Be curious and collaborative, Irish scholar urges Nigerian youth at ASE lecture
A
An Irish management consultant and former Senior Lecturer at Atlantic Technological University, Ireland, Paddy Harte, has urged Nigerian youth to embrace curiosity, think critically and work collaboratively in order to succeed in the contemporary digital age.
Mr Harte gave this advice while delivering the fifth Public Lecture of the African School of Economics (The Pan-African University of Excellence), Abuja, last Wednesday, February 18, 2026 at the University. The title of the lecture was “Innovation and Leadership in the Digital Age: Perspectives from Ireland”.
According to the Guest Speaker, meaningful success often requires resilience and teamwork and everyone should strive to lead with purpose. He emphasised that leadership is about empowering others and that the greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does great things but the one who gets people to do great things.
He noted that the digital age has refined leadership through rapid global change, connectivity, remote work, artificial intelligence, automation and data-driven decision-making, all of which require leaders that are adaptive and collaborative as modern leadership has shifted from instruction to collaboration.
The Guest Speaker enjoined Nigerians to embrace the magnificent seven rules of leadership, which are that they turn up, speak up, listen up, look up, team up and never give up.
In his goodwill message, the Irish Ambassador to Nigeria, Peter Ryan, noted Nigerians’ resilience and openness as drivers of innovation while he emphasised the centrality of hospitality, connection, relationship-building and curiosity to fostering leadership and progress.
Ambassador Ryan encouraged Nigerians to step beyond familiar spaces and interact meaningfully with others in order to gain insights and perspectives.
Earlier in his welcome address, captioned “Readers are Leaders, Learners are Earners”, the Chairman of the occasion, who is also the Vice Chancellor of African School of Economics, Prof. Mahfouz Adedimeji, highlighted the centrality of leadership in the conduct of human affairs, saying that it takes good leaders to produce good societies and bad leaders to create bad societies.
“The world we are living in today requires leadership, which John Maxwell defines as ‘influence – nothing more, nothing less’ or the ability to positively impact people to achieve common goals. The world also requires innovation, which former US President Barrack Obama simply and profoundly defined as ‘the creation of something that improves the way we live our lives’. If leadership is taken seriously, society grows tremendously and the development of any society is often proportional to the quality of its leaders and their innovative mindset,” he said.
Prof. Adedimeji enjoined Nigerians to work together as they have more in common than in contrast. He enjoined everyone to use the unique opportunity of the month of Ramadan and the Lenten season that started together to read and learn more about one another.
“Part of the symbolism of this coincidence is that Nigerians have more in common than what drifts them apart. But in a situation where people do not read or fail to learn, there will be poverty of ideas and currency of tension,” he said.
Highlights of the occasion included goodwill messages by participants, including a former Nigerian ambassador to Mozambique, with concurrent accreditation to Swaziland, Madagascar and Mauritius, Albert Omotayo; an associate professor of English at the University of Ilorin, Dr Foluke Aliyu, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Ibadan, Dr Tope Ajayi, and a Zonal Commissioner with the National Hajj Commission of Nigeria (NAHCON), Dr Tajudeen Oladejo.
