By Fela Durotoye
Nigerians are the only ones who can bring change to Nigeria. How can you leave Nigeria and go and transform America? That has never been the plan. If He needed America transformed, he will send a transformer to America. Go and look at all the people we acknowledge as great men all over the world, and look at their spheres of change. Did Mahatma Ghandi bring change to America? Did he bring change to Britain? He brought change to India. The same thing with Nelson Mandela, he brought change to South Africa. Global change can come from changing your locality. You don’t even need to change the whole of Nigeria, you don’t need to change the whole of Lagos, just change where you are and the entire world can hear and read about you.
Just as God put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to keep and tend it, so also God has placed you in Nigeria to keep and tend Nigeria and guard Nigeria. You have to continually remind yourself that “I was put in this country to dress Nigeria, to keep Nigeria, to tend Nigeria, to guard Nigeria and to cultivate Nigeria”. This is the reason why you were born here. But don’t forget that the land has always gotten into trouble by the reason of its inhabitants. The land and the Garden of Eden had no problems of its own till Adam sinned and rather than curse Adam, God cursed the ground. Every time that people sin, the land suffers for it; so the land suffers for the failure of its inhabitants. And that was why when God was talking about destroying the land in Ezekiel 22:30, He said “So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.” But today, God has found a people who are going to make a difference.
Ladies and gentlemen, you must take responsibility for Nigeria and please understand that the value anyone has is tied to the vacuum that their absence creates. My value in Nigeria is tied to the vacuum that my absence creates in Nigeria. There are human beings that if they got a green card and left Nigeria, Nigeria will not know that one person has left neither will America know that one person has arrived because such people are nothing but a passport number, a census count. There are human beings that get fired from organizations and nobody in the organization knows that they have left. Not even one customer asks after them. Dead people aren’t just people who can’t breathe. There are some human beings who are just existing, not living. The day Adam ate the fruit, he died but he was breathing. Everything Adam did before he ate the fruit was recorded but from the day he ate the fruit, there was not one record of what he did. This means that he was breathing but he had no value. He had nothing that he was doing; therefore, he was a dead man walking.
Our job is very simple. Our job is to find what the challenge is. To every challenge, you have been equipped with a solution; otherwise, you would not have been born at this time. You are a container of solution for your generation. The only reason why you were not born in 1909 like Obafemi Awolowo is very simple, you were sent to this time and season. Otherwise, you would have been born a lot earlier or maybe much later. Yours is the generation that must transform this nation. There was a generation of liberation. There was another generation that was supposed to be a generation of activation but they didn’t make it. The next one was a generation of transformation. I stand as an ordinary citizen in this nation and I’ll testify to three things. When we realized that it seemed that there was a leadership deficiency in our culture because we have always had rulers not leaders, we had traditional rulers, colonial rulers, then we had military rulers. We didn’t have leaders. One day, as I was watching Sky news, during the David Cameron elections, they were talking about the leaders of the Liberal Party and the leaders of the Labour Party and the leaders of the Conservative Party, and at one point in time, the lady touched her ear piece and said “This is a breaking news, we have just heard from Reuters that the ruler of Nigeria, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua has died and it is now expected that Dr. Ebele Jonathan will be next ruler of Nigeria.” I wanted to go crazy! I wanted to scatter the television. How dare you call your own people leaders and call ours rulers. And God said to me, “Cool down, let everything create according to its own kind. What is the ruling party in your country?” I said to myself “It’s the PDP” then He said “the PDP describes itself as what?” I answered “as the ruling party”. So, everything will create according to its own kind.
I said this at a gathering of where many PDP leadership were and when I finished, one of them said to me “ Fela, we apologise to you for calling ourselves ‘the ruling party’, henceforth, we are going to be called ‘the leading party’ but it hasn’t yet come out in the communiqué .” The point here is that we have been having rulers; it is time for us to have leaders. Someone said to me one day, “Fela, did you hear what a former General said, ‘that there is no one in your generation that can rule Nigeria.’ There were four microphones that were pointed at me at a public function. I knew that whatever I said might be used against me, so I said “I pray for the sake of our generation that the General is right; that no one in my generation will be found to rule Nigeria. My generation has been ruled for over 50 years and we have become nothing but decay. It is time for a generation that will lead Nigeria to emerge.”
Ours is a generation that will lead Nigeria. Are you a Ruler or a Leader? Nigeria needs leaders, Africa needs leaders and as leaders, we must become exemplary. As leaders we must live a lifestyle of solving problems. So when the problem of education came to my notice, and I realized that the children no longer wanted to read, I decided to write a book – ‘The 17 Secrets of High Flying Students’. The book was endorsed by Dr. Oby Ezeskwesili as the then Minister of Education and Dr. Dora Akinyuli, then Minister of Information and Orientation.
At another time, somebody came to me and said to me “I want to divorce my husband, just give me the permission to do so”. I said to her “it’s not in my power to give you the permission to do so. Two, it is not possible for me to tell you because God hates divorce.” So she said “then you will have to solve the problem”. Fifty-four percent of marriages round the world are ending up in divorce less than five years after the wedding. You can’t build strong nations under destabilized family units, so you have to do something. So I wrote another book called ‘Mr. Fantastic’. You see, I could have been joining those talking about the problem but I didn’t. I now found out I was a leader. It doesn’t matter who found the problem, I just found a solution. We wrote a book that tells you the 17 key things you must look at before plunging into marriage. You have to know whether your partner is tolerable, intolerable, compatible or incompatible. Then we found out that the economy is not good because productivity is low, so we decided to write another book called ‘Sub-ordinate’.
You might say Fela, you are just writing books, is it book that we will chop? Well, true, it might not be book that we will chop but one thing is for sure, the good book says “my people perish for lack of knowledge” and therefore my people thrive by reason of knowledge. When we noticed that the teachers in school were not very happy, they weren’t teaching the children well, I didn’t complain about it, I decided to mobilize teachers through a program called “Raise One Million”. We adopted an education district in Lagos called “District Four.” We got 75 teachers that were doing after school activities for free. They were teaching 820 children for free every day. They were teaching them Leadership, Math and English. There was never a day when any child had to be flogged with a cane or threatened with a cane to learn. In the course of teaching them, we also realized that only 20 of them had mathematical sets. The government had provided mathematical sets for them but many of their parents had told them not to take it because “if it gets missing now, Fashola will say you have to pay for it”. So they didn’t take it even though the government had provided it. So the implication was that the mathematical sets were there but the children were failing. We also found out that only 11 of the students out of the 820 students had Mathematical Tables. The tools were there but because of a rumour, the students were not taking advantage of what the state government had provided to aid their academics. So there was a problem that needed an urgent solution.
What I did was that I went to Facebook. I decided on that social media because of the large followership that I have. So I told my followers to please join me in buying mathematical sets for the kids and before you know it, people started sending in money. We were trying to buy mathematical sets for 820 students but we ended up giving mathematical sets and tables to 4,422 students.
When we found that leadership was a problem, we set up a leadership training institute, Gemstone. No we have decided that we are setting up a centre called the Gemstone Institute for Leadership and Effective Governance to train all the right thinking people so that every one of them can become like a Governor Fashola, so that they can be prepared and trained and go into governance and do great things. We need good people to go into governance who are well prepared. This is because most of them have vision but they do not have preparation. They do not even know anything about the place they want to transform. So, we are saying let us prepare them so that they can carry out transformations when they get there.
I went to a school in the US called “The Leadership Institute” and for a week, they were teaching on a course called “The Future Candidate”. I was there not because I want to be a future candidate but because I want to train future candidates. And by the time we were done, I understood. They said if a candidate running for the office of the President of the United States has a campaign management plan less than 2000 pages, it is sure he will not win. They were able to articulate that electioneering and campaigning has become a science so that you do not go and make campaign promises that will get you into trouble. But here, what do we do? Do we expect anything of our leaders or people that are candidates? Nothing. And yet many of you will not fly in a plane that the pilot has not been trained. None of you will not ride in a car if the driver has not learnt how to drive.
For the Raise One Million Programme, we decided that the children needed mentors because the children were going to school and they didn’t even know why they were going to school. So we decided to set up the Employee Volunteering Team where many people who were working in organizations can come to schools and be able to inspire the children. We also found out that most of the volunteers were scared and didn’t know how to talk to the children; so we came up with a simple system that makes them read the books to them. Soon reputable institutions began to show interest and they began to send their staff over. The Lagos State Ministry of Education has endorsed that we go into Lagos State schools with mentors to go and begin to touch the children. The initiative also gave birth to the Global Reading Festival where books were read to children in 17 countries simultaneously. The First Lady of Lagos State, Dame Abimbola Fashola was the lead reader in Lagos. The books were read simultaneously in 17 cities in Nigeria. It is the first time a book is being read across the world simultaneously. We know that reading a book isn’t just important; we need to have peace too, so we decided that we were going to use a compass to find out where the North is across the 17 cities and we would get people to declare peace to the North and vice versa to the South, East and West. Then we would ring the peace bell and that would be the largest ever call for peace.
The Nigeria we make is the Nigeria we have. We need to build a new Nigeria brick by brick till we achieve the Nigeria of our dream. God bless Nigeria.
Fela Durotoye is the Chief Executive Officer of Visible Impact; a social enterprise set up to tackle social and environmental challenges and limitations with the aim to build people into super-achievers and responsible leaders, build corporate organizations into global market leaders and responsible corporate citizens, as well as assist governments in developing blueprints and programs that create a desirable environment for their people to do great things. He is widely regarded as a nation builder, an internationally acclaimed national development strategist, best - selling author and an internationally renowned motivational speaker. His book, ‘The 17 Secrets of High Flying Students’, delivers to students, principles that make them super achievers, while the entire plan guarantees an educational system that is believed will make Nigeria the worlds’ centre for academic excellence by December 31, 2025. He has also gained a reputation as one of the leading experts in the field of Customer Management and Workforce Activation, particularly in the banking sector. Today, Visible Impact’s Consulting Group has assisted several organizations, including 9 of Nigeria’s top 10 banks in their quest for high quality service delivery. As a highly sought after speaker, the name Fela Durotoye now rings across Nigeria, the United States of America and the United Kingdom as one of our nation's most sought after business strategists and motivational speakers. Fela is also the founding president of the Motivational Speakers Network (MSN) of Nigeria. He is happily married to Tara; a renowned and celebrated make-up artist and beauty consultant, and together they have 3 boys. Born Wednesday, the 12th of May 1971 in Ibadan South West Nigeria; He attended the Staff Children's School (1974-1981) and Moremi High School (1981-1986). He bagged a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science & Economics in 1991; an MBA in 1997 and an M.Phil in Strategic Management in 2000.
