BY IDOWU ADEWARA
Across cultures and history, leadership has been idealized. Kings are said to rule by divine right, their authority handed down from the heavens and therefore beyond question. Military rulers by force. And in modern democracies, political figures cultivate larger-than-life personas, projecting a kind of exceptionalism that sets them apart from the citizens they claim to serve.
In Nigeria, this idea has evolved to an entrenched narrative that leadership belongs to a protected class with godfathers, elite network, or financial backing. The political terrain reinforces this daily. Candidates without deep pockets or powerful patrons rarely survive the primaries. Young people with genuine ideas are told to wait their turn, to pay their dues, to find a sponsor. The message, delivered in quiet ways, is that leadership is not for everyone.
When people believe this, they stop practicing it in their own lives. They wait to be led rather than choosing to lead. They disengage from civic life because they cannot see themselves in it. And the country suffers not from a shortage of potential, but from a systematic suppression of it.
But what if this assumption is fundamentally flawed? What if the power to lead is not reserved for a chosen few, but is available to everyone? What if, in the most meaningful sense, you are already a leader?
The answer begins not in government offices or political corridors, but at home. Leadership starts the moment a child is entrusted with responsibility and learns to carry it out with diligence. It is being formed when a young person is assigned household chores and held accountable for doing them well. The parent who models integrity in small things, the older sibling who manages a conflict with patience, the child who tells the truth when lying would be easier. These are leadership acts. They are the early discipline, reliability, and responsibility that become the building blocks of leadership long before any title or authority comes into play.
This matters because it challenges the idea that leadership is a supernatural quality. It is not. Leadership involves decision-making, coordination, communication, and responsibility. These are capacities that human beings exercise constantly, in ordinary life, without fanfare. The question is not whether someone possesses these capacities. The question is whether they are being developed, practiced, and applied with intention.
To lead well, it takes the ability to listen before speaking. It takes the honesty to admit when something has gone wrong rather than deflecting blame. It takes the patience to bring people along rather than simply issuing instructions and expecting compliance. None of these are qualities that come with a government appointment. They are qualities that are built over time, in small moments, through repeated choices. A mother mediating a disagreement between her children is practicing those same instincts. Leadership, in its most essential form, is simply the habit of taking responsibility seriously.
Leadership also evolves in the workplace. It is evident when a worker is tasked with a role and chooses to execute it with integrity and excellence, even when no one is watching. It shows up when someone takes ownership of an outcome rather than hide behind excuses. It emerges when a person raises a problem rather than ignoring it, mentors a colleague rather than competing with them, or says a difficult thing rather than protecting the peace. In these moments, leadership is not about position. It is about conduct.
And this is where Nigeria’s dominant narrative does its deepest damage. By treating leadership as an exclusive entitlement, something conferred by money, bloodline, or political connection, it discourages the kind of everyday leadership that actually holds societies together. It tells the junior employee to stay in their lane, the community organizer to defer to the politician, the whistleblower to keep quiet. It mistakes obedience for order and silence for stability. Meanwhile, the country’s real leadership deficit is not only at the top. It is in the slow erosion of personal accountability, civic courage, and basic trust at every level of society.
There is an important distinction worth making here. Leadership as a quality and leadership as a position are not the same thing. Not everyone will govern a state or run a federal ministry. Positional leadership in politics and public institutions is, by definition, limited. But leadership as a practice, as a way of showing up in your family, your workplace, your community, is available to every single person. And it is this distributed, everyday leadership that forms the foundation on which functioning institutions are eventually built. You cannot build a culture of accountability in government without first building it in homes and offices. The values have to be practiced somewhere before they can be demanded everywhere.
Nigeria has spent a long time looking upward for salvation. Every election cycle brings fresh hope that the right person, finally, has arrived. And every cycle, more or less, ends in the same disappointment. This is not simply because politicians are corrupt or institutions are weak, though both are true. It is also because the country has not yet fully grasped that national character is built from the bottom up. The integrity of a society reflects the accumulated choices of its people, not just its rulers. What happens in the corridors of power is, in many ways, a reflection of what is tolerated and normalized everywhere else.
This is the truth that Nigeria’s leadership conversation consistently misses. The country’s future does not depend on waiting for extraordinary individuals to arrive and fix things. It depends on building ordinary habits that consistently produce results. The search for messiahs is not just a distraction. It is a form of abdication. It lets everyone off the hook. If leadership is someone else’s job, then failure is also someone else’s fault. And so nothing changes.
Think about what would shift if Nigerians broadly embraced leadership as a personal practice rather than a political prize. Teachers who lead their classrooms with genuine passion. Traders who build reputations on honesty. Local officials who fix roads not because cameras are rolling, but because that is what the role requires. Parents who take seriously the values they model at home. Citizens who show up, to vote, to speak, to raise their hand when something is wrong. None of this requires wealth or connections. All of it requires will.
The long work of building a country is not done only at the top. It is done at every level, by every person who decides to take their responsibilities seriously. Leadership starts at home, in how we raise children and hold each other to account. It grows in the workplace; in the standards we set and the example we choose to live by. It matures in public life, when people who have practiced leadership privately finally step into roles that demand it publicly.
So, can we all be leaders? Yes. But not by waiting for permission. Leadership is not a title that someone bestows on you. It is a decision you make, quietly, in the moments when it would simply be easier not to bother. Nigeria has no shortage of people capable of making that decision. The real question is whether enough of us will.
Idowu Adewara is a fellow of the Lateef Jakande Leadership Academy.
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