Ambode as Bridge Builder

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality”- Marren Bennis, Notable America Business Leader. It is an unarguable fact that the quantity and quality of any nation’s professionals determine its economic development because they are the people with the skills and intellect necessary to shape the course of growth of any country.
It is also a statement of fact that advanced countries of the world have their professionals and leaders to thank for heights they have attained.
Ever since democracy took root in Nigeria, there has been sustained effort on the part of government to bring the country out of underdevelopment. This was the reason the vision 2020 was drawn. Specifically, the vision aims at transforming Nigeria into one of the 20 industrial powers by 2020.
For this goal to be realised, the nations’ professional class and leaders must be involved to drive the process. Nigeria boasts of thorough bred professionals and leaders who can hold their own anywhere in the world.
Name any country and you will find Nigerian professionals in strategic places, helping to advance the cause of development. Mention any profession and you would find a Nigerian among the best in the world; Nigerians are endowed with one talent or the other.
Indeed, a professional and leader is a person who has achieved an acclaimed level of proficiency in a calling or trade. The term can also apply to a person who engaged in a certain occupation for gain or as a means of livelihood. The fact definitely cannot be gainsaid that the professionals and leaders in any country are its greatest asset.
Even though Nigeria is abundantly blessed with human and natural resources, it is sad that this has not translated to economic development. Even nations, with whom we had the same economic indices 50 years ago, have all left us behind. In fact, some foreigners have often argued that our continued underdevelopment is due to the underperformance of our professionals and leaders, saying that it is because they are not competent enough to move Nigeria forward.
But we know this assertion is not true as they are very much capable of making the desired transmutation of Nigeria.
More so, leadership is a practical thing. It is epitomised in the continuity of societal progression. Leaders move the society from a state of stagnation.
Akinwunmi Ambode is an epitome of the above-mentioned qualities of leadership. In the history of Lagos State government, in which he served as a civil servant and rising to position of Permanent Secretary, there has not been such of his record ever in the civil service, as has been under the Akinwunmi Ambode leadership as an Accountant General of the state. He is calm, immensely knowledgeable, organised and focused. Ambode, led the most organised, painstaking and deeply managed Lagos State treasury during the Obasanjo administration that starved the state of funds due to of the additional LCDAs.
His management throughout the period dwelt deeply on education, agriculture, due process, rural and urban transformation, localisation/ domestication of contract award, the re-engineering and re-organisation of the civil service.
Rising from the humble position of a junior Accountant, he moved up the ladder to becoming the youngest ever Auditor General for Local Governments in in 2001. Subsequently,
he was made the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Finance in January 2005, before combining the additional responsibility of Accountant General in February, 2006.
But of a remarkable achievement was how he kept the state running during the embattled period when the Olusegun Obasanjo-led administration unilaterally stopped allocation to local governments in the state. A more critical look at his book: Public Sector Financing may shed more light on the strategie.

Advertisement

 

Advertisement

*this was published in the Daily Times newspaper dated Monday, December 29, 2014