

III. *Develop a strategy:* Records and history have shown that Nigerians have had discussions, deliberated on matters and even on some occasions, a workable national master plan. However, these agendas and discussions do not see the light of day due to ineffective strategy and implementation.

Therefore,  it is pertinent that we work-out strategies that will be efficient and effective in the realisation of our national goals.

IV. *Raise Finance*: This is the where ideas, agendas and strategies fail. No change can occur without the aid of finance. If we must have a well-built Nigeria, we must enlighten our people, channel new ideologies and on the overall change the national narrative. These and many more will only be possible with the aid of finance to facilitate implementation.

It will no doubt cost a fortune to disseminate our developed effective strategies to the nooks and corners of our nation, not to mention do some kind of re-educating the masses on what it means to be the citizen of a forward-aspiring nation.

Therefore, finance is crucial if we are to achieve our goals. In a nation of over 100 million youths, if 10 million of these youths can contribute say, #100 each we will be talking about 1 billion Naira. That is enough to shake the political foundations of our Nation which is obviously built on money exchanging hands for various purposes, ranging from campaigns and propaganda to sponsoring bribery and other nefarious activities.

V. *Organize a Platform* : Once we scale through the prior four stages, what will be left is the organization of an all-encompassing platform to float our ideologies. In organizing a platform, there are two methodologies we can adopt:

(A)  Coalesce into a mega-body where our voice and strategy can be developed into achieving our desired result of nation building.

(B)  *Hijack a platform* :Much like a (justified) hostile takeover, this route can be quite difficult but very possible.

The  platform is important because it is needed to get elected into public offices, given the manner of operation of our political system.

VI.  *Mobilise* : Having gotten a platform where our strategies can be channeled into building the nation, we would need to mobilize the people without which our plans would be lofty but lifeless schemes. If truly we seek to serve the people, engaging them actively is non-negotiable. By ourselves, we are few and then as we have said time and again, politics is an art of numbers. We need the majority to win elections into public offices.

Politics has its greatest power at the grassroots, and mobilizing people is the very heart of grassroot politics.

VII.  Voting is the most sacrosanct aspect of politics, however this art has been bastardized in Nigeria.

The Political elite has developed a strategy that makes the masses not wanting to exercise their constitutional rights.

If we must build our nation, it begins and ends in voting.

I believe strongly that the template presented above will help in achieving our desired nation-building goals.

Thank you.

May God bless you and may God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

*Adewumi Adedeji*
*Writes from Lagos, *Nigeria.*
*08082790452*
*@_AdewumiAdedeji.*
*Dejijupiter@gmail.com*
*#D'PresidentDiary.*