LASG to recruit leadership fellows into civil service — Sanwo-Olu

The Lagos State Government has introduced an Excellence Pathway that will enable qualified fellows of the Lateef Jakande Leadership Academy to join the state civil service, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has said.

Sanwo-Olu disclosed this on Friday at the graduation ceremony of the academy’s third cohort and the induction of the 2026/2027 fellows at the Balmoral Convention Centre, Ikeja GRA.

He described the initiative as a deliberate effort to bridge the gap between leadership training and public service.

According to him, the pathway would give high-performing fellows who meet the applicable requirements an opportunity to move directly from the fellowship into government.

“For too long, the best of our young people have looked at public service and seen a closed door, a place where merit waits in line behind everything else. If we train leaders and then give them no way in, we have trained them for somebody else,” the governor said.

He said the Excellence Pathway was designed to change this by making the academy a pipeline for young Nigerians seeking to serve in government.

“The Pathway closes that gap. It is how a Fellowship stops being a year of experiences and becomes a pipeline into the machinery of government itself. It is how an idea becomes a system. And a system is the only thing that survives its founder,” Sanwo-Olu said.

The governor said the initiative was particularly important because the academy was established not merely to produce fellows with impressive CVs, but to develop people capable of taking responsibility for the future administration of Lagos.

He said the programme was also intended to outlive his administration, noting that the academy had been written into law to ensure that its survival did not depend on the governor in office.

“This is the last graduation of the Lateef Jakande Leadership Academy that I will attend as Governor of Lagos State. By this time next year, someone else will hold this office, and someone else will stand at this lectern,” he said.

Sanwo-Olu added, “We did not build this Academy for a Governor. We built it for a State. We wrote it into law so that it would not depend on my goodwill, or my successor’s, or on anyone’s mood in a budget season.”

He said the central question behind the academy was who would take charge of Lagos in the years ahead, including those who would occupy senior civil service positions, manage public institutions, negotiate major concessions and make difficult decisions on behalf of residents.

“Leadership is infrastructure,” the governor said, adding that the quality of people managing public assets would ultimately determine whether such investments served Lagos effectively.

Sanwo-Olu said more than 16,000 people had applied for the incoming cohort but stressed that the academy would not sacrifice quality for numbers.

“Bigger is not the goal. Better is,” he said.

He urged the new fellows to look beyond the acquisition of certificates, saying Lagos needed people willing to uphold integrity and strengthen institutions even when doing so came at a personal cost.

“This Fellowship was never designed to give you a line on your CV. Lagos has enough certificates. What Lagos is short of is people who will do the right thing at the moment it costs them something,” he said.