The economic development of Nigeria requires leadership that manages the affairs of the country as quasi-business going forward.
Eileen Saiyen, Managing Director/ Chief Executive Officer, H. Pierson Associates Limited, made this call in Lagos, stressing that leadership in Nigeria must be based on competence.
She noted that the only way out of the under development that has beset the most populous country in Sub-Saharan Africa for decades is for Nigerians to rise above the pedestrian mode of choosing leaders based on sentiments.
“Talking about competence, a leader has to be nominated based on the footprints of what he has done. Our economy, states are just too large to be used as experiments. At all levels of leadership, we need a paradigm shift on how we see leadership.
“They must be leaders who have a global view and global standard. That requires deliverables and transformation. l think we need to have a fundamental shift on how we define good leadership and we need to also act very quickly”, Saiyen said.
Speaking on efforts of government to diversify the economy of Nigeria, Saiyen commended the policy trust of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration. She called on government to be committed to the execution of the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP), which she said was well articulated and focused.
“You will agree with me that it is very well focused, well articulated. But what we need is execution. In strategy, everything is about execution.
As we go through to 2019, what we need is consistency in governance, and timeline for execution.
If we begin to do that, you will begin to see the impact. But if you have major interjections that disrupt execution, you lose focus and the plans are disrupted”, she disclosed.
On growing the economy through the activities of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), Saiyen said the only way to fast-track economic prosperity through the sector is to drastically bring down interest rate and create access to finance.
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