Leadership Behaviour And The Crises Of State Failure In Nigeria: Towards A Transformational Leadership Attitude for Addressing Nigeria’s Failing State

Abstract

Current debates rest on the conclusion that Nigerian leadership suffers from extreme moral depravity and attitudinal debauchery. This leadership personality is expressed in poor governance manifested in consistent crises and insecurity, poverty of extreme order among the citizens, debilitating miasma of corruption and rising unemployment indices. There is a glaring failure to regulate the system effectively and the leadership’s inability to exploit and distribute the resources of the state fairly and equitably. Nigerian leadership has been described as a corrugated theatre of indentured roguery, and its populace as a timid mass of impoverished humanity. Infrastructural decay has become a national identity and the citizens now live in bizarre condition of uncertainty. The picture shows a rapidly failing state and it is argued here that it is largely a function of poor leadership attitude. Nigerian leadership today requires a new attitude to navigate a rapidly deteriorating society. How this attitudinal change can be brought about was the focus of this paper. The study generated data from documentary sources as well as researcher-experiences through participant observation and descriptively analysed them. The discussion concludes that the persuasive approach to bringing about attitudinal change has failed to cause a change of attitude in Nigerian leadership towards being responsive to public interest. On the basis of this, the paper recommends a new approach to attitudinal change called legitimate compulsion.

Keywords: Leadership, attitude, failed-state, legitimate-compulsion