 If you noticed, I followed the strategic leadership of the SGF by coming by the safer, the safer staircase here, rather than this rather dangerous looking one in front. I think the head of the civil service of the Federation and her team deserve our commendation for the revamped and improved successor plan 2021 to 2025 to the federal civil service strategy and implementation plan 2017 to 2020. The approval of that revamped plan by the Federal Executive Council last year reflects the strong commitment and determination of the federal government to reposition the federal civil service to enable it play its pivotal role in national development. And of course, the LEED-P is an integral part of the three prong training components of the plan, as we've heard so eloquently laid out by the head of civil service. The other two being the structured assessment-based training programs, SMART-P, and the induction training. Are well done for the excellent efforts and the progress that you've made so far. Again we must commend you for the first, this first leadership enhancement and development program. From all I've been told, this first cohort of the LEED-P are some of the brightest and best in the civil service. Having earned their place in the cohort, as we've heard from you, by merit. I think the best of all is the commendation already given for your hard work and diligence by all who have spoken, especially the head of the civil service. Congratulations. I'm to speak on strategic leadership, the essential skills. I think the big question for me has always been whether it's even possible for a nation to develop beyond the capacity, the professionalism, and the integrity of its civil service. That's always been the question for me. Is it even possible for a nation to develop beyond the capacity of its engine room? The empirical examples of other countries that we have, especially LEED developers, show that a highly capable and professional bureaucracy is synchronous for successful development of any country. This was certainly the case with Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, as we've heard, especially from the SGF, amongst others. Just as is the case with Brazil, China, and India, who are even China, for example, is a much earlier starter than everyone else. Its civil service is almost several centuries old. Now all of these are well-developed and professional bureaucracies, and this fact should not be too surprising given the roles and responsibilities of the civil service, namely to, in some cases, to implement policy and to design, in some cases, but implement policy to regulate economic activity and provide public goods, including infrastructure and social services. Very often, we hear people say that Nigeria's problem is not plans and policies, but rather that of a lack of the capacity to implement or failure to implement. The subtext of such comments is simple. The bureaucracy is the key. If it works, everything works. If it fails, plans and policies are hardly worth the paper that they are written on. The bureaucracy literally holds the future of the nation in its hands. And there are several theories, and I'm sure that you all have gone through several theories, case studies and researches on strategic leadership. And I'm quite certain that management and leadership teachers will be much better suited to deliver more informative lectures on this crucial subject. Since I'm not such an expert, I think it might just serve our purposes better if I share with you my own thoughts on some of the strategic leadership skills that I think are essential, especially for leaders such as yourselves in our civil service and in our country. First, let me say that strategy, as far as the civil service is concerned, is first a clear and detailed or required, first a clear and detailed understanding of government policies. As is often the case, politicians come into office with a vision for the future captured either in their manifestos or subsequently in policies and plans. Some of those ideas are at the rudimentary stages of articulation. It may then be the loss of the bureaucrats to further develop these thoughts and ideas. But whatever the circumstance, the strategic leader most fully grasps the policies and plans of government. There must be a clear understanding of what are the policies and plans of government. And this, if you will permit me, requires serious study and inquiry. To be effective at this stage of the assignment, the bureaucrat must apply multidisciplinary knowledge and skills. Some can be taught. Some can be communicated through lectures of the sort that you may have gone through. But self-development is perhaps the most important. Self-development is the most important. What you're reading, what you're studying, the skills that you are giving yourself through personal study. Strategic thinking and planning are mere buzzwords, in my view. If, for example, the bureaucrat does not study and understand, say, for example, the medium term expenditure policy and the fiscal strategy paper of our country and the budget in any given cycle, there's no way that one can apply skills without a fundamental understanding of these policy papers of government, especially where it comes to the economy. Second, strategic leadership is not an individual phenomenon. It has to be systemic and organizational. Strategic thinking and action requires collaborative thinking, especially for the civil service, a huge organization. It has to be collaborative thinking, planning, and implementation. So an essential skill for a strategic leader is the ability to plan, work, and deliver on plans and policies with others, synergy, often across departments, across agencies. So for example, central to our own economic policy, the economic policy of our government, is a diversified economy, job creation, wealth creation, and resource mobilization. Those are key features of our economic policy. But all of these depend on robust private sector participation. And to emphasize the primacy of the private sector, our new development plan envisages an investment commitment of $348 trillion naira over the planned period, of which is expected that government at all levels will come up with $49.7 trillion, or about 14%, while the private sector is expected to invest $298 trillion naira, or about 86% of all of what is required during that implementation period. So the strategic leader must acknowledge the stark reality that without the private sector, we do not have an economic plan. This must then inform the way the strategic leader thinks, plans, and acts. The leader must recognize that the whole point of the civil service and government agencies must therefore be to facilitate and enable individuals, corporations, and other commercial entities, sometimes working with government, to develop industry, to develop business, trade, to render services, and invest. So strategic leaders must envision strategies for ensuring that all government agencies and departments work together to achieve this objective. Any failure along the chain means that the overall objective is either delayed or completely denied. So for example, persons wishing to do business may need to incorporate their businesses. They would need to seek NAVDAC approval for their products. They may need to register a patent if they are using proprietary processes or machines. They may need trademarks for legal differentiation from other products. They may need to import components for their manufacturing or export their products. Every one of these steps involves one or more government agencies. So from the Corporate Affairs Commission through to the Trademarks Office, to NAVDAC, to customs, and other agencies and regulators, it is the business of the civil service leadership at the strategic level to fashion the fastest, most efficient ways to ensure that commercial people and investors can do their business unhindered. Some policies on diversifying the economy, on creating jobs, on resource mobilization are useless if there is no collaborative thinking and action for implementation by the leadership of the civil service. So the question that strategic leaders must always ask is what is the end-to-end implementation strategy that is required? What is that end-to-end strategy that's required? Not what my own silo or my own unit requires, but what is the end-to-end requirement? What does it require to take the issue of economic development, to take the issue of industry from one end to the other? How many agencies should be involved? How many steps are to be taken? Are there ways of shortening the processes or the time that it takes to process applications? So finding the answers to these questions unlocks the objective of enabling the private sector, in the case of our own national development plan, to contribute 86 percent to the national economic plan. So the role of government agencies as licensors, as regulators, as revenue generators, only makes sense when operators understand the bigger picture, and the bigger picture is to provide the most auspicious environment for the private and non-governmental sectors to operate. The strategic thinker must know that we are called to just tend the golden goose. Yes, we are supposed to tend it, but in the process we mustn't struggle it, because otherwise, if in the process of trying to ensure that this golden goose is regulated, we struggle it, then we'll get no eggs whatsoever. This approach, in my view, applies to every component of government policy, not just the economy. Our commitment to lift 100 million people out of poverty as a president has laid out over the next 10 years. Our social investment programs are massive policy initiatives, but they require a full understanding and strategic interpretation by the civil service for effective implementation. This applies even to the routine functioning of government. So the strategic leader may ask, why should it take four months to process the first salary of a new entrant into the civil service? As a matter of fact, when I joined the civil service as vice president and the president, after about two months or three months of waiting for our pay to come in, the president asked me whether I had been paid. I said, Mr. President, I've not been paid. He said, I've not been paid either. And this was the president and vice president. So the question we must ask ourselves, why does it take so long? Why should it take so long? What are the steps and processes? Why do they take so long and what can be done? Why should it take so long to process pension payments and all those verifications and all of those? What does it require? What do we need to do to ensure that these processes are seamless and they're efficient and they're speedy? What does it require to function? What does it require for the civil service to function optimally? What sort of training is required? And this is so important and this is why, as I said earlier, we must commend what the head of civil service is doing with this Lead P project because this is strategic thinking. What does it require to have a civil service that can run the economy and social policies of a nation of 200 million people? What sort of training is required? What remuneration makes sense to attract and retain talent? What sort of remuneration makes sense? How much money do you need to pay to attract and to retain talent? Because there's no point pretending that you can attract quality people and retain them if you don't pay well. There's no point. I mean, there's no question at all. So I'm quite surprised that that got the loudest applause. Okay, but let me just say and I'll give a very quick example of what happened in Lagos State with our judiciary in Lagos State. When we assumed office in 1999 in Lagos State, I, as attorney general, one of the major problems we had was with the judiciary. We ran a survey of practitioners within the courts, within our court system. Legal practitioners who go to court regularly, a committee, which had been set up by a justice sector committee, ran that specific survey and we asked the question from 200 legal practitioners who practice regularly in the courts about the integrity of our judiciary. To cut a long story short, 89% of the lawyers said that our judiciary at the time was, the expression was that they were very corrupt, well, notoriously corrupt, notoriously corrupt. Yes. 89%. And at that time, no judge had ever been sacked, no magistrate had ever been sacked, or even reprimanded in the history of the state, up until 1999. I then held a meeting with some of the senior judges just to look at what the issues were, you know, about six or seven of the senior judges. And we started with a look at their pay. At the time, judges were earning something like 46,000 Naira a month. And when we looked at the pay and we asked the questions, okay, so you have three children in school, two abroad, one here in Nigeria, you know, and we started trying to do the figures. One of them tapped me on the shoulder. I said, learning attorney general, stop all this. You know that this thing doesn't make sense. You know this pay doesn't make sense. You pretend to pay us, we two pretend to work. So it was evident to us, evident to me, that we were not paying. I visited a judge, a judge who was retired. He had been retired for almost 10 years in a place where he lived in somebody's boys' quarters in Lagos, where he had two rooms. One of them had all stacks of books and all of that. He had a little house in his village, according to him. But where he lived in Lagos, it didn't, it was, so I thought to myself, how does it, how does anyone come into the judiciary knowing that they are going to end up in this way? It simply doesn't make sense. So we decided then that we are going to take a whole look at that sector. We are going to look at remuneration. We are going to look at discipline. We are going to look at merit in terms of appointment of judges. And we did all of that. But I'll just focus on the issues of discipline and remuneration. So we knew that every judge, one of the greatest fears of a judge is that they will leave office without a home because you can't practice law once you leave office as a judge. You can't appear in the courts or anything. You are prevented by law from doing so. So if you leave the place without being able to afford a home of your own, that's it. You will never have a home. So we knew that that was a big fear of the judges. And we decided that we must provide accommodation for judges, which is theirs. As soon as you become a judge, you are given a home. It's yours forever, right? And you choose the place. You choose your location. It could be Koei, Leke or Ikeja, the DRM. And then we looked at the remuneration. We got in the human resource experts who looked at the remuneration and we then positioned the remuneration in such a way that it would be difficult for the judge to say that I'm not well paid. And we ensured that remuneration was adequate. We then looked at the questions around merit. How do we attract the best? We were able to attract the best first because, of course, the remuneration was good. And then we looked at questions of discipline. How do we ensure that if a report is made about judicial corruption, we are able to ensure that that report is carried up to the NJC and that we get a decision and we take action. On account of the fact that we were able to carry out all of these extensive reforms, we were, of course, able to ensure that the discipline of judges took place. I mean, about 22 magistrates in our first and first second year were sacked for various acts that were considered contrary to the rules. Same as judges, about three judges lost their jobs. But we ensured, but after that, you would then see that about in 2007, the World Bank did a similar survey with us on asking the same questions about integrity in the high courts of Lagos. Zero percent of our legal practitioners said that our judges were corrupt. Zero percent of our legal practitioners. Now what happened? It wasn't that these people suddenly found revelation and became converted and changed. No. They realized first that they were well remunerated. They had reasonably good accommodation, which, of course, would be their choice. And also that there would be consequence for misbehavior. They recognized that as well. So it's not just a matter of, oh, let's pay people well, no. There must also be consequences. So I think that as part of our thinking through this process, we must be able to arrive at what makes sense. Of course, at the moment, the question that we must ask ourselves at the moment, we already have over two-thirds of our budget is on remuneration and emoluments and recurrent. Almost two-thirds of the national budget. So the question is, are we getting the best? And how do we then restructure? How do we reorganize ourselves and reorganize our finances and reorganize our remuneration in order to be able to attract the best? Because really, as has been pointed out by the Secretary to Government and everyone who has spoken so far, there's no point having a civil service that is not functional. The civil service is the changing room. And I was just saying to the SGS that when he spoke to the former Singaporean minister who went on to head the sovereign world fund, we had also had interactions with Lee Kuan Yew, the Prime Minister then of Singapore who when he heard what we were being paid as public officers and legals at the time, he laughed, he just laughed. I mean, how do you pay quality people this kind of money? It was ridiculous. Nobody was being paid the kind of remuneration that they ought to be paid. And I think it was Lee Kuan Yew himself who said, and I quote, he said, petty power invested in men who cannot live on their salaries is an invitation to the misuse of that power. And that adequate remuneration, he said that adequate remuneration is vital for the high standards of political leaders and high officials. It's important, but a good pay is not enough. Ensuring accountability and discipline are as important. And of course, training, adequate training are also very important. So let me commend again the vision and the focus of the head of the civil service. And I think that this is an excellent start to the big questions of how do we ensure that we have a civil service that can do the work that is required for the largest economy in Africa and perhaps even on the way to becoming one of the most significant economies in the world. So let me end by repeating something I said in 2017. The signing of the Executive Order 001. And this is to do with, at the time I was speaking about the questions around functioning of how the civil service functions. And I said everything that happens in public service has an impact on the lives and of course on the economy and the future of our country. Every time a civil servant says come back next week to someone for something that we can do today, you may postpone the prosperity of that person but in reality you postpone the prosperity of so many who would have earned something from that enterprise. Every time a public officer is an obstacle to business in any way he attacks the prosperity of our economy and he attacks the prosperity of our future. Great economies and great nations and the abundance of those nations and communities are created by men, not spirits. No spirit or anything or angel is going to come down from heaven to come and work out and resolve our issues. And I think it's so important that what makes nations great, those who make nations great are you and I. And when I say you and I talk about the civil service, the civil service is by far and away the most important component in developing any nation. So let me add a word or two of advice. I think it's important also for government to ensure in addition to the training of our lead participants that they have role models and that they are well mentored including senior public servants in various MDAs as well as leaders of the private sector. I'm sure that there is a plan along those lines because it's important that should be a mentorship program an intentional mentorship program that puts these cadres of people through senior public servants who have done well and also private sector. I think that they will be greatly encouraged by seeing those who have succeeded by staying the course and garnering the attributes of leadership over the years. Similarly, it's important that lead people participants are shielded from what may sometimes be and is natural the envy of other political of other civil servants, especially old school civil servants. I think it's important because invariably, invariably there might be resentment to high flyers of this thought. I think that part of what may be required to be done is by ensuring that even those others are given the same sort of training and are given a sense of inclusivity in all of what is being done. I think that you have your work cut out for you in this particular regard. So let me again end by saying that our future development as a nation requires a public service that is motivated, that is efficient and dynamic. And I'm confident that the FC SSIP is the right direction and I urge participants of the Lead P program to take full advantage of the opportunities and exposure that you're getting and because this is surely the way to restore the trust of the political leadership and the citizens in the civil service and indeed the public service at large. So thank you very much for listening. Thank you.