Last Thursday evening, Senior Pastor of Trinity House, Lagos, Pastor Ituah Ighodalo, hosted the Senior Pastor of Covenant Nation, Pastor Poju Oyemade to a zoom interview where they discussed a number of issues. Asked for his thoughts on how to make Nigeria great, Pastor Poju suggested thus: “Let us go to the corporate and business world and get those successful people who have built successful corporations, and tell them, ‘there is an assignment for you, go into government,’ You will get a level of fulfilment when you begin to deploy the talent you have used in trade to transform society, there is nothing like it.”

Pastor Ighodalo would go on to echo this recommendation over the course of the interview. My thoughts immediately went to the founding Managing Director of GTB, Mr Fola Adeola, and founding director of Sahara Group, Mr Tonye Cole, and their attempts to ‘walk Pastor Poju’s talk,’ in the past.

Fola Adeola and Tonye Cole went into politics after helping to build very successful businesses but their initial attempts did not yield the top prize. Does that put a lie to the suggestion? Not at all. What it calls for, is a commitment of more intellectual heft for interrogating the subject.

Obviously, these gentlemen currently possess vast amount of intelligence about the nature of the murky waters from their individual experiences. It is the kind of intelligence that arm-chair analysts and pontificators, do not have. Yet it is the kind of intelligence they must make available to their incredible network of similarly skilled, talented and experienced friends, colleagues and associates who have built and operated hugely successful businesses; the sample population, from where Nigeria must harvest the critical mass necessary to take on 2023 right away.