Of Brilliant Nigerians And Beggarly Institutions

While Nigeria may not have been very lucky with great and fantastic political leaders, there’s something our country has never been in short supply of. Nigeria does not lack brilliant and outstandingly intelligent people. God has been quite generous with us on that one as a country.We have brilliant and shrewd entrepreneurs who can turn a small shop in Idumota into a group of companies. We have many brilliant civil servants who can recite the Public Service Rules offhand. We have amazing professors who can teach for three hours without notes. We have talented musicians and filmmakers wooing fans all over. We have World-class intellectuals who can hold their own anywhere in the world. Brilliant and truly-gifted young people building apps from a self-contained apartment in Yaba.However, what we have struggled to build are the institutions that can allow that brilliance to survive the brilliant person and truly scale. And at this stage of our national life, that difference will determine whether this current reform story of the President Bola Tinubu administration will end as real transformation or just another fine set of talking points in the long run. And why do I make this point? An institution is not an office. An office is where a man sits with his name on the door. An institution is what continues to work after the man and his nameplate have left. One is the person. A single personality. The other is process. The institution. We seem to love celebrating personalities in Nigeria and praising them to high heavens. But true and lasting development does not run on a personality. It’s possible for a country to have a visionary and great President and still have weak institutions. A company can have a genius MD and still be very weak in corporate governance. And a university can have a star Vice-Chancellor and still lack institutional depth. We have seen all these films before. They are undeniable realities in our country. And the International Monetary Fund (IMF) tried to tell us this politely in its 2025 review of Nigeria. That was just last year. While it commended the hard decisions taken by the Bola Tinubu government, especially the removal of fuel subsidy and the unified exchange rates, and noted, correctly, that the gap between official and parallel market rates collapsed from over 60 percent to under 3 percent and that external reserves improved, it, however, added the homework we must do if we want sustained and inclusive growth: Governance. Business environment. Electricity. Capital markets. And diversification beyond oil. Those are not policy pronouncements to be mouthed. They are institutional work that must be done! Take electricity, for example. We have had patriotic and dedicated ministers of power in Nigeria like the late Chief Bola Ige and even Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN). We have also had energetic regulators who wanted to see positive changes in the industries they regulated. Nigeria has also not lacked ambitious roadmaps with impressive acronyms. But light does not come from brilliance. Light comes from institutions that can deliver regardless of who is minister.The same applies to education. Can the system in place deliver quality education and learning whether the commissioner or minister is a professor or a politician? Same for health. Same for works. Same for agriculture. Same for housing. Same for labour and others.We always celebrate any governor who builds roads, schools, and hospitals but forget to ask what would happen to maintenance after he leaves office and takes his team and his contractors with him. We praise the Director General who reforms an agency that has been underperforming for decades but fail to question what would likely happen when that DG is finally removed and another person is appointed in his place. Dear compatriots, no nation, including Nigeria, can be built on the hope that exceptional individuals will always show up. I believe that is too expensive an option for us as a people. In fact, exceptional individuals, by the very essence of the meaning, are scarce to find. It is only the presence of strong institutions that allow ordinary people to produce extraordinary and outstanding results, not just once, but repeatedly and consistently till it becomes the norm. There are two unglamorous things strong institutions do. They create continuity and they create accountability. This is because when rules are clear, we can always know who to hold responsible for actions and inactions. When procedures are written, performance can always be easily measured. When information is preserved, decisions can be reviewed. And when institutions have memory, the same mistake is not repeated every four years under a new leadership. This is why institutional memory is not cabinet filing. It is economic infrastructure. Government loses money when every new minister and his permanent secretary announce that they are starting afresh.
Businesses lose money when a major client is lost because the relationship lived only on the MD/CEO’s phone. Universities lose intellectual capital when a professor retires and 30 years of research leaves with him forever in a Ghana-Must-Go bag. Even media houses lose credibility when a lack of systems or a change in ownership wipes out the archive.We need to start treating memory as an asset, not as paperwork. And let us be honest, technology alone will not do the memory for us.To be fair, government has tried recently. At the International Civil Service Conference in Abuja in May, the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Mrs Didi Esther Walson-Jack, announced that all 38 federal ministries and extra-ministerial departments met the December 2025 deadline to go paperless. Her office also introduced Service-Wise GPT, an AI tool to help civil servants navigate service rules and institutional knowledge. It has already logged over 50,000 conversations.On September 29, the Bureau of Public Service Reforms inaugurated four inter-ministerial task teams to produce the National Strategy for Public Service Reforms 2026-2030 and a compendium of reforms. The Director-General, Dr Dasuki Arabi, said the goal is to place Nigeria among the first 20 public services in the world. These are commendable moves. But as the Bureau itself warned recently at its Emergency Response Summit, institutions must be prepared, responsive and resilient, truly capable of making timely decisions based on credible data.But this must be clearly emphasized. It is possible for institutions to possess the best software in the world and still fail if leaders refuse accountability. There can be dashboards everywhere, yet, they still make blind decisions. Institution-building starts with values, not software. Do we reward competence or proximity to power? Do we keep records or keep secrets? Do we respect rules or respect the man who can break them? Do we promote on merit or on who is closest to the boss or most sycophantic? The same principle applies to business. The most valuable thing a founder can build is not necessarily a product but an institution that can keep building good products or offering great service after him. That is the difference between an event and an ecosystem.And so, while we have never been lacking in brilliant people in Nigeria, what we need as a country are systems that make one official’s uniqueness less necessary. What we need are institutions, solid systems that can continue to function every day under ordinary and average leaders but deliver extraordinary results with budgets that are not inflated. That is how nations become extraordinary. Nigeria’s future will not be secured by personalities or politicians whose fans describe as incorruptible alone. It will be secured when good leadership becomes embedded in institutions and keep multiplying, when competence becomes a system, when accountability becomes culture, when memory becomes an asset, and when power can change hands without the country having to press restart, painfully moving in circles. That is the Nigeria we deserve. It is worth building. O’Femi Kolawole is a journalist, author, publisher and media development professional with over 25 years’ experience. He is the founder of Posterity Media, which documents leaders and institutions and preserves the stories that shape Nigeria’s development.