Fellow Nigerians, good morning.
I woke up this morning after my church service with a deeply reflective heart, and despite every constraint, I felt compelled to share these thoughts with you.
Many people do not truly understand the silent pains some of us carry daily—the private struggles, emotional burdens, and quiet battles we face while trying to survive and serve sincerely in difficult circumstances.
We now live in an environment that has become increasingly toxic, where the very system that should protect and create opportunities for decent living often works against the people—a society where intimidation, insecurity, endless scrutiny, and discouragement have become normal.
More painful is when some of those you associate with, believing you would find understanding and solidarity among them, become part of the pressure you face. Some who publicly identify with you privately distance themselves or join in unfair criticism.
We live in a society where humility is mistaken for weakness, respect is seen as a lack of courage, and compassion is treated as foolishness—a system where treating people equally is questioned simply because you refuse to worship status, tribe, class, or power.
Personally, I have never looked down on anyone except to uplift them. I have never used privilege, position, or resources to oppress others, intimidate the weak, or make people feel small. To me, leadership has always been about service, sacrifice, and helping others rise.
Let me state clearly: my decision to leave the ADC is not because our highly respected Chairman, Senator David Mark, treated me badly, nor because my leader and elder brother, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, or any other respected leaders did anything personally wrong to me. I will continue to respect them.
However, the same Nigerian state and its agents that created unnecessary crises and hostility within the Labour Party that forced me to leave now appear to be finding their way into the ADC, with endless court cases, internal battles, suspicion, and division, instead of focusing on deeper national problems and playing politics built more on control and exclusion than on service and nation-building.
Even within spaces where one labours sincerely, one is sometimes treated like an outsider in one’s own home. You and your team become easy targets for every failure, frustration, or misunderstanding, as though honest contribution has become a favour being tolerated rather than appreciated.
And when you choose to leave so that those you are leaving can have peace, and you step out into the cold, you are still maligned and your character is questioned. Despite all your efforts to continue working for a better Nigeria and engaging people with sincerity and goodwill, those who do not wish you well continue to attack your character and question your intentions.
There are moments I ask God in prayer: Why is doing the right thing often misconstrued as wrongdoing in our country? Why is integrity not valued? Why is the prudent management of resources, especially when invested in critical areas like education and healthcare, wrongly labelled as stinginess? Why are humility and obedience to the rule of law often taken to be weakness rather than discipline?
Let me assure all that I am not desperate to be President, Vice President, or Senate President. I am desperate to see a society that can console a mother whose child has been kidnapped or killed while going to school or work. I am desperate to see a Nigeria where people will not live in IDP camps but in their homes. I am desperate for a country where Nigerian citizens do not go to bed hungry, not knowing where their next meal will come from.
Yet, despite everything, I remain resolute. I firmly believe that Nigeria can still become a country with competent leadership based on justice, compassion, and equal opportunity for all.
A new Nigeria is POssible. -PO
In 1942, the Japanese rounded up all Chinese men in Singapore.
They were filtering out the healthy young ones to execute.
Lee Kuan Yew was 18. A guard pointed at him and said: "Go to that lorry."
He knew what that meant. The lorry went to the beaches. The beaches meant machine guns.
He asked: "Can I collect my other things?"
They said yes.
He walked away, found his family's gardener, and hid in his quarters for two days.
When they changed the screening inspectors, he tried again. This time, he got through.
The ones sent to that lorry were taken to the beaches and shot. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 didn't survive.
60 years later, he sat down at Harvard to explain how he built Singapore from a tiny island into one of the wealthiest nations on Earth:
On what the war did to him:
"We lived in happy, placid colonial Singapore in the 1920s and 30s. The British Empire would have lasted another thousand years, so we thought."
Then the Japanese came. In less than one and a half months, the British collapsed.
"Three and a half years of hell. Butchery. Brutality. Many didn't survive. I was fortunate. I did."
"But it changed us."
"What right did they have to do this to us? Why did the British let us down so badly?"
When the war ended, Lee went to Cambridge to study law. But he was watching with different eyes.
"Can they govern me better than I can govern myself? Because they scooted when the Japanese came in. And why shouldn't I be running the place?"
On learning languages to lead:
Lee was the best speaker in English. But only 20% of Singapore spoke English.
The masses spoke Hokkien, Mandarin, and Malay.
"So every day at lunchtime, instead of having lunch, I would sit down with a Hokkien teacher and laboriously and painfully learn to convert my Mandarin into Hokkien."
"Had I not mastered that, the battle would be lost by default."
His first speech in Hokkien, the kids laughed at him.
"I said, please don't laugh. Help me. I'm trying to get you to understanding."
By 6 months, he could get his ideas across. By 2 years, he was fluent.
"Believe it or not, at the end of two years I could speak better than most of them."
"That came respect."
It showed two things: how determined he was, and how sincere. Here was a man doing all these other things and still learning their language just to talk to them.
On fighting the Communists:
The Communists had been organizing since 1923. The year Lee was born.
"Here we were in the 1950s trying to beat them. And they are professionals at organization."
They had elimination squads. Guerrillas in the jungle. Killer squads in the towns.
Lee stood up and said no.
"They denied that they were Communists. 'We're just left-wing socialists.' So I did a series of 12 broadcasts to set the scene. And I made it in three languages."
English. Malay. Mandarin. 20 minutes each.
"When I finished each broadcast, the director of the station couldn't see me. Went into the room and found me lying on the floor trying to recover my breath."
"But it was a fight for survival. Life or death."
On where trust comes from:
"It's difficult to establish trust in times of calm. You just say, 'Well, it's an argument, therefore I'm a better guy than you.'"
"But when the chips are down and you can get eliminated in a very unpleasant way and you show that you're prepared for it and you'll fight for them, it makes a difference."
"Without that trust, we could not have built Singapore."
On IQ vs EQ:
Harvard asked him: would you prefer high IQ or high EQ in a leader?
"IQ, you can get beautiful paper done. Complex formulas worked out. Elegant solutions."
"But when you've got to get a team to work and put that formula into practice, you're dealing with human beings."
"If you're not good at EQ, you can't sense that A doesn't get on with B, and you put them in the same team. It's no good."
He rated his own EQ as 7 or 8 out of 10. His IQ as "maybe 120."
But he had colleagues who could sense a person instantly.
"He shook hands with the man and said, 'I recoiled when I felt his palm. Evil man.' And he was. How does he know? I don't know."
"So I learned whenever I had to do interviews to choose people, I would get people who are very good at seeing through a candidate."
On corruption:
Singapore in the 1950s was full of deals, bribes, and organized crime.
"When we took over, we decided that this was the critical factor. If we did not make it so that every dollar put in at the top reaches the ground as one dollar, we're not going to succeed."
"We came in and made a symbolic act. We dressed in white shirts, white trousers, and said we will be what we represent."
He put the anti-corruption bureau under his personal portfolio.
"I gave the director the authority to investigate everybody and everything. All ministers. Including myself."
One of his own colleagues took half a million in bribes. When the investigation started, he asked to see Lee.
"I said, if I see you then I'll be a witness in court. So best not see me. Better see your lawyer."
The man committed suicide. Left a note saying: "As an oriental gentleman who believes in honor, I have to pay the supreme price."
"It's a heavy price. But it reminds every minister that there are no exceptions."
On consistency:
Lee had three journalists analyze 40 years of his speeches.
He asked them: what was the dominant theme?
All three said the same thing: consistency.
"What I said at the beginning, throughout all that period, the theme stayed loud and clear."
"That made it simple. Because you know where you stand with me. And you know what I want to do."
On delivering results:
"We deliver the homes, the schools, the jobs, the hospitals."
"Today, 98% of our people own their own homes. The smallest would be about $100,000 US. The biggest about $300,000."
"Once you own that amount of assets, you are not in favor of risking it with a crazy government. Your assets will go down in value."
"But that was planned."
Why? Because Singapore is small. Everyone does national service. If you're going to fight, you better be fighting for something you own.
"So we give everybody a stake."
On changing culture slowly:
Lee wanted Singapore to speak English. But he couldn't force it.
"Had I passed a law and said you will all learn English, we would have had mayhem. Riots."
Instead, he let parents watch who got the best jobs. The jobs were already there, from the multinationals and banks. They all used English.
"They watched and saw who got the best jobs. And they switched."
It took 16 years.
"I did not want to have said 16 years. Because in those 16 years I lost 20,000 Chinese graduates who had poor jobs. I wanted to make it shorter. I couldn't. I would have run into flack."
On whether leadership can be taught:
Lee quoted Isaac Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Yiddish literature.
Someone asked Singer: "Can you make a writer write great literature?"
He paused. Then said: "If he has the writer in him, I will make him a good writer in a shorter time."
Lee's version:
"Can you make a leader of anybody? I don't think so."
"He must have some of the ingredients. He must have that high energy level. He must have the ability to project himself, his ideas. He must have the desire, almost instinctively, to say 'let's do something better.' Of wanting to do something for his fellow men and not just for himself and his family."
"You can't teach those things. He's either got it or he hasn't got it."
"But if he's got that, then you can save him a lot of trouble."
On sustaining yourself:
Harvard asked how he managed despair over decades of leadership.
"If your message is one of despair, then you should not be a leader. You must give people hope."
"But there are moments when you feel very down. Either because you're physically down, or emotionally down, or because the world has turned adverse against you."
"When you are in that condition, the first thing you do is get a good night's sleep. Then get a swim or chase a ball. Get the cobwebs out of your mind."
"If you're not fit, you're going to make mistakes. Physically fit. You must stay physically and mentally fit."
In his later years, he learned to meditate.
"At the end of 20 minutes to half an hour, my pulse rate can go down from 100 to about 60. You can feel yourself subside. You still your mind. You empty your mind."
"Then when you are rested, you resume quietly. You still got the same problems. Maybe you sleep on it. Come back. Look at it for a few days. Then decide."
This 2 hour Harvard interview will teach you more about leadership than every business book you've read combined.
Bookmark & give it 2 hours this weekend, no matter what.
This 2 hour Stanford lecture will teach you more about how LLMs like ChatGPT & Claude are built than most people working at top AI companies learn in their entire careers.
Bookmark this & give 2 hours today, no matter what. It'll be the most productive thing you do this week.
Every time you accepted a salary, chose a price, or walked into a negotiation, the other person was running GAME THEORY in their head.
You were guessing.
This 1-hour Yale lecture by Professor Ben Polak will permanently change how you read people and make decisions.
Most MBAs pay $150k to learn this. Yale posted it for free:
This 58-minute lecture from 1992 will make you question everything your business school professor ever told you.
Steve Jobs before the iMac, before the iPhone, before the comeback - explaining exactly how great products get made.
Watch until the last 10 minutes.
What he says about failure will change how you think forever.
This 40-minute Peter Thiel lecture will teach you more about business than a 2-year MBA program:
Summary:
• Value Creation and Capture:
A valuable company must both create value (X dollars) for the world and capture a percentage (Y%) of that value.
X (total value created) and Y (share captured) are independent variables; a company can succeed with either a large X and small Y or vice versa.
• Monopoly vs Perfect Competition:
Monopolies are stable, profitable, and create long-term value, unlike perfectly competitive industries where profits are eroded away.
The airline industry exemplifies a highly competitive market with very low profit margins despite large revenues, contrasted with Google’s search business that is smaller in revenue but much more profitable due to monopoly power.
Thiel argues there are only two types of businesses: monopolies and perfectly competitive firms, with very few in between.
• Market Size and Perception Lies:
Companies distort their market descriptions depending on their position.
Monopolists exaggerate market size by describing their market as a vast union of many different sectors to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
Non-monopolists minimize market size, describing it narrowly to appear unique and attract investment.
Example: A restaurant owner might claim to serve a tiny niche market (e.g., British food in Palo Alto) to claim uniqueness, while Google describes itself broadly as a technology or advertising company to dilute monopoly perception.
Successful startups begin by dominating a small market and then expand outward.
Examples include Amazon starting as an online bookstore, PayPal targeting eBay power sellers, and Facebook launching initially at Harvard.
Starting with a large, broad market is often a sign of misunderstanding the market and leads to intense competition and failure (e.g., many clean tech companies).
• Last Mover Advantage:
The greatest value lies in being the company that dominates a market long-term, not necessarily the first mover.
Most of the value of tech companies comes from future cash flows many years ahead, emphasizing durability over short-term growth.
• Historical Perspective on Innovation and Value Capture:
Throughout history, many scientific and technological breakthroughs created large societal value (X), but the innovators rarely captured substantial financial value (Y close to zero).
Examples include great scientists like Einstein and industries such as railroads or early aviation, where competition or structural factors prevented wealth capture.
Two main categories where value capture was successful:
1. Vertically integrated monopolies (e.g., Ford, Standard Oil) require complex coordination and capital investment.
2. Software businesses, benefiting from near-zero marginal costs and rapid adoption.
• Psychological and Cultural Aspects of Competition:
Society often romanticizes competition, seeing losing as a personal failure, but Thiel argues that competition itself is a form of losing, as it destroys value and capital.
Human nature is mimetic (imitative), leading to overcrowded markets and irrational competition.
Real success comes from escaping competition by finding unique, overlooked opportunities.