A Framework for Conversation, Refinement and Possible National Adoption As Nigeria approaches another important season of political choices, perhaps we should begin a different conversation about leadership.
For decades, we have interrogated those seeking public office largely around promises: What will you build? How many jobs will you create? Which roads will you construct? What will you do about education, healthcare, security and the economy?
These are legitimate questions.
But perhaps they are no longer enough.
Behind every manifesto lies a more fundamental question: what kind of governing system will the candidate leave behind?
Nigeria’s experience suggests that good intentions are not enough. Good people can become ineffective leaders. Strong leaders can produce impressive results while in office, only for those achievements to disappear after they leave. And institutions that depend upon exceptional individuals are not yet truly strong institutions.
Perhaps, therefore, our leadership conversation should move beyond simply asking:
‘Are you a good person?’
or even:
‘What will you do for us?’
to asking:
‘What will you build that can outlive you?’
The following ten questions are therefore proposed not as a finished national template, but as a framework for conversation, criticism and refinement and perhaps, if we can build sufficient consensus around it, eventual adoption as one of the instruments through which Nigerians interrogate those who seek the privilege of governing them.
THE TEN QUESTIONS
1. THE INSTITUTIONAL LEGACY TEST
Which institutions within your responsibility will be demonstrably stronger when you leave office than when you entered and how should citizens measure that improvement?
The question is not merely what the candidate will personally accomplish, but what institutional capacity will remain.
2. THE SUSTAINABILITY TEST
Which of your major reforms should still be working five years after you leave office, and what will you do to make them survive you?
Projects may deteriorate and administrations will change. Serious reforms should become embedded in systems, laws, professional routines and institutional culture.
3. THE SELF-RESTRAINT TEST
Which powers presently dependent upon personal discretion will you convert into transparent, rule based processes?
One measure of institutional leadership is the willingness to replace ‘Oga must approve’ with rules, systems and processes that work irrespective of who occupies the office.
4. THE INDEPENDENCE TEST
Which institutions will you strengthen sufficiently to investigate, audit, challenge or sanction your own government, associates and political allies where necessary?
It is relatively easy to build institutions that constrain one’s opponents. The real test is whether those institutions can also constrain one’s friends and oneself.
5. THE COMPETENCE AND MERIT TEST
How will you ensure that competence, rather than patronage, increasingly determines who enters, advances and leads within the public service?
No government can permanently outperform the quality of the state machinery through which it governs.
6. THE PERFORMANCE TEST
What few measurable outcomes should citizens use to judge whether your government is actually succeeding?
Not speeches. Not activities. Not the number of committees inaugurated. What outcomes should citizens independently track?
7. THE TRANSPARENCY TEST
Which important government processes will you make sufficiently transparent that ordinary citizens can interrogate them without privileged access?
Budgets, procurement, expenditure, appointments and project performance should progressively become matters of public information rather than insider knowledge.
8. THE CONSEQUENCE TEST
What happens when someone in your government breaks the rules including someone politically important to you?
Rules become institutions only when consequences cease to depend upon the identity of the offender.
9. THE SUCCESSION AND CONTINUITY TEST
How will you ensure that government does not suffer institutional amnesia whenever leadership changes?
A functioning state should preserve knowledge, capability and continuity across administrations rather than repeatedly returning to the starting line.
10. THE SYSTEM TEST
What safeguards will you build so that an average, incompetent or even self-interested successor cannot easily dismantle what works or inflict extraordinary damage?
Perhaps this is the ultimate institution building question.
A successful system should enable good leaders to accomplish extraordinary good while preventing bad leaders from doing extraordinary damage.
FROM QUESTIONS TO A NATIONAL CONVERSATION
The usefulness of these questions will depend less on who originated them than on who eventually uses them.
For citizens and young Nigerians, they could provide a way of looking beyond charisma, rhetoric, identity and campaign theatre. Do not merely applaud the speech. Ask the questions. Record the answers. Return to them after the election.
For the media, they could help move political interviews and debates from rehearsed talking points towards institutional competence. Imagine presidential and gubernatorial debates in which candidates are required to explain not simply what they intend to do, but what systems they will build to ensure that their achievements survive them.
For civil society and professional organisations, the questions could become the foundation for an independent Institution Building Leadership Scorecard through which commitments are recorded before elections and performance assessed periodically afterwards.
For political parties, they could become part of the process for evaluating aspirants before nomination. Manifestos should tell us what a party wants to achieve; institutional questions should tell us whether its candidates understand how sustainable government is built.
For business and organised private sector groups, the framework could help shift engagement with candidates beyond requests for particular policies towards questions of regulatory predictability, institutional continuity, rule of law and the durability of economic reforms.
For traditional, community and faith leaders, whose voices continue to carry considerable influence in shaping public expectations, the framework could provide another language for encouraging citizens to assess leadership beyond ethnicity, religion, geography and immediate political patronage.
And for universities, think tanks and policy institutions, perhaps the framework can be challenged, researched, improved and eventually transformed from ten interesting questions into a credible instrument for measuring institutional leadership.
That is why this document is deliberately being circulated as a conversation framework rather than a concluded proposition.
The questions themselves should be questioned.
Are these the right ten?
Are some more important than others?
Can candidates answer them meaningfully?
Can the answers be independently measured?
Should some questions carry greater weight?
Could we eventually construct a 100 point Institution Building Leadership Score?
And, most importantly, can sufficient consensus emerge among credible Nigerian institutions for something of this nature to become part of how we interrogate leadership?
Perhaps changing Nigeria’s leadership outcomes must begin partly by changing the questions we ask of those who seek to lead us.
Our politics has become highly sophisticated at evaluating who can win elections.
We may now need to become equally sophisticated at evaluating who can build institutions after winning them.
The objective is therefore not to find another perfect Nigerian.
It is to identify leaders who understand that their greatest legacy may not be the power they exercise while in office, but the institutions they leave behind when that power is gone.
Perhaps every candidate seeking significant public authority should ultimately confront one simple question:
If Nigerians give you power today, what will you build that will make Nigeria less dependent on finding another person like you tomorrow?
That is the conversation this framework seeks to begin.
Not the final word.
Hopefully, the beginning of a better question.