Actions are the physical manifestation of our thoughts. The thought process involved denotes our mindset. This mindset can be a reliable gauge of our core values and how we see life.
Perhaps the most noticeable difference between a Third World country and a First World country is their level of commitment to discipline; governments keeping faith with their professed policies and doing all to adhere to agreements; making punctuality a watchword and sundry other visible evidence of discipline as an established culture.
Discipline needs to be inculcated from the home and further reaffirmed at school. A child who lacks discipline while at Secondary school where there’s still a modicum of monitoring is bound to go haywire at university where he’s essentially free to do whatever he likes; not to talk of when he’s out of the school system entirely. So, once you miss it in the formative years of an individual’s life, it makes it that much harder to get it right. Even if not impossible.
More than ever, our nation is desperately in need of transformational leadership; leaders who possess the resolve to say “No” to the normalization of wrong values; leaders who are no longer willing to stand by the sidelines while the nation burns and the future of our offspring disintegrates before our very eyes; leaders whose default mode is not to make excuses for non performance. As one of my friends likes to say, “we need leaders ready and able to inspire responsible citizenship”. Last but not least, we need leaders who don’t wait to be given a position or “leadership” title of some kind before doing all of the above.
One significant thing I’ve learned is that social rejuvenation doesn’t require a whole population of geniuses – only a steely resolve by individuals like you and I, to always do the right thing, beginning from our own little corner.
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Oladapo Oritsemeyiwa Akande, a weekly newspaper columnist for several years, is a University of Surrey graduate with a Masters in Professional Ethics. An alumnus of the Institute for National Transformation and author of two books: The Last Flight and Shifting Anchors. Ghost writer of a third book
LinkedIn: Oladapo Akande
oladapo.akande@edutimesafrica.com
EduTimes Africa, a product of Education Times Africa, is a magazine publication that aims to lend its support to close the yawning gap in Africa's educational development.