Going a step forward, Democracy, which is a popular system of government is defined as government of the people by the people and for the people. This is simple enough for all to understand that it is for the people.
It then becomes worrisome and questionable when the people suffer and their government are either not responding or responding sub optimally. It begs the question whether they have the interest of the people at heart.
In my country Nigeria, things have progressively gotten worse, the standard of living, the unemployment and poverty are at an all time high.
Many factors are responsible for this but most importantly is bad leadership and apart from their negligence and corruption, the major cause of these problems is the devaluation of our currency, the Naira.
In the past, when the Naira still had value relative to other currencies, the poverty was not so pronounced because with your earnings in Naira, you would still be able to live a very comfortable life. But with the current exchange rates, despite several increase in minimum wage, the purchasing power of the Naira is extremely low.
To the point that even the best paid are struggling to survive.
There are several ways a government can prevent devaluation of it's currency, slow it down and possibly even reverse the process but the Nigerian government has done nothing in this regard.
Instead, the government keeps doing things that makes it worse. For example, encouraging exports, making the land favourable for foreign investors, utilising indigenous services for health, construction and other sectors, etc
These are not obtainable, rather the government makes things difficult for it's citizens and for foreign investors, they also travel for health care and education which gives them the effrontery to denigrate health care workers both in speech and in remunerations.
By so doing, the economy is crippled with little to no hope of redemption.
To make matters worse, many of these so called leaders now go ahead to convert billions of our currency to foreign currencies and save it in foreign banks. Then when they run into problems in these countries, the money is seized and just like that the money is gone while millions whom it could have helped keep languishing in penury and hopelessness.
This just goes to show how terrible our leaders are at not just leadership but as humans too. This is because, even if you are not good in leadership but happen to be a good human, some of these problems would have been solved with a little effort. But because they are not good even as humans, they look the other way while things continue to deteriorate because it doesn't affect them in any way..
Image(s) are mine
