By Oluwole Solanke PhD, FCIB
When a nation applauds mediocrity in power, it quietly signs its own death warrant. A responsible society must learn to hold its leaders to account, or pay the price of its own silence.
In every society, leadership plays a defining role in shaping the direction of a people and the destiny of a nation. Leaders influence policies, values, culture, and the collective aspirations of the citizenry. It is through their vision, or the absence of it, that societies either rise to greatness or sink into mediocrity. Yet a troubling and deeply corrosive phenomenon persists across many nations: the reflexive celebration of leaders who have clearly, demonstrably, and sometimes catastrophically failed in their responsibilities.
When a society begins to glorify failure in leadership, it quietly plants the seeds of its own stagnation and decline. It rewards the wrong behaviours, emboldens future incompetents, and signals to the next generation that results are optional and accountability is a luxury. A responsible society, one that is truly serious about its own future, must therefore learn to distinguish between genuine achievement and mere popularity, between real leadership and hollow symbolism, between earned honour and manufactured legacy.
The Culture of Unmerited Praise
In many places, leaders who leave behind little or no meaningful legacy are still celebrated with elaborate ceremonies, fawning tributes, and exaggerated titles. Streets are named after them, public institutions bear their portraits, awards are bestowed upon them, and history is sometimes quietly rewritten to flatter their image. Their failures are euphemised as ‘challenges beyond their control.’ Their corruption is excused as ‘the product of a difficult system.’ Their incompetence is dressed in the language of ‘doing his best under the circumstances.’
Yet the fundamental question must be asked — and asked loudly: What did they truly accomplish? Were roads built and maintained? Were schools resourced and reformed? Were hospitals equipped and accessible to the poor? Did the economy grow, and did ordinary citizens feel that growth in their daily lives? Did security improve, or did lawlessness deepen? Were institutions strengthened, or were they hollowed out for personal convenience?
These are not unreasonable demands. They are the very minimum that citizens are entitled to expect from those entrusted with power. A society that ignores these questions, and instead rushes to construct bronze statues and deliver glowing eulogies, inadvertently sends a dangerous message to every aspiring leader: performance is optional, accountability is negotiable, and survival in office is an achievement in itself.
“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The same principle applies to governance. True leadership is not measured by longevity in office or by the grandeur of one’s inauguration. It is measured by what is left behind, the institutions built, the lives transformed, the problems solved, and the foundation laid for those who come after. Dr. King’s words remind us that competence without character is dangerous, and character without results is insufficient. A society that cannot apply this standard to its leaders lacks the very critical thinking that separates progress from perpetual decline.
Why Societies Celebrate Failure
The reasons why societies celebrate failed leaders are complex but not mysterious. First, there is the seduction of familiarity. Long-serving leaders, however ineffective, become woven into the fabric of a nation’s identity. Their faces on currency, their names on highways, their voices on archival broadcasts, all of this manufactures a false intimacy. Citizens confuse exposure with achievement. The more they have seen a face, the harder it becomes to critically evaluate what that face represents.
Second, there is the phenomenon of tribalism and ethnic loyalty. In many societies, particularly those still navigating the difficult terrain of post-colonial identity, leadership assessment is distorted by ethnic solidarity. A leader’s failures are minimised if he or she is ‘one of our own.’ His corruption becomes ‘redistribution to our community.’ Her incompetence is explained away as ‘the system working against us.’ This brand of loyalty, while emotionally understandable, is intellectually corrosive and nationally destructive.
Third, there is the role of propaganda. Authoritarian and semi-authoritarian governments have long understood that the control of narrative is the control of reality. When state media, compromised intellectuals, and purchased journalists collectively celebrate a failed leader’s mediocre milestones as extraordinary achievements, a critical mass of citizens, particularly those with limited access to alternative information, may genuinely believe the manufactured story.
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” — Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln’s observation cuts to the heart of the matter. Power does not create character, it reveals it. And when citizens celebrate leaders regardless of how power is used or misused, they abandon the one mechanism that power most fears: honest, unflinching judgment. A society that does not hold power to account does not truly hold power at all.
The Cost of Celebrating Failure
The consequences of celebrating failed leadership are neither abstract nor distant. They are felt in the potholed roads that break the axles of ambulances. They are counted in the school buildings that collapse on children. They are measured in the hospitals that lack basic drugs while the leaders who promised reform are feted at award ceremonies. Every time a failed leader is celebrated, the standards of acceptable governance are lowered, and the next leader takes that lowered bar as his starting point.
Perhaps most damaging of all is the effect on the young. When children grow up watching corrupt and incompetent officials celebrated as heroes, when they see failure rewarded with praise, titles, and retirement packages, they internalise a profoundly corrupting lesson: that it is not what you do, but who you know; not what you build, but how long you survive. This corrodes the very aspiration that a nation needs most from its youth.
“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” — Plato
Plato’s warning, delivered more than two millennia ago, retains its full force today. When citizens choose comfort over accountability, when they opt for the easy applause over the difficult question, they do not merely tolerate failure, they invite it. They create the conditions in which mediocrity feels safe, in which corruption goes unchallenged, and in which the genuinely capable are discouraged from entering public life at all.
Accountability as an Act of Patriotism
There is sometimes a mistaken belief that criticising leaders, especially after they have left office, is a form of disrespect, ingratitude, or even disloyalty. This belief is not only wrong; it is the very opposite of patriotism. True love of country demands honesty about its condition. True respect for a people demands that their suffering not be papered over with dishonest praise. True loyalty to the nation means placing its interests above the comfort of any individual, regardless of the title they once held.
The late American statesman and diplomat Colin Powell once remarked that the chief test of leadership is not charisma, not eloquence, and not even courage in battle. It is the willingness to make hard decisions and to be accountable for their outcomes. A society that evaluates its leaders by this standard, that asks not ‘did they look the part?’ but ‘did they deliver?’ It is a society that is taking itself seriously.
“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.” — Colin Powell
Accountability is not cruelty. It is the mechanism by which societies learn, improve, and grow. It is how institutions are strengthened rather than personalised. It is how public servants are reminded that their authority is borrowed from the people and must be returned, with interest, in the form of results. To hold leaders accountable is not to attack them. It is to take both them and their responsibilities seriously.
Redefining Legacy: What True Leadership Looks Like
A genuine leader does not need history to be rewritten in his favour. His legacy writes itself in the quality of the roads, the literacy rates of the children, the independence of the courts, and the vibrancy of the economy. She does not require a committee to decide her greatness, the lives she has transformed speak eloquently enough on their own behalf.
Consider the example of Nelson Mandela, a man who served 27 years in prison, emerged without bitterness, led his nation through a potentially catastrophic transition, and voluntarily relinquished power after a single term. His legacy requires no embellishment. Or consider Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who inherited a city-state with no natural resources and transformed it into one of the world’s most prosperous and well-governed societies. Or Rwanda’s remarkable post-genocide reconstruction, driven by intentional, accountable, and results-oriented governance.
“It always seems impossible until it is done.” — Nelson Mandela
These leaders did not ask for our celebration. They earned it, through sacrifice, through competence, through accountability, and through an unwavering orientation toward the welfare of those they served. Their legacies endure not because of elaborate ceremonies but because ordinary citizens look at the world around them and say, with genuine gratitude: this is better because of what was done.
That is the standard. That is the bar. Anything less is a disservice to the citizens who deserved better and a corruption of the very idea of public service.
The Responsibility of Citizens and Civil Society
The burden of accountability does not rest on leaders alone. A society that produces celebrated failures has, inevitably, been complicit in their glorification. Citizens, civil society organisations, the media, academia, and the intelligentsia all bear a share of the responsibility.
The media, in particular, occupies a critical role. A free, independent, and courageous press does not merely report events, it interrogates them. It asks not only ‘what happened?’ but ‘why?’ and ‘who bears responsibility?’ and ‘what was the cost to ordinary people?’ When the press becomes an instrument of public relations for the powerful, whether through corruption, intimidation, or the comfortable lure of access, it betrays its most fundamental obligation.
Civil society must create and defend spaces where honest assessment is possible, where a leader’s record can be examined without political retribution, where citizens can access credible information, and where the culture of honest evaluation is nurtured from childhood through education. Universities must resist the temptation to award honorary degrees to mediocre politicians. Religious institutions must speak truth to power even when power fills the collection plate. Community leaders must refuse to lend their authority to the celebration of failure simply because it is fashionable or financially convenient.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
And so it is with the celebration of failed leadership. When we glorify failure in one domain, we corrode the standards of every domain. When we reward mediocrity in the highest office, we signal to every teacher, every doctor, every engineer, every young person with ambition that excellence is not what this society values. We choose, in that moment, a smaller future than the one we could have had.
A Call to Honest Remembrance
None of this is to suggest that leaders should be treated with contempt or that their human struggles should not be acknowledged with compassion. Leadership is difficult. Governance involves trade-offs, imperfect information, and competing interests that no individual can perfectly navigate. Every leader who serves in good faith deserves basic human dignity, even in the assessment of failure.
But dignity is not the same as false praise. Compassion does not require dishonesty. We can acknowledge a leader’s personal courage while being clear about the institutional failures that occurred on their watch. We can respect a person while refusing to misrepresent their record. We can mourn a death while refusing to manufacture a legacy that history does not support. Honest remembrance is not cruelty, it is the highest form of respect for the citizens who lived under that leadership and the generations who must learn from it.
The great African philosopher and statesman Kwame Nkrumah once declared that the independence of Ghana would be meaningless if it was not linked to the total liberation of Africa. In that same spirit, the celebration of any leader must be meaningless, must be refused, if it is not linked to the honest liberation of citizens from the consequences of that leader’s decisions.
Conclusion: Choose Your Heroes Wisely
A society reveals its values in the people it chooses to celebrate. If it celebrates wealth regardless of how it was accumulated, it tells the world that theft is acceptable. If it celebrates power regardless of how it was exercised, it tells the world that abuse is forgiven. If it celebrates leaders regardless of whether those leaders delivered results for ordinary citizens, it tells the world, and itself, that ordinary citizens do not matter.
But if a society chooses differently, if it decides that its heroes will be those who served faithfully, governed honestly, built durably, and left the people better than they found them, then that society has set itself on a different trajectory. It has raised the bar. It has sent a message to every ambitious young person that the way to be celebrated in this society is through genuine service and measurable results. It has given itself a fighting chance.
The choice belongs to each generation. It belongs to the citizens who vote, who speak, who write, who teach, who organise, and who decide each day what kind of society they wish to inhabit. Choosing honestly, courageously, and wisely, refusing the comfortable lie of manufactured legacy in favour of the difficult truth of genuine assessment, is not merely an intellectual exercise.
It is an act of love for the society you wish to become.
