The President and Founder of the Reading Awareness Society for Development in Africa, Mrs Bukola Ladoja, said solutions to the nation’s problems are available in books.
According to her, leaders who do not engage in extensive reading are bound to fail.
Ladoja, the wife of a former Oyo State Governor, Rasheed Ladoja, spoke to journalists shortly after a programme titled, “Readers are Leaders” organised for select public secondary school pupils in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital.
According to her, the programme was aimed at nurturing youths that would become change agents and solution providers.
She said RASDA, which was established in 2007, had been to almost all the geo-political zones in Nigeria, adding that it already had stakeholders in the Federal Capital Territory, Owerri, the lmo State capital and Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital.
Ladoja noted that RASDA recently launched its new project the “One Child, One Book, One Week” in Abuja, even as she disclosed that private schools are gradually embracing the “One Child, One Book, One Week” programme, a brainchild of RASDA.
She said, “We are saying we lack leaders, but this is perhaps because most of our leaders have leadership thrust on them without sufficient preparations in terms of adequate knowledge about diverse aspects of life, which of course can only be derived from extensive reading.
“Such leaders are bound for failure because you cannot give what you do not have. The technical know-how to solve the nation’s problems is in books, but we do not want to read books. Parents do not see the correlation between reading and leadership or even success in life. But it is the knowledge from books that will prepare their minds for future leadership.
Speaking on the topic “The Relationship Between Public Speaking and Leadership,” the Director of Training, National Broadcast Academy, Lagos, Dr Ayodele Aliyu, said a leader must through public speaking, be able to move people to action, show feelings for followers, and lead by example.
