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Dr Yele Okeremi
Dr Yele Okeremi

Africa needs innovative leadership— Businessman

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Nigeria-based Precise Financial Systems, Dr Yele Okeremi, has attributed the underdevelopment of Africa to leadership.

He said some of Africa’s leaders did not have the understanding of how to apply the numerous natural resources to the betterment of their citizens.

Addressing the fourth congregation of the Nobel International Business School (NIBS) in Accra last Saturday, he said: ”The challenge we have in Africa is we still haven’t found the means of allowing our best to lead us. We still have the system where the worse lead us. And that is why we see countries that are not so smart doing better than us”.

Sixty-four students graduated with Doctor of Business Administration (DBA), while another 18 graduated with Executive Master’s of Business Administration (EMBA).

Managing resources

Dr Okeremi said “countries that do not have those resources are having wealth because they have leaders who have understood how to apply those resources to the betterment of their citizens”.

He underscored the reason to invest in education, saying most developed countries had moved from dependence on natural resource to investing in human capital.

“Africa still thinks that the worth of the nation still lays beneath the ground, while the world has moved on to the understanding that the worth of nations is in the heads of its people,” he started.

Innovation

Dr Okeremi said the country needed more people with creative and innovative ideas to manage and harness the resources of the country.

He, therefore, charged the graduates to use the knowledge they had acquired to transform the nation.

“The question is, who will you be? What changes will you make? Is your degree going to make the world a better place?

“A doctorate is not about being brilliant, a doctorate is not about being intelligent, but a doctorate is about being disciplined. A doctorate is being resilient and a doctorate is about being focused, and this saying goes to the EMBA graduates as well,” he said.

He stressed that Africa and the world at large needed both brilliant and disciplined minds, adding that “any knowledge that doesn’t lead to a change is absolutely useless”.

The Assistant Academic Dean, Dr Hod Anyigba, said the school had a unique module where the course work was integrated with theses writing.

That, he said, had led to the students having high completion rates.

“That is why you can see a very high completion rate as opposed to the global completion rate of about 20 to 30 persons. We have high completing rate of about 70 to 80 per cent because we have unique and innovative ways of approaching education,” he said.

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