Stakeholders from diverse sectors have urged political leaders to embrace personal sacrifice and selfless service as essential ingredients for nation-building.
They made the call in separate interviews with the Press on the sidelines of the 2025 International Leadership Conference and Awards held in Abuja.
The conference, themed “Strategic Leadership for Nation Building,” brought together leadership experts, clerics, scholars, and women’s rights advocates, who emphasized that leadership is a call to serve.
They appealed to leaders to place national interest above personal or partisan considerations to drive genuine development.
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According to them, the country urgently requires united, selfless, and intentional leadership at all levels to steer it toward peace and prosperity.
Pastor Oloche King-Adaji, Senior Pastor of the City of Refuge International Church, Abuja, noted that sacrificial leadership is vital to building a fair and progressive nation.
He also stressed the need for mentorship for emerging leaders to ensure that strong leadership values are transferred to the next generation of Nigerians. “I believe that the missing link in our society is visionary leadership, as we have people in various spheres of leadership in our nation leading us to nowhere.”
“For many people, leadership is the occupation of a seat or the fulfillment of an ambition, but leadership is actually about making sacrifices.
“The truth of the matter is, leadership must be sacrificial to make a meaningful impact, sacrificing personal gains for nationhood and national development.
“That sacrifice must be made if our nation is to make any meaningful progress, and leaders must understand that this is not all about them,” he said.
Esther Adelana, a leadership coach and Executive Director of Tea-Prime Leadership Academy, the organisers of the event, said the nation needs transformational leaders across all sectors to drive meaningful and progressive change.
“The theme for this event is strategic leadership for nation building, and we believe that strategic leadership will provide solutions to the problems in Africa, and Nigeria in particular.
“It will help us to initiate innovative solutions to those problems and also come up with initiatives that will lift Nigeria from a third-world country to a leader on the global stage.”
“Sacrificial and selfless leadership is key to achieving this, and that is why we should catch the youths earlier and then imbibe in them the culture of transformational leadership,” she said.
Earlier in his keynote address, Prof. Udenta O. Udenta noted that beyond the political space, effective leadership is essential across all sectors including education, security, and other institutions to achieve a truly transformed society.
He highlighted clarity of vision, capacity development, the disruption of outdated systems, and the convergence of diverse ideas as critical pillars for nation-building. “No matter how small or big your agency is, your organisation is, you must have a clear vision of what you want to achieve.
“Vision is when you have even compelling limit situations that will hamper your ability to perform, but you overcome them because your vision is very clear and very intentional.”
“As young people, we must strive to question, to decompose the old order, to talk about proposals.
“We must harass conventions in order to have another picture to find your voice and through your voice employ a leadership potential for the growth of the nation,” he said.
NAN/Oluchi