Browsing: 100 Days in office

Aspiring to a leadership position is one thing, being at the top is another; they are simply two different scenarios. In the aspiration stage, dreams and fantasies permeate the thought process and produce both workable and seemingly unworkable ideas, making decisions and reasons for action quite difficult. Once one reaches the leadership position, reality brings stresses, challenges, painful choices, and controversial decisions and actions from which problem-solving mechanisms emerge. This puts a new leader in a difficult situation: having to meet the demands and expectations of diverse groups of people. The people are diverse. From those who have secretly opposed the leader’s goals to those who have helped him achieve them, they will flood him with a sea of demands that may be impossible to meet. Without strategic thinking, this problematic situation can prevent the leader from achieving his or her desired goal of serving people. From a strategic perspective, a leader must identify the tasks and those who could take on those tasks. A leader must beware of political paternalism that results in putting a round peg in a square hole, because the job can never get done that way. Therefore, a leader must recruit talent from within and outside the political arena to build a high-performing team. He must gather the best minds and assemble a team to accomplish the task before him – good governance, integrity and accountability as embodied in the true democratic ethos. In this regard, the less than 200 days that Dr. Dikko Umar Radda has spent as Governor of Katsina State is on my radar as an interested stakeholder who is keenly interested in addressing the challenges, rapid progress and development of Katsina State. Dikko, the 4th civilian governor under the current political leadership, inherited a basket of problems and challenges as if they came out of Pandora’s box. At his inauguration, Dr. Dikko pledged to the good people of Katsina State that they would not regret putting their trust in him.