Ibikunle Amosun, governor, Ogun State, has said that within his two years in the saddle, the state has substantially upped its internally generated revenue (IGR) to N4 billion from N700 million monthly, making it only second to Lagos.
Amosun said the feat was achieved as a result of dedicated leadership and his determination to walk his talk.
The governor spoke in Lagos on Thursday at the 1st CVL Solution Conference Series and presentation of CVL Leadership Compendium.
According to him, “Leadership is to have the vision and the capacity to pass what you believe across to other people. You must show the example; lead the way and others will follow. Once the leadership gets it right, every other thing will fall in place. In Ogun State today, civil servants resume for work earlier than they used to. This is because, I show the example; by 7.30 every morning I am in the office, and all the commissioners have adopted that habit. That is leadership. In two years, we have increased our IGR to N4 billion and with that we are now second to Lagos.”
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In his opening remarks, Kalu Idika Kalu, a former minister of finance and chairman of the occasion, identified corruption, greed, lack of patriotism, indiscipline and poor leadership as the bane of the country.
“As a country, we have made too many wrong turns. Such wrong turns include inadequate funding of the economy by our own volition; we embarked on GSM at a wrong time when what we needed was to increase the landlines and make it available and affordable; we transferred a huge bundle of dollars to our credits, and wrong consolidation. We don’t need to scratch our heads thinking where things went wrong. We must not stop talking until there is a positive result”, Kalu said.
Wole Olanipekun (SAN), former pro-chancellor and chairman of council, University of Ibadan, in his speech said good leadership would help the citizens achieve their goals in life.
“We know what good leadership entails. The question we need to ask ourselves is, where is our generation heading to and heading for? We want leaders who will do what they say and not those who will say ‘do as I say and not what I do’. We don’t have institutions, we don’t have values, and we don’t have constitution and that’s why we continue amending and amending”, Olanipekun said.
