Events
Exec Suites
The Dilemma of Choosing Between Order of Priorities and Hierarchy of Needs
Written by Duncan Monday, 26 July 2010
ShareLETTER TO THE PRESIDENT –8 Your Excellency, To back my argument up, I will quote a Mafia saying from the oldest master of them all; Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano: Our wants and our needs are two different things. Now somebody might be thinking that I seem stuck in the Mafia way of life, but I say if we remove their criminal inclinations, the Mafia ways are the best ways in life. In effect, Your Excellency, I’m trying to say that Nigeria needs to begin to distinguish priorities from needs. And everybody knows that it is always best to start a new practice or religion in the smallest of ways. So, if we want to start this new method of recognition of what to do first, the microcosm point for the country should be in football and sport, because no other sector completely mirrors the success and failure of the country as much as this two do. I think if we manage to fix football, sport is automatically fixed; and we would already be ahead in the fixing of the country’s ills. It is like the family within a nation. It was a former United States First Lady who once said that when the family breaks down in a country, the nation can be considered well on its way to breaking down too. The priority of needs is merely the things a country wants, whereas its hierarchy of needs is about those things it needs to do, to fix, immediately. Now, it takes a lot of study to know how the president of any particular clime thinks. This is why in the United States, for instance, they have so many specialists in so many specialised areas; like Asian specialist, African specialist, even Japanese and Chinese specialists. This is the reason why some people think that America and Britain – through President George Bush Snr. and Prime Minister John Blair – erred in not taking the advice of intelligence agencies of their countries, which had said Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), in going on to start Gulf War -2. That war was not an issue of WMD. It was that America had decided that time was up for Saddam Hussein, and Britain being the brother of America had to follow their more important sibling into the crusade, for in reality, it was a crusade clothed in WMD obliteration. Let us take the reaction of the United States to Saddam Hussein’s threat in the line of what the great Abraham Maslow had designed in the 1940s and 50s as to human’s needs; and which he had called the Hierarchy of Needs Pyramid. According to the theory, only when the lower order needs of physical and emotional well-being are satisfied are we going to be concerned with the higher order needs of influence and personal development. Conversely, if the things that satisfy our lower order needs are swept away, we are no longer concerned about the maintenance of our higher order needs. In the same manner, Sir, let us substitute Maslow’s pyramid with our own. What more Sir – although the traditional number of echelon on Maslow’s Pyramid is five - since football has so much power over our lives, it can even help to reduce our Nigerian Hierarchy of Needs echelon number from five to four, as it can automatically solve Maslow’s third grade echelon in our lives – Belongingness and Love Needs (see Diagram B). With all of us meeting at the stadium or behind the television, during live matches, and with our teams having a 90 percent rate of success, Nigerians will find they automatically bond and our workgroup, office and family relationship will be at a premium.
Today, we should do a little bit of techno-socio-science in order to differentiate between priorities and needs; areas I can say are divided from each other by a fine line. Some people may peddle ideas that priorities and needs are one and the same thing, but I say those who peddle such notions are only living under aqueous realities.
For this, only a sitting president, if he genuinely have the love of his country at heart, can decide what the true hierarchy of his country’s needs are. That is why the United States – notwithstanding that all the Service Chiefs might have accented to the country using a nuclear weapon on an enemy – requires that the sitting president give his final consent through his signature on the official seal.
According to Maslow (please check Diagram A), humans’ real needs begin from the lower level “Deficiency Needs” of safety and belonging, which seem to pull stronger than the higher level “Being Needs” such as justice, beauty, compassion and love. Maslow’s theory is said by experts, to remain the single most valid basis, today, for understanding human motivation, management training, and personal development.
Looking at that lowest level, in relation to Bush’s America and Saddam Hussein, it is easy to see that the former President, in the wake of the bombing of some American cities, saw the former Iraqi leader as threatening America’s basic level of life needs in air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep. Read: How do Americans sleep well when the enemy has demonstrated he could so easily reach them? If you couldn’t sleep in peace, go to work freely, how do you procreate and live? So, Saddam had to go to restore Americans’ confidence in both the government and in life.
We all know that Nigerians are one of the happiest people in the world. But for a period of two weeks in June, we were the saddest humans on Planet Earth. Why was this so? It was so because our football was performing poorly in South Africa. This same situation had occurred six months earlier in January when the game went to Angola for the Africa Cup of Nations and mis-performed. So, if a sector has such a high level of hold and power over our ability to be happy and sad; therefore causing us so much pain and low productivity level in all spheres when things are down there, why not put that sector in the base level of our needs?
So, Sir, check my two diagrams, ‘A’, belonging to Maslow, and ‘B’ my adaptation of it for the country. Every democracy has its adaptation, and so does every other thing in life. Let us try something like this to attempt to make Nigeria a success. I don’t see any harm in trying something unique. Who knows what we might come out with?
Show/hide comments
Show/hide comment form
