By Benson Daniel
Nigeria cannot afford to wait until young people occupy positions of authority before teaching them what leadership means, the Executive Secretary of the Lateef Jakande Leadership Academy, Ayisat Agbaje-Okunade, has said.
She believes the process needs to start much earlier, when young Nigerians are still finding their identity, developing their values and deciding what kind of impact they want to have.
Agbaje-Okunade made the point while announcing a new six-month virtual discussion series, The Leadership Room, designed to give young Nigerians direct access to experienced leaders across different sectors.
The idea is simple but significant. Instead of waiting for young people to become managers, executives, politicians or institutional heads before exposing them to leadership lessons, the programme will allow them to learn from people who have already spent years making difficult decisions, building organisations and dealing with failure.
“As soon as someone is given a title, leadership development doesn’t need to start; it should begin a lot earlier,” Agbaje-Okunade said.
That approach reflects a wider challenge facing Nigeria. The country has a large and youthful population, but opportunities for young people to engage directly with experienced leaders are often limited to formal education, professional training or occasional networking events.
The Leadership Room is intended to fill part of that gap.
The sessions will be held virtually on the first Tuesday of each month, with participants able to listen to moderated conversations and ask questions directly.
The first edition will feature former Minister of Communication Technology Omobola Johnson and economist and former Central Bank of Nigeria Deputy Governor Kingsley Moghalu.
The conversations will go beyond career advice. Participants are expected to explore issues such as identity, character, accountability, people leadership, institutional leadership, execution and legacy.
That distinction matters.
Leadership is often presented to young people as a collection of motivational phrases about success and ambition. The academy is instead positioning the programme around the less glamorous side of leadership: responsibility, character, service and the consequences of decisions.
Agbaje-Okunade said the programme was created partly because many young Nigerians do not have enough opportunities to ask experienced leaders the questions they would ordinarily struggle to get answers to.
The six-month pilot will run from September 2026 to February 2027 and is expected to attract students, young professionals, entrepreneurs, public sector workers and other emerging leaders from Nigeria and across Africa.
The academy also plans to create a digital library from the sessions so that the lessons can remain available beyond the live conversations.
For the organisation, the initiative is also an attempt to widen access to leadership development beyond participants in its fellowship programme.
That could prove important in a country where leadership conversations are often concentrated around people who have already achieved prominence.
Young people from different professions and backgrounds, the academy argues, should have an opportunity to learn from one another as well as from those who have gone before them.
The larger question is what happens after the conversations end.
Exposure alone cannot create effective leaders. It has to be followed by opportunities to take responsibility, make decisions, experience setbacks and learn from them.
But without that first exposure, many young people may enter positions of influence without ever having had the chance to understand the weight that comes with them.
For Nigeria, where questions around leadership, accountability and institutional effectiveness remain central to the country’s development, starting that conversation early could be more than a youth programme.
It could be an investment in the kind of people who will eventually be asked to run the country’s businesses, institutions and public organisations.
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