Be Wary of Pack Leaders

(By Jude Idada) - ... I once had a friend, who my father never liked....

He had met him once when he came with my other friends, for a Christmas party my father had thrown.

At the time I couldn't understand his dislike, because we all loved this friend and would do anything for him.

He was our world.

I never knew my father had been watching us that day as we sat in a group, with this friend standing, having our own party while the older and even oldest ones partied in the bigger party that surrounded us.

My friend had promptly left when something someone had said rubbed him wrongly.

The others followed.

I attempted to also follow, but my father called me back at the gate.

"Where are you going to?"

"Not sure where, but my friend wants us to go somewhere."

He looked at me, in that way that laid bare your soul, then he sighed.

"You don't know where they are going but you are following them?"

It was a rhetorical question.

And it showed clearly the foolishness of my action.

"You are all leaving because your friend is leaving right?"

At the time I was shocked as to the acuity of the statement.

I nodded.

He sighed and began one of his lectures, even as the live band played and the guests dined and danced.

"Jude, in every group of friends, there is always a pack leader.

Be wary of him or her.

For when they lead you up a mountain, it is either to show you greater fields to conquer or to actually gain enough height, so that when they throw you down, you will surely die.

That pack leader who uses the word "I" instead of "We"

That pack leader who is always standing when everyone else is sitting.

That pack leader to whose place everyone congregates but hardly ever visits others.

The pack leader who hands his favourable opinion of you like a reward for your favourable opinion of him.

The pack leader who understands friendship only through the extent of strict obeisance to his intellectual dictates and conformity to his visual, aural, social and religious regimen.

That pack leader who always wants the final say, no matter how brilliant the opinions that have been given before by others are.

That pack leader who views "No" from his followers as an attack on his person and supremacy and then uses active and passive aggression as a counter punch to subjugate the one that dared say "No."

If you must follow a pack leader, choose the pack leader wisely. Not by the use of your primal desires but by a well thought out assessment of his qualities and the reason why you need to follow him in the first place.

And when you have chosen, trust the pack leader with healthy scepticism, but don't surrender ultimate control, for people change just like the seasons.

Use your head and not your heart.

And be the friend of logic and reason.

For even the pack leader needs to be saved from the hubris of power.

That hubris that occurs when the leader believes through the conscious or unconscious collusion of the followers, that their power or authority exists unquestioned.

For tyrants are not born...

They are created by the led."

Time passed and with my father's eyes on me and his words ringing in my ears, I drifted from the group.

I made new friends and started out on a new path.

All my four other friends studied at the University of Benin because the friend who we all loved did.

They also joined a confraternity because the friend who we all loved joined it.

In the course of time, the friend who we all loved became a feared confraternity Capo at the University of Benin.

And when there was an inter-confraternity war on the University of Benin campus...

They all were dead in the span of two weeks.

I am alive.

Because...

I had a father.