The Leader and founder of the National Interest Movement (NIM), a non-partisan civil society platform that independently promotes an alternative to the winner-takes-all electoral system in the country, Dr Sakara Foster, is worried over partisan leadership.
He explained that the challenges facing the country was because leadership had gravitated towards maintaining a power structure within a partisan setting at all cost.
“That has trickled down in a society where everyone believes politics is the answer to our challenges and the kind of politics practised in the country is divisive to the extent that even communal collaboration for development has been affected,” Dr Foster decried.
According to him, as a country, we have failed, woefully, to make optimal use of opportunities we have had and was principally because leadership had gravitated towards maintaining a power structure within a partisan setting.
Dr Foster indicated that it had trickled down in the society where people were influenced to believe politics was everything in the country since they realised politicians were the people who live affluent lifestyles and cited instances.
“If you graduate from the university and you venture into politics and you are lucky, you will rise quickly, while if you do not, you are stuck here so, all other issues have influenced people to believe without those benefits from politics, you cannot progress, grow and develop.
“You move into societies which have been existing for years before we started multi-party politics, they have been successfully divided into two groups of people so much so even communal collaboration for development is now difficult to engage in.
“This is due to the fact that somebody is always tagged as being from that side who undermines somebody from another side which has eaten into the fabric, soul and spirit of the nation,” Dr Foster bemoaned.
He advocated that comprehensive reform of the1992 Constitution to remove key impediments to the nation’s progress, growth and development in order to reset development on faster path to prosperity for all, and not only a few.
Dr Foster observed that prosperity must be the foundation for progress, growth and development and to achieve that there was the need for some radical changes to the Constitution and also how institutions worked.
“As citizens we have to ensure greater inclusion, meritocracy, probity, accountability, transparency, equity, discipline, rule of law and patriotism in governance which outcome must be human-centered development for a just and fairer society while pursuing national interest above partisan and personal interests.
“That means an absolute fight against corruption, nepotism and rent- seeking behaviour that has become the norm for public office,” Dr Forster said.
