Sycophancy is a major hindrance to good governance in Nigeria. It is a
disease of epidemic proportions afflicting Nigerians in all spheres of our
existence as a nation. It traverses all social classes in the country. Sycophancy
is not hero worship. We have no true living heroes in the system of governance
of this country. And sycophants have no
heroes or principles they subscribe to or defend; they are just fawners who seek
personal gain through creating an ego mountain from a small anthill of
insignificance of their targets. A simple chain of hierarchy in any Nigerian
public institution has been turned by sycophants at all levels of the chain
into a praise and worship cult of the head of the institution
Armed with a false giant ego, the targets of sycophants believe they
are really larger than life. They come to see themselves as the Alpha and Omega
of their establishment. And they act the big man too! Convinced of their
invincibility and believing in their own sycophantic prowess and their ability
to grease the palms of politicians charged with oversight, these tin-gods
commit crimes of fraud, harassment, recruitment malfeasance, outright stealing
of public funds and many other crimes of bad governance. . The Nigerian
followership through sycophancy induces bad governance and turns the people’s
employees into primitive overlords.
Civil servants, who by their own appellation are servants of the people,
assume the attitude of haughty benefactors to their employers – the people. Heads
of military and paramilitary services as well as Director-Generals of government
agencies are treated like tin-gods by their subordinates. And they act the
roles too. They forget the statutory limits of their powers as heads of
government institutions and assume new ones dictated by their many sycophants. And
more often than not, they carry their egos beyond the confines of their
establishment into the public space and expect adulations from the public. They
react violently to any challenge to their ego and hapless civilians who cross
their ways bear the brunt of their fury.
Elected politicians are prime targets of sycophants at all levels.
These temporary employees of the people get so carried away with their induced
overrated self-worth that they believe they have the power of life and death
over their constituents. Our politicians wear their egos like clothes; any
legitimate challenge or demand by a frustrated electorate is perceived and reacted
to as a demeaning attempt from an inconsequential person. They unleash their
fawning aides on the poor constituent.
And the places of worship? The sycophancy that trails the leaders of
places of worship in Nigeria has made some GO’s and Bishops see themselves as
gods. They get adulations from the lower clergy and the worshippers climb over
the each other to fawn the loudest. The
pronouncements of some are in utter divergence from the Holy Books. They, as
the new gods, write their own version of the scriptures and impose
inconsiderate levies to milk the poor dry. They are also sycophants too; they
cannot speak the truth to power, rather they hobnob with them and pat each
other’s backs.
But for sycophancy-induced ego-ride, how could a civil servant have accepted
that his shoes be cleaned in public by another civil servant? What else would
explain the attitude of a high officer of the Nigerian Navy who unleashed
violence on a harmless woman in the streets of Lagos? What could have driven a
governor to talk down to the Civil Servants in his State? Or worse still, what
could have possessed the wife of a sitting governor that caused a clergyman to
be sacked because she was not considered first by virtue of her position to get
God’s blessings through anointing? How could one explain the pronouncement of
Bishop Oyedepo in the build-up to the last elections that the gates of hell
were open to those who would not vote for Jonathan? These are examples that
have been in the press, but there are many others that go unreported every day.
The probability that you, the reader of this article are a sycophant
is very high. You are either a sycophant to a politician, your pastor, your
boss at work or even to God. You mouth-worship somebody; you fill their ego-bag
with your hot air so much that they feel
and begin to believe that they are God’s deputy. That is the way the Nigerian
environment has reengineered your genes. It is called epigenetics – a science
that studies how your environment affects your genes to enhance your survival.
In other words, you are a direct product of your environment.
How did this scourge land in our midst? Is it imported or of local
manufacture? Did our diverse cultures in any way contribute to its emergence in
our modern system of governance? How do we undo this malicious gene that has
rendered good governance almost impossible in our country?
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