WAKANDA: Leadership Lessons for Nigeria

My reply to Atiku's tweet that sparked up a social media frenzy. 

I’ve heard so many people make comments like “It’s just fiction” “Come back to reality” “Don’t use movie to judge Nigeria”. Yes, Wakanda is fictional and Black Panther is just a movie, but it was written, directed and acted out by humans with real life experiences and ideas. Let’s be true to ourselves, Wakanda is all Nigeria has been said and envisioned to be and more. Every Nigerian reading this can look back to the earliest memories they have of childhood, up until now, we’ve always heard talks of Nigeria being the ‘Giant of Africa’, something we all believed to be true about the country as kids and could argue it out with any and every one that dares to hold an opposing view.

It happened that on the warm evening of Saturday the 17^th of February, I made a conscious decision to go see Black Panther with a friend and really, it was well worth the hype and the money, you’ll want to see it again. Usually, the first weekend is when a movie with such hype makes the most money as movie freaks or ‘enthusiasts’ as we’d rather be called throng into cinemas to be among the first set of people to see the movie and go on to post spoilers with all the shenanigans, while others just want to watch it to be free from spoilers. Indeed cinemas cash in ‘bigly’ on opening weekends, as virtually all screening times gets sold out and this was exactly the case as we couldn’t get tickets for the time we wanted and had to wait for the next. Black Panther did not disappoint on its opening weekend as it grossed well over 300 million dollars in global sales, surpassing its production cost by almost double.

Wakanda, a fictional African nation, is portrayed to be the most technologically advanced nation in the WORLD. As in, the whole wide world, with Asia, Europe and America expressly included. It achieved this status through visionary leadership which traded off minute amounts of its abundant mineral resource, Vibranium, and secretly sending its best brains to go study abroad, only to come back and develop the nation. Virtually everything in the country is made with some amount of vibranium, a very powerful mineral with multifaceted capabilities. Wakanda was able to achieve all that in isolation and independent of any foreign aid.

Nigeria however, a country based on true life experiences, blessed with so much natural and human resources, has refused to take its ‘rightful’ place (I say this with full consciousness of the abundant natural resources and human capital packed in the most populous black nation, with a huge diaspora network of very qualified and competent professionals in all fields of human endeavour) as the ‘Giant of Africa’. All that resource base is seemingly becoming more of a curse than a blessing. From massive corruption and mismanagement of state resources, to the steady sacrifice of competence and merit on the altar of sectionalism (tribalism & religion) and nepotism (man-know-man) to all the several other ills which I don’t need to bore you with (because we all know them), Nigeria has been reduced to naught. It took T’Challa (The leader of Wakanda) and his forces to go to Sambisa Forest to ambush Boko Haram and rescue Chibok girls from their captors.

From the movie, we got an idea of two generations of leadership, T’Challa, the present day Black Panther and his predecessor and father, T’Chaka. While T’Chaka, a ‘conservative’, believed that existing in isolation from the rest of the world, was the best way to build Wakanda and protect it from invasion of other nations with intentions to manipulate and exploit it of its rare and valuable resource, Vibranium, T’Challa, a young and more liberal leader, owned it upon himself to atone for his father’s misgivings. He believed that Wakanda could use its very advanced technology to help the world in solving some of its very many problems. Wakanda, just like Nigeria, is a multicultural society consisting of 5 tribes with the lords of each tribe sitting on the king’s council. The fifth tribe, led by M’Baku actually spoke an Igbo dialect.

A picture of Wakanda that depicts equality with women in positions of leadership.

In Wakanda we saw a nation that didn’t limit women to the kitchen, living room and ‘the other room’. We saw the women of Wakanda leading and making exploits in its Technology and Defence Institutions. As we celebrate the International Women’s Day today, I can only hope that Nigeria shatters all the glass ceiling and provide women with equal opportunity to compete and thrive in all spheres of society. Wakanda, though fictional, paints a clear picture of what Nigeria could be with good leadership. So far, especially in the current democratic dispensation, our growth as a nation has been largely inhibited by one bad and incompetent leadership after another. What’s even more saddening is that, the old crop of leaders with archaic, if not obsolete ideas, have refused to give way for a new generation of, not just young, but visionary leaders to steer the nation towards rapid development and advancement in all strata of human endeavour.

Yes, it is true that being young alone, does not necessarily make one a good leader (a certain ‘youngest governor’ comes to mind), another very important truth that most Nigerians have refused to acknowledge is that, this country will not cease to exist if we retire the old crop of leaders and embrace a new breed of very competent and capable Nigerians, who are bursting with cerebral and physical strength required to take this nation out of its current mediocre ‘shithole’ status and set this self-acclaimed ‘giant’ on the path of becoming, not just a regional power, but a global force to be reckoned with and respected as such.