It was on a Sunday, the 18th day of September 2016 to be precise, and I went in the company of two incredible friends, Vivian the Great and Vingabby. Kickoff time was 4pm (GMT+1), and the battle line was drawn between Rangers International Football Club of Enugu and Sunshine Stars of Akure at the Nnamdi Azikiwe Stadium, Enugu. The long and short of the game is that after toughing it out for 90+3mins, the game ended in favour of Rangers; 2:0 to be precise.

It was my very first live match, and I made sure nothing stood in my way of attendance that evening, not even the threatening rain. I actually thought I was too old not to have witnessed a live match off-screen, just as I had to storm Lagos earlier this year because I’d always thought it was such a shame that an above twenty-year-old Nigerian who claims to love Nigeria was yet to step his feet on the Main- and Island of Lagos.

I came to break that jinx, I came to have fun, but I ended up in a classroom. The bowl of the stadium had turned into a classroom, other spectators became my classmates, the pitch metamorphosed into the ‘smartboard,’ and the players and the reality of football, being the teacher, graciously dished out the following lessons.

Life is a game

Biblical parables often compared the kingdom of God to this or to that – merchant, king, sower, virgins, feasts, etc. On this occasion, observing the players and the field of play, I came to the realization that life can indeed be likened to a football game. Or, put differently, and better, football aptly showcases the dynamics of life: the goal, the timing, the fouling, the cards, the linesmen, the spectators, the applauding and boos, the fun, the referee, the etc. To merely say that the leather ball game mimics real life is to say it lightly.

The two kinds of people

It has always been about Actors Vs Spectators. That day, I inevitably found myself – and everyone else off pitch – occupying the spectator position. While the players did the sweating, the rest of us had fun watching them. While their hearts raged within them, while their muscles cramped and their legs ached, the rest of us made jokes of their pains, cheered them on when they impressed us, and jeered at them when they seemed not to get it right. From the spectators’ end everything was so easy; talk is cheap! That day, I got the gracious reminder that living truly can only happen at the ‘acting end’ and never at the ‘spectating end.’

Unstoppability is a choice

And then the long awaiting rain started pouring down! It was hell. I got totally drenched in it. Guess what? While we the spectators were running helter-skelter in search of canopy, the actors (players) chose to be unstoppable. They played on under the rain as well as they were playing under the sun minutes earlier. Not even one of them stepped out of the pitch. And not even the referee.

Leverage on what you’ve got

Rangers is Enugu State football club. The match held in Nnamdi Azikiwe Statium, Enugu. 99% of spectators were 042 people. Rangers had all the additional advantages, and they did leverage on it. It was their pitch, their town, and their people. They weren’t lacking one bit in fan base, since next to everyone was their fan. The applause was for them and boos was for their opponent. They were in high spirits, and they capitalized on it.

Fight to the death!

This golden lesson came from the Sunshine Stars. Though they were at the disadvantaged end, they kept faith till the very final whistle. They pressed on, they persisted, they kept at it, and they fought on – to the death! Being down by 2 goals by injury time, they even pushed harder until the referee blew the final whistle on one of their men motioning towards Rangers’ goalpost with the ball.

PS: Special thanks to Vingabby for being a constant reminder and a great company. Thanks, too, to Vivian the Great for giving the evening a touch of fun; she pushed us to dancing under the rain with Rangers fan club.

Leadership is one of those words that can do without the dictionary, as only a handful of people are in want of its meaning. The word is so much in common usage that it ranks among the so-called household words. And the reason is not far-fetched: leadership is ubiquitous; leaders are everywhere. Yes, the father heads the family, the principal administers the school, the community head ensures order therein, the governor pilots the affairs of the state, the pastor pastures the flock of God, the president presides over matters of state, the Pope oversees the Holy See. What more could the dictionary say about leadership if not to restate the obvious.

Of course, the unintended consequence of the above thinking about leadership is that it causes one to identify leadership with headship, to equate leadership with administration, to restrict leadership to positions of authority, to domicile leadership in America’s White House, Nigeria’s Aso Rock, or Britain’s 10, Downing Street.

A sequel to the above is that one is forced to characterize leadership by the mannerisms in which those hitherto identified as leaders conduct their leadership business. Therefore, because the head of the family is wont to wielding the rod at the slightest provocation, the growing child gets socialized into thinking that rod wielding is integral to leadership; because the principal of a school lords it over his or her teachers and students, some students may begin to think that ‘lordship’ is a corollary of leadership; because the pastor of a church threatens to rain down fire from heaven at the slightest infraction of church rules, faithful followers begin to imagine that it is part and parcel of the leader’s job description to secure conformity through the issuance of threats and sanctions.

The preceding exposition aptly captures Leadership 1.0. In the Leadership 1.0 era, leadership was equal to headship; leadership was synonymous with lordship; leadership was resident in the head that bore the crown and the legs that wore the shoe. In that era, too, there was a clear-cut distinction between leadership and followership. Here, while the leader takes both the frontline and first position, the follower can at best be second; while the leader dishes out orders, the follower takes them and orders themselves accordingly; while the leader is blue-blooded, the follower has the usual red blood. For every groundbreaking feat, for instance, while the leader points to the ground, the follower breaks it.

However, gone are the days of Leadership 1.0. Welcome to the era of Leadership 2.0! Call it Advanced Leadership if you like. Mind you, it is not advanced for its sophisticatedness; it is advanced for its simplicity. It is advanced for its openness, making it possible, for the first time, for anyone who is interested in leadership to become one – blueblooded or red-blooded. As much as the father, a child can be a leader; as much as the CEO of a multibillion dollar company, a janitor can be a leader; as much as the Pope, a catechist can demonstrate leadership; as much as the master, a slave can have a bite of the leadership pie; as much as the ‘leader,’ a follower can have a taste of leadership.

Leadership 2.0 is a total rethink on leadership. In it, revolutionary thinking was brought to bear on the all-important enterprise of leadership. In fact, it is a revolt on Leadership 1.0. And the essence of Leadership 2.0 is to democratize leadership, to make it “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” It essentially distils out the core of leadership, and goes on to strip it of all the addenda and paddings that make it heavy and complicated.

What, then, is Leadership 2.0? Inspired by the works of the likes of John Maxwell and Robin Sharma, Leadership 2.0 locates leadership in one word, INFLUENCE. And the choice of this one word is not far-fetched, as every manifestation of leadership, even in the Leadership 1.0 experience, is built on it. By the way, ‘influence’ simply means “the power to affect, control or manipulate someone or something. Although ‘influence’ is significantly wielded by those who occupy positions of authority (the leaders of the Leadership 1.0 era), it is not at all their exclusive preserve; Leadership 2.0 insists that anyone, just about anyone, can wield ‘influence.’ This, of course, is another way of restating the fact that anyone can be a leader.

A classic example of Leadership 1.0 Vs Leadership 2.0 is the discovery of the external installation of elevators. El Cortez Hotel is one of San Diego’s famous hotels. Once upon a time, the hotel management decided to install an additional elevator to better serve guests. While the contracted engineers came up with complicated designs that called for cutting holes through each floor of the hotel, which, of course, will cost the hotel a fortune, and pile up mess for the janitor to clean up, the eventual solution came from the janitor’s comment: “You could build the elevator on the outside of the hotel.” Here, we learn that even janitors are capable of thinking outside the engineering box; they mustn’t have bagged an engineering degree, or registered with the engineering council.

A more ad rem example of Leadership 1.0 Vs Leadership 2.0 can be gleaned from Thomas Edison’s laboratory, in J.P. Morgan’s words, “where genius resides.” At 31, Edison already had about 400 patents to his credit, and had become one of the greatest scientists ever. The zenith of Edison’s scientific feats was the perfection of electricity. But it was the Direct Current, inferior to the later Alternating Current. Guess what? Both electricity current designs were developed in the same laboratory: Edison’s. However, while the boss (Edison) was responsible for the inferior one, D.C., the apprentice (Nicola Tesla) was responsible for the superior one, A.C. And when apprentice reported his development to boss, apprentice’s noble development was talked down on; Edison told Tesla his A.C. design couldn’t amount to much. The long and short of it is that Tesla’s A.C. later edged Edison’s D.C. out of the market, went on to crash the party on Edison Electric Company, and remains the electricity standard till date. In Leadership 2.0, as already stated, apprentice can do as much as, and even better than, boss.

There is a famous picture in the United States of baby JFK, Jr. crawling under the Resolute Desk of the White House Oval Office while his father worked on it. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, JFK, Sr. (the baby’s father) was the 35^th President of the United States of America, one of those to be assassinated. That crawling lad was born to him few days after he won the US Presidency in November 1960 and remained in public spotlight until he died in a plane crash sometime in 1999. The 6^th President of the US (1825–1829), John Quincy Adams, was the son of the 2^nd President of that country (1797–1804). In the same vein, George Walker Bush, the 43^rd President of the US (2001–2009), is the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41^st President of that country (1989–1993). Again, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. announced to an unprecedented crowd of 200, 000 civil rights activists, and indeed the world at large, his dream of a truly free United States of America. Whether the US is truly free today is a different story, but we do know that about 46 years after King’s epoch making I Have a Dream speech, Barack Hussein Obama became the first black human being to mount the US Presidency, or, should I say, the most powerful human being on the planet. From this survey, therefore, there seems to be a certain degree of sincerity in addressing youths of America and elsewhere as leaders of tomorrow.

I wonder if the same holds true for our country, Nigeria. Few examples will do. When General Olusegun Obasanjo was Nigeria’s Head of State way back in 1979, he had addressed a group of youths, wherein he told them he looked forward to seeing them take over the reins of power in the nearest future. Funnily enough, exactly 20 years from that year, that is 1999, he vied for the office and became president again, remained there for 4 more years and wanted to bend the constitution to let him stay on, and would have asked for more afterwards, I guess. Go through the annals of Nigeria’s history and find that our great grandfather’s Heads of State still want to be our president, and are not joking about it. Check out the résumé of President Buhari and find that he’s been there a very long time ago. Go through the Nigerian Civil Service and find grandfathers who should be glorying in their pensions and be tenants of retirement homes still posing to be 50 years of age with the assistance of our interesting instruments of corruption – affidavit swearing and Declaration of Age. And yet we find energetic and promising youths languishing under the yoke of underemployment and unemployment.

The case here is that of a conspiracy of the rich and those who thread the corridors of power. They want youths down. They want them to be and remain incapable of questioning or challenging the status quo. They want them to accept the status quo for a culture and be too blind to spot and spoil their greed. And it actually appears they are succeeding if at all they haven’t. How? Through their educational designs and obsolete curriculum they make youths unemployable; through their emphasis on security they dissuade youths from resorting to crime; through their sabotage of the economy they discourage economic adventure, the type the likes of Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Musk, etc. dabbled into in America to make their way to the billionaires club. What do we find around us instead? They want youths to get their eyes off white collar jobs and embrace the various available farming schemes. They offer enticing loans to NYSC pass-outs and have students compete in writing and executing business plans. In one word, it is difficult to trust that the system cares about youths and it appears that only death can muster the courage to kick them out.

The one million dollar question becomes: “What do we do?” Rising to mutiny, that is killing every single one of them, is not at all a part of the solution. This is because our children will hold us responsible for the blood of their grandfathers. Ruffling it out with them is not the solution either, as one should be sure of losing out on the game, given that they are pretty good as what they do, in addition to the fact that they made more than enough pluck when our money grew on trees – they own all the oil wells, bought up most public enterprises in the name of privatization, and equally have a cabal of Machiavellian capitalists who throw their combined weights behind them in return for profitability from their mischief. Furthermore, while they can be said to have the repose of wisdom, which is got from experience, youths are, more often than not, impulsive in deciding what course of action to take.

What then is the way forward? The answer is quite a simple one and is hidden in the understanding that the future is now! You just need to understand that your future is now, and then start living in it. I can explain. To start with, what is your take on the idea of future? Is it something faraway, near or now? Do you wake up every morning in joyful anticipation of ‘a time’ called ‘future’ when all your dreams and noble aspirations will come through? This is correct only insofar as you are viewing the matter in the light of conventional wisdom. However, the problematic encountered in seeking a deeper understanding of the concept of future, the type sought for here, is that of the concept of time. Suffice it therefore to say that our understanding of the concept of time is the point in question here, as the terms past, present and future, or yesterday, today and tomorrow are only nomenclatures that express time.

At this juncture, let’s turn to St. Augustine to tell us something about time. For him, the concept of time is elusive, one that is understandable but incommunicable. He confesses, in his Confessions, that while he knows what time is, his knowledge of it eludes him whenever he attempts to communicate it, reason being that the components of time (past, present and future) barely exist: the past is no more, the moment is passing, and the future is not yet. Therefore, this ‘present passing moment’ is all we have got to grapple with.

And so ‘getting involved’ in this ‘present passing moment’ is the key to doing battle against the Nigerian status quo. When you get involved, you rather than blame or complain against the situation take responsibility for whatever has become your lot. It demands that you do whatever you say you want to do – never caring about your detractors – because your word is your bond. It calls you to the realization that your destiny is in your hands, and you never want to trade it for a bowl of porridge. It emboldens you to go out there and get all you need to become all you want to be. It instructs that the only limits are yours to decide. It means that you daily become what you aspire to become by the quality of every single choice you make and every other decision you take. Yes, it is that simple, except that you have decided to busy yourself with gossips about a system that cares little or nothing about you.

For instance, what do Nigerian youths do with the many months of strike whenever the Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) want them out of school? I bet you that many youths will spend their time making jokes of it on social media, while many others will spend it doing one stupid thing or the other. And if one continued this way, why complain about ending up on the downside of things? I understand that the status quo has put many in critical positions, but there is absolutely no need to enjoy such an experience. Get involved!

Elon Musk is 45-years-old. He is Canadian-American, though South African-born. Most importantly, he is the craziest human being in the universe.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

When Apple, Inc. ran the above advert campaign, they really didn’t know they were doing a welcome song for the Iron Man, Musk. No doubt, Apple’s foreman, Steve Jobs, stood for crazy for his goal to put a dent on the universe, but Musk is crazier. To say the least, every bit of Musk’s thinking has a touch of crazy to it. In fact, to be Musk is to be crazy. He was crazy enough to think out and accomplish the following:

The PayPal experience

Musk thought that they should be a better way of conducting online transactions, an e-Wallet so to speak, an online payment gateway. He then kick-started a company that would see to it’s realization. He went on to merge with another company already on a similar project. That was the birth of PayPal. And eBay would show up to buy PayPal at a whooping $1.5billion, from which Musk’s take-home was $180,000,000.

What Musk did next will shock you. He reinvested every dime of that huge cash into founding three childhood dream-companies: SpaceX ($100,000,000, Tesla ($70,000,000, and SolarCity ($10,000,000).

The SpaceX experience

Musk was a kid when the US landed the Eagle on the moon using the help of the likes of Neil Armstrong. And then he grew up dreaming of building his own rockets. Today, this is how the narrative goes: “Only four people have succeeded in sending rockets to and fro space: US, Russia, China, and Elon Musk.” Notice that while three names on that list are not just countries but superpowers, the fourth name is the 45-year-old Musk. Mind you, Musk didn’t launch his rockets on a golden-launch pad; it was a frustrating experience for him, as the first three rockets he fired up failed in succession. He didn’t give up one bit. He said he’d have to be dead or totally incapacitated to give up.

He even has a grander ambition. Musk thinks earth is not enough for the humankind; he wants us to occupy more than one planet, and he’s doing all he can to make that happen. He has already succeeded in alarmingly cutting the cost of moving stuff to space. And Musk is so passionate about what he does that his eyes were welled up with tears when an interviewer for “60 Minutes” raised questions bothering on the testimonies in Congress of his childhood heroes (the guys that landed the moon when Musk was a kid) against his space concerns.

The Tesla Experience

Tesla cars run on electricity. You can already imagine that! And Musk is already promising to come along with more disruptive car technologies.

The SolarCity experience

This guy thinks that the only way forward for our energy experience is solar. And the SolarCity business is seeing to that in an entirely different and crazy way.

Finally, I’m convinced that Elon Reeve Musk is the craziest human being right now. Or, do you know of a crazier person?

My tour of Calabar was awesome. The sites visited were scenic; ranging from the sea-side stunning Marina Resort to the mind-blowing Tinapa Business Resort. The guys I hung out with were terrific, including Pavlo, Nadico, Smith, The Prince, and Lawless (their nicknames). The weather was clement, and the transport company, ABC Transport, did great. To say the least, it was a worthwhile experience and I’m far better off for it.

Yes, there was enough eating and plentiful drinking, much laughter and lots of love, but there was more. It got to a point where the one thing I needed to do was the only thing I failed to do. I needed to cry, but I didn’t. At that point, the close to real life reproduction of the slavery experience called for some tears; the inhumanity was great, and the cruelty excessive. Somehow, I just couldn’t afford as much as a drop of tears, but I felt all the pity such an experience could provoke. Quite an experience, I must confess.

Imagine slave traders raiding an entire village, capturing men, women, and children; razing down houses, killing those resisting capture, and abandoning the aged and incapacitated. Imagine shackling the people up in fetters of iron at the neck, hands and legs. Imagine going without food, nor with water, for days on end during the journey from the hinterlands where captures are made to the sea-side where they are ‘cargoed up’ for Europe and the Americas. Imagine having to be boxed up in ships like sardines in cans, and imagine having to maintain this ‘boxed up’ position for as long as the journey lasted, say 3 – 6 months. Imagine being thrown overboard to lighten the ship in the event of a tempest. Imagine being gagged in the mouth as a sugarcane slave worker (to keep one from helping oneself). The punitive measures were darn crazy; a slave could be beaten to death to serve as deterrent to others. In fact, there are too many imaginings to imagine, and they all sum up to one word: ‘crazy.’ And we’re privileged to exist in the post-slavery era.

However, the above scenario is half the truth. There is always the other side to every story. Yes, every ‘single story’ is dangerous, especially because of its power to create stereotypes. And Chimamanda Adichie would insist that the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. The point being made here is that we’ve always construed the slavery story from a singular perspective, which always ends in castigating only the White culprits in the slavery deal. Of course, the whites are to blame for conceiving of such inhumanities, but there is more.

In Calabar’s Slave History Museum I visited, I saw that there were more hands in the slave deal than most of us could see or were told. With real relics of the slavery age, our tour guide, Peter, explained that local chiefs exchanged as many as 10 slaves for a gun; they exchanged slaves for mirror, and they also exchanged slaves for a bottle of dry gin. They equally exchanged slaves for gunpowder. Who were those in charge of capturing slaves? The very same local people recruited for that purpose, and rewarded with all what not. The local people always had a hand in slavery; the White slavers only provided the opportunity.

My point: share the guilt; balance the story. Yes, it was a partnership in crime. The Transatlantic Slavery experience is rightly called a trade. If so, and it is so, while the Whites demanded, some of the natives supplied. And the supplier is as good a businessman as the demander.