How to build leaders for Nigeria’s modern economy, by Kolade, Momoh

CONFRONTED by the challenge of leveraging the prospects of the largest youth population by 2050, Nigerians must learn to be the kind of leaders they seek, act to decisively impact their immediate environment and embrace attitudes that would strengthen the right values of leadership, Chairman, Board of Directors of the Nigeria Leadership Initiative (NLI), Dr. Christopher Kolade, has said.

Kolade, who made this submission yesterday at the 7th Christopher Kolade Symposium, organised by the NLI, in Lagos, said that Nigerians needed to understand that the leadership of the country is “not about Buhari, nor where we are going for the future about Osinbajo, but about you, me, and everybody.”

According to him, “Nothing is going to bring this country to a better position unless everybody expresses and exercise their in-built qualities of leadership. Better leadership is leading people to get things done. The more you lead people to do things, the more we are building the required human capital for the future.

“It is not the job of the leader to bring greatness to people, but rather to bring the greatness in people to the fore, because everyone has seeds of greatness in them.”

The keynote speaker, Chairman of Channels TV, Mr. John Momoh, said Nigeria is a great and complex country, where, “we have few good men and women in the company of bad leaders. The bad people are in the majority.”

He stressed that Nigeria was sitting on a time bomb with its docile youth population and that government must either do something about unemployment or face the consequences ahead, noting that the motive of any good leader should be to work for impactful social change, abhor injustice and believe in noble virtues.