Post-2023 leadership function and the lessons of history for Nigeria

• Published date: 22 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

In this piece, I want to further explore deeper issues relating to the lessons that political history of the world around us offer in focusing on the leadership challenges that Nigeria needs to urgently engage with, as we approach the change of leadership baton in 2023. The worry for me still revolve around the concern, that we are focusing more on the dynamics of electing another administration; rather than the far more weightier issue of outlining the critical elements of success for such an administration; etched against the various landmines which explain why previous administration since independence have failed. Leadership success hinges around the capacity to elaborate and implement a change space that harnesses vision and strategy to the managerial capacity to deploy capabilities. That is the key factor that the new administration will and shall be judged by. Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut, once remarked: 'Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It's about keeping your team focused on a goal, and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high, and the consequences really matter.' And he is absolutely right.

It is not really difficult, except a country has become really immune to transformation, to learn specific leadership lessons from the many country-specific transformations that history outline for us globally. There are several countries that have faced down the odds of progress and development to achieve transformative metamorphosis through the deployment of change management with unstinting focus and political will. These are the various lessons that I hope to bring to light in this piece. And I want to start with America's vision of landing a man on the moon.

In 1962, at the Rice University stadium, President John F. Kennedy gave the now famous 'Moon Speech' that gave political will to what is now the series of Apollo Mission to the moon. In his attempting at persuading the American people to sign on to the Apollo program and own it, JFK noted that it was 'an hour of change and challenge,' and in a 'decade of hope and fear'; and yet he insisted that

We shall send to the moon 240,000 miles away, a giant rocket, more than 300 feet tall on an untried mission to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth. But why some say the moon? Why choose this as our goal? …. We chose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because...