Think of leadership as a culture, not a position - Young leader to Ghanaian youth

The Chief Servant of The Gracedlife Leadership Centre (TGLC), Emmanuel Nuamah, has called on young people to move from thinking of leadership as a position, to rather considering it as a culture to be lived.

He explained that young people should understand that leadership is not only something that comes with occupying an office or designation, just like in politics, but it is something that should become part of their lives.

Speaking at an event to mark 5 years since the establishment of TGLC, Emmanual Nuamah stressed the importance of people beginning to do the right things, even if it makes them feel alone.

“I think what we're doing is to move people from thinking of leadership as a position, and to think of leadership as a culture – as a way of life. And that's one of the things that is missing in Africa. It's not part of our culture. So, I'll give you an example. When leadership is part of a culture of the people, it’s uncomfortable for people to do what is wrong. It's like if you litter, it should feel uncomfortable, you should feel alone, you should feel ashamed, but it's not so here. Nobody cares.

“In fact, if you don't litter, you feel like you are rather sinning, and that's a problem. Because, the people that become our leaders, as we call them, are from us. So, when you have a poor leadership culture, you have poor leaders eventually,” he explained.

Nuamah further detailed the importance of leadership and why, as a society, young people should take an interest in it.

He also urged the youth of Ghana to be willing and ready to take up their own destinies into their hands, and not to depend on others to do that for them.

Using the story of how he and others started the Gracedlife Leadership Center, he stressed the need for young people to be more daring to do what is right and to step into leadership positions.

”I think that well, as young people, we all can feel what is going on in Africa, we have a great sense of what could even happen. There is an increasing number of Africa's young population. Right now, it's estimated at 60% by 2100. We estimated that Africa's young population alone might be the size of the entire Europe – that’s something people have to be concerned about. Our biggest question is whether this is a resource or is going to be a risk. If the leaders or the young people lack opportunities, they don't have quality training, they don't have the skills, and we keep having politicians failing, it’s going to be a very risky thing, and we don't want to wait to find out.

“We are young people and so, five years ago, my friends and I, we were coming from the university - many of us were from University of Ghana, and we thought that we needed to do something about it. We didn't have anything. But we thought that if we could come together as young people, if we could find people - the people with the skills to train us, and if we could find people to mentor us, and if we could put one or two together, bring our resources together, and build a leadership center of a sort, where young people can come, get trained, mentored, and build their vision, we could really contribute to the advancement of Africa’s transformation. So, we did that, and that's how Gracedlife Leadership Center began.

“Five years we've had right on we have about 50 leaders and the beauty of it as all these leaders are building something to move Africa's transformation forward. We have leaders who are in faith, leaders who are in business, leaders who are nonprofit. Every single leader and it's just a beautiful thing where we meet because these leaders are by themselves leaders. Some of them have TV productions, some of them are doing shows for students, some of them have factories, businesses. That is the incredible thing: something built by young people. We are co-creators of the future that we claim, or people claim, belongs to us, so we have to be part of it. We have to make sure we make that change and that's exactly what we are doing here just to make sure that we don't leave our future to anyone.

“Our destiny will not be taken by anyone. We will fight, we will continue to speak up and we will continue to also create opportunities for ourselves, find the people to train us, help ourselves, pull resources together, and that's how come we’ve put this facility together to be able to help each other move forward and become the leaders that Africa needs,” he explained.

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