Africa needs strong institutions to develop – Dogara

For African countries to make any meaningful development, leaders must build strong institutions and not strong personalities, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, has said.

The speaker made the assertion in Abuja on Monday when he received in audience participants of the Executive Intelligence Management Course 9 visited him.

Dogara lamented that British colonial masters did not bequeath educational system that train leaders but one that make them followers.

“The fact is that the conventional education facilities were not put here but the colonial masters to train leaders. They were basically meant to train followers and in a situation where you have followers and not leaders, there is no way the country or a given society can make progress,” he stated.

Dogara maintained that the paradox is that Africa is full of strongmen and women but wondered why is it that ‘our own strongmen and women build weak institutions? That, to me, is a paradox because strong men and women should build strong institutions.”

The speaker opined that  without  institutional independence, there is no way African countries can move  forward because according to him,  “democracy is not just about the individuals providing leadership, no matter how spirited an individual is as a leader. Because we are practising representative democracy, it will not last forever and such a man can be succeeded by a mean spirited leader, then what happens thereafter?’

“And that is why when we have systems that are organised, we have institutions that are strong, they are secure, it is just like that society is on auto pilot. Whatever happens, those institutions will support growth, those institutions will support social policies, those institutions will provide the needed security that a system requires to grow. But as long as we have weak institutions, we can’t make progress”.

He said one of the biggest challenges confronting Nigeria in the wat againts insurgents is the issue of intelligent gathering and dissemination and “ even interpretation of this because what is the value of the intelligence you have gathered if you cannot interpret it and proactively take steps to engage in issues that have arisen in the course of analysing the intelligence?”

He commended the government for establishing the security institute which is “in recognition of the fact that it is only in institutions like this that the tools for leadership is delivered.”

He further argued that as society is dynamic, “our laws that will superintend over it  must also be dynamic as well and the institutions of the society are supposed to be dynamic.”

I want to praise this spirit of unity and networking among agencies that the visioners of this school were able to craft together. I sincerely believe that instead of inter-agency competition as we have witnessed in the past, if we pull the best of these institutions into an institution like this and they grow, chances are that they develop effective bonding at the course of their training and then after that, they can now apply the same thing when they get back to their agencies and are directing and managing their affairs there.”