[OPINION] Rt Hon Chinedum Enyinnaya Orji: Compassionate Leadership Redefined

By Jude Ndukwe

“Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate to and connect with the people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives” – Oprah Winfrey

Without compassion, leadership is a valley of tyranny, but where compassion is the reason for service, leadership becomes a fount of comfort, a mount of milk and honey constantly refreshing the people.

Rt Hon Chinedum Enyinnaya Orji, the Speaker of Abia State House of Assembly, has by all standards met the celestial and even surpassed the terrestrial criteria for leadership, chief of which is compassion without which leaders become tyrannical, dictatorial and totalitarian.

When leadership seeks out the poor to empower, the sick to treat, the broken to bind up, the despondent to restore to hope, the wary to strengthen and the sorrowful to make joyful, it is only fulfilling the divine mandate and people who practice such leadership can only be brought to higher realms by Divine Confederacy to effect more people with their leadership style of compassion.

God is so much interested in this kind of leadership that he chided the “shepherds” of Israel who led the people without any modicum of compassion in the days of Prophet Ezekiel, thus:

“The weak you have not strengthened, nor have you healed those who were sick, nor bound up the broken, nor brought back what was driven away, nor sought what was lost…” ,(Ezekiel 34:4).

Rt Hon Chinedum Enyinnaya Orji can be said to have adequately answered this call; he has, as a matter of character, and as Speaker, been speaking for the voiceless, strengthening the weak, helping to bring healing to the sick, binding the broken and restoring the lost. He brings with him the brightness of morning even to places where there is mourning; he looks down on none but raises the downtrodden in their numbers; he embraces the pauper and empowers the poor; he is the quintessential epitome of compassionate leadership; he is the one whose “cool breeze” blows without discrimination; the one “who relates to and connects with the people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives”!