Fayemi slams leaders in Nigeria for fuelling injustice, marginalization

The Ekiti State Governor, Kayode Fayemi, on Wednesday revealed how leaders created an atmosphere of disunity in the country over the years.

Fayemi, who addressed participants at a summit on national unity organized by a socio-political organisation, the National Prosperity Movement, said unity cannot exist where injustice, exclusion, inequity, and marginalisation were embedded in governance.

He said: “I have often shuddered at the spectacle whereby some among us who have been entrusted with leadership responsibility very easily slide into the role of ethno-regional champions, xenophobes, and zealots.

“While it is normal that leaders must have their ears to the ground and feel the pulse of the people who have elected them – imbibing, reproducing, and spilling out raw and crude bile and pushing scorched earth solutions crosses the line of representation to become an exercise in the shirking of responsibility.

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“Unlike the bulk of their followers, leaders are positioned and privileged to know that in matters of nation and state-building, the world is far more complex than the simple and many at times simplistic binary divisions that are frequently deployed to oppose black and white.

“Leaders must truly lead by using the broader, more complex, and better-nuanced understanding they have to help moderate and modulate seasons of deep division in the polity, rather than becoming the ones who add fuel to a raging fire.”

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