Prof. Oladipo Akinkugbe, Pro-Chancellor and Chair of the Council of Port Harcourt University
Leadership has in our age become a strange chimera of diluted values. Its imperatives are multifaceted but as Abraham Lincoln once said “All virtue without a vice is not leadership!” Essential ingredients include intelligence, initiative, self assurance, empathy, simplicity, trust, dedication, common-touch and hard work. A shrewd blend of four desiderata, however, marks the leader from the rest of the pack – he must be single-minded, selfless, purposeful and endowed with a generous fund of integrity. Just as the pen is the tongue of the mind, the leader must operate in a milieu in which contemporary values system is stable and guaranteed.
In a society in which many have so much respect for modesty that they use it sparingly, in which material wealth often determines social status and in which internal self-discipline and public integrity count for little, it is difficult to find the appropriate locus to rest the proverbial lamppost of due diligence and dedicated leadership.
The leader must constantly seek value-added and enhancing instruments to demonstrate to society the dividends that derive from well-informed intellect (knowledge is power) and the ability to use such knowledge for the advancement of public good.
Society itself must be primed to appreciate the correct values system, for it is by doing so that it will be better able to judge the quality of leadership that flows from precept. A cultivated disdain for conspicuous consumption, for vain-glory postures, for the raw and arrogant display of power, will go a long way to sanitize our values system.
The leader must constantly seek value-added and enhancing instruments to demonstrate to society the dividends that derive from well-informed intellect (knowledge is power) and the ability to use such knowledge for the advancement of public good.
Perhaps the most important imperative of leadership in every society is that of decision making, decision taking and decision actualisation. Take two leaders – both are involved in taking and acting on ten issues. The first takes decisions and acts on all ten but is eventually vindicated in seven of these issues. His scorecard is 70 percent. The other leader is ultra-cautious – the type who will hold his trousers up with both belt and braces. He takes decision and acts on only three and leaves himself little or no time to make his judgement on the remaining seven. Even if he is proved right in all the three issues he has managed to act upon, his performance is only 30 per cent. Indecisiveness in any endeavour – in high profile office, in the professions, in the board room, in industry, in academia and indeed in the whole nexus of public life – is near criminal, and may vicariously and adversely affect the “ingredients” enunciated above. Decisiveness derives from having available all the data necessary to form a judgement. Its twin imperative therefore is the ability to garner enough information to facilitate the process of decision-making.
Young minds must therefore be trained to learn how and where to search for information to guide their capacity to think and arrive at a sound judgement on any issue that confronts them. Even when a decision does not call for a specific action, or suggest action contrary to public expectation, a leader must have the courage of his conviction to explain carefully why he has adopted a particular course of action rather than invite unnecessary and sometimes unhelpful speculation.
Once there is a blend of informatics and decisiveness, the ultimate essence is the time-factor. Again Abraham Lincoln once quipped “Things wait for those who wait, but only the things left behind by those who hassle”.
Professor Oladipo Akinkugbe, CON MD DPhil FRCP FWACP FAS NNOM is the Pro-Chancellor and Chair of the Council of Port Harcourt University and Professor of Medicine at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
