The King in the North!
After making a riveting speech, Lyanna Mormont declared, “We know no King, but the King in the North… He’s my King, from this day until his last day!”
After two more similar declarations, chants of “The King in the North!”, “The King in the North!”, “The King in the North!”… echoed through the room as they all drew their swords and bent the knee to Jon Snow.
In 2015, majority of us chanted similarly as we bent the knee to our “King in the North”. However, almost 3 years later, we are finally coming to the realization that just like Jon Snow, he knows nothing. Even worse, that is where the similarities end.
If you’ve ever attended any Leadership/Management conference, then you most likely have heard a version of the quote: “A great leader surrounds himself with people better than he is”.
Unlike Jon, our King has no Arya to slit the throat of the “little fingers” threatening the peace of the nation. He appears content to sit cross legged while the Boko Haram insurgents and Fulani Herdsmen run amok in the country. Instead of a Ser Davos or Samwell Tarly, our king has surrounded himself with people who brag about our “growing foreign reserves” without mentioning our ever worsening debt profile; who are quick to talk about being “out of recession” but ignore to mention that our GDP is 71% of what it was in 2014; who sing about our reduced import bills without mentioning the effect the “41 item list’’ has had on commodity prices in the country.
Just how smart is the man who borrows $60 billion, burns through a bunch of it, puts the rest in his bank account and brags about his account balance growing to $40 billion? How wise is it for an A student, who dropped to scoring Es, to celebrate scoring a D as improved academic performance? or for a father to boast that he has slashed down his household monthly expenditure while his entire family is moving about in rags and dying of starvation? I know I’m over simplifying, but it paints the picture.
Unfortunately, this is the reality we live in. Our leaders have taken to feeding us one sided “single stories” while we, the masses, live in ignorance & denial.
According to the old Chinese/Arabic proverb, “He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not is a fool; shun him”. Whereas, “He who knows not, and knows that he knows not is ignorant; teach him”.
Now you know.
