THE ETHICAL DILEMMA

Tajudeen Toyin-Oke has acquitted himself creditably by engaging in a sound and lucid analysis of the underlying factors responsible for the decline in ethics and values in Nigeria. He draws from his own rich personal and professional experience to tell this less than savoury side of Nigeria’s story. The author, in recommending a brutally-frank national self-audit, while remaining optimistic for a glorious future, suggests that Nigeria, in holding onto methods that are a mere relic of a mixed glorious and inglorious past, needs to courageously accept that even traditions can be remade anew so that a people can step out of their ‘comfort zone,’ and into a new and vibrant era of genuine growth and development.

He concludes that, in this season, Nigeria needs leaders who are strategic in thinking and deliberate in deed, and who are committed to working with the best interests of the people they lead in mind, and that a remarkable transformation cannot be achieved without a fundamental shift in our long-held paradigms, and most importantly, an ethical revolution. It is that ethical revolution that has been the author’s avowed and passionate quest over the past decade that made him push for a Bill for the establishment of the Agency for National Ethics and Values Compliance.