Former President Goodluck Jonathan on Friday urged world leaders to aspire to meet their social obligations to people they govern in order to minimize conflicts.
The ex-President also charged leaders to always adopt a conscience based approach rather than resorting to dictates of their ego, saying such had brought untold hardship to humanity across the ages.
He stated these in a key note address entitled: “Conscience Based Leadership: The Secret to Global Peace and Security” which he delivered at a World Summit holding in Kuching, Malaysia.
The Summit jointly organised by the State of Sarawak and Junior Chamber International (JCI) was attended by 700 young leaders from 102 countries.
Noting that conscience builds a society while ego destroys it, ex-President Jonathan said: “The best leadership flows from inspiration and not from power or force of arms. You can only inspire people when your leadership is governed by your conscience and the support of the led.
“Power centric leadership is ego based. Looking at human history in the last 100 years, you would notice that ego based leadership has brought untold hardship to humanity and set us back decades.
“On the contrary, conscience based leadership has again and again, been shown to be the only type of leadership that can engender world peace, progress and unity.”
Jonathan reminded leaders that a recent report on the Global Peace Index indicated that the cost of creating and containing violence in 2016 alone stood at $14.3 trillion which was about 12.6 per cent of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
“If anything, this colossal effort which is directed at fighting already lit fires, should tell us where to place our priorities. That would be concentrating our efforts on those deliveries that make our people human, keep them safe and cater to their happiness, rather than spending so much, just to show our might,” he added.
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