By Raheem Akingbolu
Every season in Nigeria comes with new, sometimes re-invented words and phrases. Most recently, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, words like quarantine, social distancing, and palliatives gained so much prominence that no education was required to understand their contextual meanings. It’s the season of politics and elections now and the public space is awash with, among several others, the words competence, character and capacity in the choice of the successor to President Muhammadu Buhari.
Unlike with quarantine, social distancing, and palliatives, with very clear meanings, competence, the first of the ‘newest’ triad, seems to mean different things to different people. With the way the supporters of the different presidential candidates talk about the competence of their candidates, one begins to wonder if competence is a subjective attribute that rides on individual perception and emotions.
Scientists have offered us a way out by identifying four stages of competence with which to appraise individuals on the hierarchy of competence. At the lowest level is unconscious incompetence. At this level, the individual does not know how to do a task, he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know, and he may even deny that there’s a skill needed to do the task. Please do not remind me of the candidate who says he doesn’t need a manifesto. Directly above that is the level of conscious incompetence. Here, the individual is aware of his deficiency and is willing to seek help. This is followed by the level of conscious competence where the individual knows what to do and is willing to stretch himself, against all distractions, to do it.
At the apex of the hierarchy of competence is the level of unconscious competence. Wikipedia describes this level as where ‘the individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task and the individual may be able to teach it to others’. The candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is clearly epitomised by this level of competence.
Asiwaju’s first term as the Governor of Lagos between 1999 and 2003 could be likened to the practice of the skills. His second term between 2003 and 2007 reinforced the skills and made them second nature while the concurrent sharing of the development template with his successors in Lagos and in other APC controlled states is akin to teaching the skills to others. In 2023, competence is required and only the highest level of competence, exemplified in Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the APC, will do.