The type of leadership we experience today as a nation is sickening. If you have a modicum of ‘home-training’, you will puke at what we see daily among our political echelons. It makes some of us want to support bacteria – it’s the only culture some people have.

The Melaye-Tinubu saga has been analyzed enough and even if it hasn’t I do not have the luxury of time to indulge in it. However, I have a responsibility to make a clarion call to all parents. Our children are, probably, on holidays now. They have a reasonable amount of time in their hands. And I bet many parents have started enrolling them in one summer school or the other. But for how long are we going to shirk in our responsibilities?

We cannot afford to be passive in training these young ones. The results we get from our leaders today should propel us to be more deliberate in raising these leaders of tomorrow. It should warn us to consider what world we are leaving behind for them to inherit. And it should spur us to change.

Our sons:

1. Let us teach our sons that a girl is supposed to be loved, protected and respected.
2. Let us tell them it’s absolutely wrong to abuse a woman, hurl insults at her, and talk less of hitting her.
3. Let us tell them that name-calling, threats, intimidation and bullying are the very attributes of a coward. And a coward is a person who is contemptibly lacking in courage to endure dangerous or unpleasant things (or insults) according to the Oxford Dictionary. Let’s instruct them that bullying only reduce you, it doesn’t make you a strong man.
4. Let us tell them that in the face of pressure it is our response-ability to take a chill pill. The Bible says, if you fail in the days of adversity, your strength is little. Adversity will test us. Difficulty will challenge us. Trials will try us. We will be known and defined by our response-ability during these times. And you cannot give what you don’t have.
5. That how they treat girls today is a seed for how their own daughters will be treated when they grow up
6. Let’s remind them that true leadership serves and not fight. True leaders engage in intellectual debates not degrading insults.
7. That when it’s all said and done, posterity will only remember how we helped humanity not how many women we conquered.

And for our daughters:

1. Let us train our girls that self-respect hasn’t run out of fashion and dignity is still valuable.
2. Let’s show our girls how to carry themselves with purpose and confidence. Let’s teach them they are not in any way the inferior sex and they need not prove anything to anybody.
3. Can we tell our girls that any man that belittles their capacity and capabilities is really not a man?
4. Can we infuse in them that rudeness is never the right response to provocation. And counterblasts has never made a bad situation better, you cannot put toothpaste back in the tube.
5. That no man born of a woman has the right to lay hands on her in form of beating or abuse of any kind.
6. That she belongs to the top. Her goals are achievable and where are dreams are concerned, there are no glass ceilings.
7. Tell her that a strong woman fights back but a woman of strength recognizes the difference between speaking her mind and diarrhea of the mouth.

But more importantly, let’s live right, let’s do right, and let us model good character, decency and integrity.

If you are not saddened by the contemptible stupidity displayed by our leaders today, it is only an indication of how bad we have fallen and how terrible our state has become. And I am totally of the opinion that politicians and diapers have one thing in common. They should both be changed regularly, and for the same reason.