Olaopa charts path to development, celebrates Okunade at 70

Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, yesterday, gave insight into a path that could be taken for national development.
Olaopa spoke on “Is Leadership Sufficient for National Transformation in Nigeria? (Bayo Okunade, Leadership Question and Political Science Scholarship at Ibadan)” at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan (UI), during the valedictory lecture and the celebration of the 70th birthday of a Professor of Political Science, Adebayo Okunade.

The professor of Public Administration, who paid glowing tribute to Okunade as his teacher with a profound influence at Olivet Baptist High School and the UI, also used the occasion to critique his theorisation about leadership, national transformation and his “arbitrary privileging of the democratic administration over other possible regimes.”

To Olaopa, rehabilitating Okunade’s theory of leadership out of what he identified as a certain “quandary” requires first the undermining of the intrinsic assumption in Okunade’s theory, about the leader as a change agent with a singular capacity to make people do what is needed.

According to Olaopa, this is evident in Okunade’s inaugural lecture, from his assessment of leadership activities from Tony Blair and George Bush to Olusegun Obasanjo and Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. To Olaopa, this understanding of political leadership stifles the significance of the relationship between leadership, social change and infrastructural development.

He said: “ Indeed, it puts a lot of over-extended pressure on a political leader in terms of the expectation of magical transformation by a wave of the leader’s wand that turns poverty to prosperity.

“We must therefore ask, legitimately, if this understanding of political leadership is sufficient for national transformation. This question is justified when we take cognisance of Nigeria’s unique political sociology and how it throws up compromised leaders who are forced to play bad politics with the commonwealth to hold on to power.
“There is a one-to-one relationship between this skewed political sociology and the construction of elite nationalism in Nigeria, making elite consensus required to craft the philosophical construct and principles underpinning the Nigeria of the future.”

“The character of the political class defined by neopatrimonialism and prebendal proclivities further compounds the dynamic making the chances of a patriotic and inclusive development social formation problematic.”

Consequently, Olaopa notes that an alternative articulation of the nature and role of leadership can be found in the change space model of leadership. To him, the change space model is founded on the point that “organisational and social change emerges when there is acceptance, authority (and accountability) and ability to allow and catalyse ongoing as well as episodic adjustments.”

“In other words, the change space is supposed to facilitate the capability of the institutions and systems of government to encounter and engage changes while factoring in contextual pressures and circumstances. Every change requires a leader as a change agent who harvests the synergy of a critical mass of other change champions and agents to bring in values, such as competencies, resources and contexts. One is channelled to facilitate genuine and transformational change through a problem-solving approach.

“This change space model of leadership helps us to move away from the idea of a leader as a strong man with a singular capacity to get things done, to catalyse the dynamics of the development process sufficiently to achieve desired national transformation.

“With the change space conceptual framework, we are also able to make sense of the relationship between ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ as the process of influencing and mobilising ideas, resources and acumen to deliver desired development outcomes. Within the framework of the change space model, political leadership is given the force required to push for progress within a distributed and multi-level leadership arrangement.

“The leadership is, therefore, expected to (a) build a coalition for change (b) assemble a team with sufficient IQ, wisdom and commitment to initiate, implement and deliver the change and (c) grant required authority, incentive and support, with accountability, to this team of leaders in their own right so they could achieve optimal productivity, performance and the impact that will deliver the change.