The Lagos State Government has created a new recruitment pathway that will allow outstanding graduates of the Lateef Jakande Leadership Academy to move straight into the state civil service.
Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu announced the “Excellence Pathway” on Friday during the graduation of the academy’s third cohort and the induction of the 2026/2027 fellows at the Balmoral Convention Centre, Ikeja GRA.
He said the initiative was designed to connect leadership training with actual employment in government, giving qualified fellows who meet the requirements a direct entry route.
“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.
Sanwo-Olu described the programme as a deliberate system to turn the fellowship into a talent pipeline for the government.
“The Pathway closes that gap. It is how a Fellowship stops being a year of experience 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,” he said.
The governor noted that the academy was established by law to outlast any administration.
“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,” Sanwo-Olu said.
“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 added.
He told the new fellows that the focus is on impact, not just credentials.
“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.
