Photo: Dr. (Amb.) Olatokunbo Awolowo Dosumu
Looking at the lives of great men of mosaic statures all through the ages, one would find the truth in the aphorism that leaders are born and not made. An average person’s day-to-day living experience is a complicated web of insatiable expectations and unending efforts that take an equally complex but pragmatic hand to manage. All over the world, and at different times, leaders have strategically emerged among cultures and nations to salvage this complex mix. Outstanding in thoughts and character that eventually spring them to the degree of apotheosis among their followers, leaders are immortalised and worshipped in the minds of people. They are believed to have reached the limits unspoken or unheard of, at least in the contemporary history of the people. By implication, they are believed to be a white tiger that shows up only once in a long wild while. This explains why leaders are often mythologised. In the process, their human flaws are tinted with their humane forms and derivatives that, in the end, the people return them to their commitment to the human cause in modeling and animating an identity of perfection and the extraordinary.