The strength of any country consists of its natural resources, human resources, and capital assets, namely, the economic wealth that delivers higher living standards. The first two determine the third. If a country can successfully harness its natural resources, using its human talent, it will prosper; if it can’t, it will fail.
Now, Nigeria is known worldwide for its abundant human and natural resources, so why is it one of the world’s poorest countries? Why is Nigeria run so badly that it is utterly dysfunctional, verging on state failure? The commonest answer people give is “leadership.” But Nigerians run world bodies and lead major political parties and governmental agencies in the West. So, why can’t Nigerians run their own country well? How can Nigerians provide leadership abroad but not at home?
Well, the problem is systemic and structural: Nigeria is systemically wired to fail and structurally conditioned to produce bad leaders. It is a corrupt, morally bankrupt nation. If values, not self-interest, guide your action, Nigeria is not your natural habitat: you must, if you are public-spirited, look for opportunities abroad. Nigeria’s brightest and best are crowded out by a political system, a political structure, and a culture that rewards self-dealing knavery over meritocracy, honesty, and integrity. Thus, Nigerians who will never succeed at home go abroad and succeed there. Consequently, Nigeria is brain-drained and utterly denuded, thereby lacking state capacity and true statehood.
Recently, two Nigerians hit the headlines worldwide for their outstanding feats. One, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was re-elected unanimously, unopposed, for a second term as Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). When she was first elected in 2020, she was the first African and the first woman to hold the position. So outstandingly did she perform that no one attempted to deny her a second term by running against her. The second, Kemi Badenoch, was elected as the first Black leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, which has produced more prime ministers than any other party in the UK since the country had its first prime minister in 1721. Given the Conservative Party’s track record of producing prime ministers, Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch, née Adegoke, could become the UK’s first British-Nigerian prime minister!
Of course, Nigerians and, indeed, the Nigerian government are quick to celebrate and “claim” any Nigerian abroad who achieves great feats. But what chances would such achievers have had at home? For instance, how far would Dr Okonjo-Iweala have gone had she decided to run for president? How far would Badenoch have gone? Badenoch answered that question herself in one interview she gave about her childhood: she was born in the UK in 1980 but brought to Nigeria by her parents, Femi Adegoke, a medical doctor, and Feyi, an academic, for her early education; she later returned to Britain at 16 for her A-levels.
“Well, the problem is systemic and structural: Nigeria is systemically wired to fail and structurally conditioned to produce bad leaders.”
Now 44, Badenoch said she toyed with the idea of returning to Nigeria at 25 to begin a political career. However, according to her, a Nigerian political figure “belittled” her, “saying something about her being a woman and how she would never make it.” Hardly any Nigerian would consider that account outlandish given that there is not a single female state governor in Nigeria, let alone the remote possibility of a female president. Yet, if Badenoch became British prime minister, Nigeria might declare a public holiday to celebrate her achievement, never mind that she wouldn’t even become a governor in Nigeria!
What about Dr Okonjo-Iweala? Well, at least she was twice finance minister, first under President Olusegun Obasanjo and then under President Goodluck Jonathan. Even so, Dr Okonjo-Iweala is a prophet without honour in her own country. In 2018, she launched her book Fighting Corruption Is Dangerous at the London School of Economics. I attended the event and wrote about it for the Africa@LSE blog, describing her as a highly respected global personality who’s underappreciated at home.
After President Jonathan lost power in 2015, Okonjo-Iweala became a hate figure in Nigeria, frequently subjected to trenchant criticisms. She narrated at the LSE event how the Buhari administration hounded her and her family, sending police officers to search her house for “illegal currency holdings” only to find “bags full of old newspapers.” But when she became the Director-General of the WTO, thanks largely to her personal recognition and the pivotal intervention of the then-new US president, Joe Biden, President Buhari gave her the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON), Nigeria’s second-highest national award. As the old saying goes, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan!
That was precisely why Abike Dabiri, the CEO of Nigerians in Diaspora Commission, NiDCOM, tried to reach out to Kemi Badenoch after her election as the Tory leader and was miffed that Badenoch rebuffed the overture. “It depends on whether she embraces her Nigerian identity. We reached out to her once or twice, but there was no response. We don’t force anyone to acknowledge being Nigerian,” Dabiri said peevishly.
Last week, Vice President Kashim Shettima put his foot in his mouth when he publicly attacked Badenoch for “denigrating” Nigeria. Shettima uncouthly suggested Badenoch could “remove the Kemi from her name” if she wasn’t proud of her “nation of origin.” A Badenoch aide responded that she “stands by what she says” about Nigeria, adding, “She tells the truth. She tells it like it is. She is not going to couch her words.”
Here’s the truth: Badenoch doesn’t deny her Nigerian lineage, but she’s not proud of the country; she’s not proud of how the patronage and corruption of Nigeria’s political class have held the country hostage for years and stunted its development. She says one of the books that shaped her worldview is Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, the economics Nobel laureates, and she sees Nigeria through the prism of that book. Whenever any British politician did something that she considered unacceptable, she would say, “It’s a Nigerian thing.” Give her credit; she ran on the values of truth, honesty, and responsibility and won over the overwhelmingly white Conservative Party membership. By contrast, such a commitment to personal ethics is utterly lacking in Nigeria’s self-serving political class.
Which brings us back to the broader point. Okonjo-Iweala, Kemi Badenoch, and other Nigerians who have achieved great feats abroad show that Nigeria’s problem is not the absence of talent. And those who say it is the absence of leadership are only half right. Of course, Nigeria has always produced leaders who can’t sacrifice their own self-interest for the common good. But it is a country’s political system that determines which leaders emerge. Sadly, Nigeria’s broken political system cannot produce public-spirited leaders because it favours the highest bidders and makes it easy for state institutions, notably the electoral body, judiciary, and security agencies, to be captured and manipulated, resulting in fraudulent elections that produce dubious leaders.
But think about it: Even if an Okonjo-Iweala or an Akinwumi Adesina, the successful president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), emerged as Nigeria’s president, would they succeed? Well, not under the current over-centralised political and governance structure that lacks effective checks and balances and that’s riven by ethnic polarisation and zero-sum politics. The sharp North-South divide and entrenched vested interests over the tax reform bills are recent evidence of Nigeria’s acute systemic and structural problem.
Yet, the fact that Okonjo-Iweala, Badenoch, Adesina, and other Nigerians succeed abroad is an astonishing indictment of the Nigerian state. For if Nigeria is so dysfunctional while its citizens rule the world, where’s the statehood? It’s a failed state!
