Hot SourceBy Dr Alim Abubakre
I pen this article with a humble sense of responsibility hoping to contribute to this critical national discourse of proffering actionable insights to nation building. This article is informed by insights gleaned from my engagements with more than 1,000 leaders globally in the past year and close to a gross of this number fifteen years after I founded These Executive Minds (TEXEM) in the UK.
Sixty-five years after independence, Nigeria stands at a crossroads that is both sobering and promising. The sobering part is familiar. Too many citizens experience public services that arrive late or not up to par. Firms face a cocktail of inflation, logistics friction, and regulatory uncertainty. Civil society carries heavy loads where formal systems falter. The promising part is quieter but powerful. In the past year I have sat with more than a thousand leaders in ministries, agencies, boardrooms, factories, start-ups, cooperatives, and classrooms from Kano to Lagos to Abuja and cities in other emerging and developed countries. The appetite I have encountered is not for new slogans. It is for practices that produce compounding improvements citizens can feel. My contention is that the leaders who will move Nigeria forward in the next decade will practise three disciplines with rigour: reflection that rebuilds trust and sharpens judgement, reinvention that converts constraints into design choices, and winning that scales what works and protects it from erosion.
Reflection must come first because progress without trust rarely survives the news cycle and more importantly does not lead to sustainable inclusive impact. In many of our institutions there is an inherited deficit of confidence. People discount statements before they hear them. Officials are assumed to be evasive until proven otherwise. In this context, the most strategic act a leader can take is to make the logic of decisions visible and testable. I have watched permanent secretaries and chief executives shift the temperature in a room by explaining the trade-offs behind a policy or a pivot in two pages of plain English, then inviting challenge before the implementation plan is final. That small ritual does more than inform. It signals that citizens and staff are not audiences but partners in judgement. Rwanda’s experience with public performance contracts for officials is instructive because it illustrates how visible targets and steady follow-through can change the relationship between leaders and citizens. Nigeria does not need to copy the mechanism to embrace the principle. We can begin with published choice notes that state priorities, the reasons for those priorities, and the measures by which success will be judged.
Reflection also requires safety for truth. In utilities, hospitals, and agencies I often meet talented professionals who knew trouble was coming but said nothing because it did not feel safe to do so. The cost of that silence is measured in failed projects, service outages, and avoidable controversy. A modest institutional habit can reverse this dynamic. Start formal meetings by asking for the pieces of bad news that no one has voiced. Reward the messenger rather than the fixer. In a northern water board I watched how this practice reduced the number of last-minute crises and improved relationships with suppliers who were finally hearing about risks early enough to help. Psychological safety is not a fashionable idea. It is a governance advantage.
Strategy is the next frontier of reflection. Plans that attempt to please everyone end up straining everyone. Strategy is not an inventory of hopes but the courage to choose. What distinguishes Ethiopia’s early industrial zones, despite all the imperfections, is not simply the infrastructure but the choice to concentrate on a small number of sectors where jobs could be created quickly and learning could compound. Nigeria has too often pursued breadth without depth. A commissioner who commits to a two-page statement of where the state will compete in transport or health, how it will win there, and what will be left aside this year, has already advanced execution. The power of this clarity lies in how it enables other actors to align. Suppliers, investors, and civil society can only complement a public agenda they can see.
Foresight completes reflective leadership. Oil shocks, currency swings, (though the latter two have been quite stable in the past six months) import disruptions, and climate stress are not surprises. They are conditions of the game. The organisations that navigate them well do not predict the future. They rehearse it. In Vietnam, which has climbed the manufacturing ladder over the past two decades, routine scenario exercises allowed managers and officials to pre-commit to responses when supply chains wobbled. In our context the same discipline means agreeing on three or four numbers that, if breached, trigger specific actions within a week. It means deciding in advance which contracts can be slowed without losing capability, which social programmes must be protected under any scenario, and which suppliers or ports will be used if a route closes. When senior teams practise these drills quarterly, they do not eliminate volatility. They convert volatility from a reason to panic into a reason to act calmly and quickly.
Once reflection has cleared the fog, reinvention can proceed with precision. Reinvention in Nigeria must start with an unflinching acceptance of constraints. Capital is tight. Power is unreliable in too many places. The skills we most need are scarce and globally mobile. Rules sometimes move mid-stream. These constraints do not forbid innovation. They shape it. The leaders who make headway begin by asking what job the citizen or customer is hiring the service to do. In one health programme I observed, teams stopped designing features and started listening to mothers who simply wanted certainty about vaccination days. A low-cost text system that reminded families and local clinics of fixed days in each ward lifted attendance without expensive infrastructure. India’s Aadhaar system, whatever one thinks of it in the round, succeeded because it focused on a minimal identity layer that others could build upon. Kenya’s M-Pesa was born because the banking system ignored the unbanked. Both cases show the pay-off from designing to the job, not to the institution.
Reinvention demands learning before scale. In too many Nigerian settings pilots are a performance rather than a process. They lack a falsifiable question, a clear owner, and a path to either stop or scale. The fix is not complicated. Any initiative expected to touch a large population should be tested in two locations, with one sharp question set in advance and a date by which a scale or stop decision will be made. The results should be published in language citizens understand. Failure then becomes an investment rather than a secret. I saw a state education agency kill three shiny ideas quickly and redirect funds into a teacher coaching model that improved learning outcomes because it treated the pilot as an experiment rather than an announcement.
Reinvention gains momentum when public institutions become conveners of ecosystems rather than providers of every function. Big problems yield when government, private firms, and civic actors share accountability for outcomes that citizens feel. Bangladesh offered a vivid lesson. Partnerships between government, a major telecom, microfinance institutions, and social enterprises created rural digital kiosks run by women that offered identity, market information, and payments. The result was a commercial model that advanced connectivity and income at the same time. There was no philanthropic afterthought. Incentives were aligned at the design stage. Nigeria’s agriculture and health sectors can embrace the same logic. Shared cold chain investment for vaccines, joint platforms for farmer data, and managed marketplaces for produce are all areas where no single actor can win alone, yet every actor can win if the rules of cooperation are clear.
The final discipline is winning. By winning I do not mean a one-off success that makes good copy. I mean the craft of scaling what works, protecting it from erosion, and compounding advantage. The first move is to pick a narrow transformation where citizens will feel the difference within months, ‘a low hanging fruit’. A permit workflow, a claims process, a land registry, or a targeted procurement system are good candidates. The rule is simple. The process must be completed end to end in a single digital flow. A named leader must own service levels. The model that drives decisions must be monitored so that it does not drift. Small wins matter because they change expectations. Once a citizen experiences a permit that takes days rather than months, tolerance for delay declines across the board. Indonesia’s progress on e-procurement and tax administration, while uneven, shows how patient systems work can raise revenue and trust at the same time. We should be stubborn about this kind of boring progress because it pays compound interest.
Winning also requires decision-making that treats a downturn as a time to prune and plant rather than to freeze. The instinct in a crisis is to cut across the board. The better move is to cut visible waste, protect muscle, and pre-fund two moves that will pay off when others are distracted. When India’s Tata Group bought Jaguar Land Rover in the depths of the 2008 crisis, it was not a gamble on prestige. It was a calculated bet on future capability. In Nigeria the equivalent in the public sphere could be a state securing a long-term power arrangement for critical social infrastructure when prices soften. In the private sphere it may look like acquiring a distressed logistics asset that reduces cost to serve for essential goods. These are not headline moments. They are compounding moves.
The strongest fosses in emerging economies are often social and institutional as much as technological. A company that ties its profit engine to a farmer’s gain by reducing post-harvest losses creates an affinity that is difficult to copy. A ministry that becomes the trusted orchestrator of identity or payments in a sector makes duplication wasteful for others and partnership sensible. Vietnam’s rise in manufacturing is instructive here. Once clusters matured and supplier development programmes took root, firms preferred to deepen rather than exit. In Nigeria we can replicate the principle if not the exact model by choosing the lever we will own, whether identity rails for SMEs, last-mile logistics in a large state, or a vocational pipeline that gives investors’ confidence.
Every serious proposal invites counterarguments. The first is that our constraints are too severe. It is true that power, security challenges, still high inflation and undervalued Naira shape the feasible frontier. Yet they rarely block the first disciplined step. Narrowing focus, publishing choices, and testing cheaply are possible even in tough conditions. The second counterargument is that pilots never scale here. That is not a law of nature. Pilots fail to scale when ownership is vague and money is episodic. Tie each pilot to a named leader with a budget gate and an adoption target. If the target is met by a stated date, the next release triggers automatically. If not, the idea is retired without controversy because the condition was agreed up front. The third objection is that openness hands advantage to rivals or invites misuse. Opacity is more expensive. Clear interfaces, shared dashboards, and pre-agreed escalation channels protect the public interest while letting private actors bring energy and ingenuity. The fourth objection is that our context is unique and therefore resistant to lessons from elsewhere. Culture and politics matter. So does execution. The underlying disciplines of reflection, reinvention, and winning have travelled across Asia, Africa, and Latin America because they are grounded in human behaviour and institutional incentives rather than in fashion.
Actionable suggestions matter most when they become routine. A practical rhythm helps leaders avoid performative announcements. Each quarter, senior teams should meet for a candid review of trust, choices, and scenarios. The output should be three objectives with dates and owners that are shared with staff and, where appropriate, with citizens. Each month, the organisation should pilot two new practices and retire one legacy habit that no longer serves. A one-page learning note in plain English should capture what moved, what did not, and what will be changed as a result. Each week, leaders should review a single measure that protects their moat, whether adoption, cost to serve, or ecosystem leverage, and then remove one blocker that slows progress. This cadence is not a ritual for its own sake. It is the mechanism through which reflection feeds reinvention and reinvention feeds winning.
The independence anniversary invites a final reflection. Nations and subnational do not become trustworthy because they declare it. Companies do not become competitive because they wish it. NGOs do not become impactful because they are earnest. Trust grows when leaders expose their logic to scrutiny and follow through. Competitiveness grows when organisations choose a place to compete and then refine how they win there through fast learning. Impact grows when coalitions form around measurable outcomes that citizens experience in hours saved, income gained, and safety improved. I have seen these habits in pockets across Nigeria. A cooperative that became a disciplined buyer and seller on behalf of its members and cut their losses. A state-owned entity that digitised a creaking process and recovered weeks of time for small businesses. A private firm that opened its platform to complementary services and grew by letting others create value. These are not miracles. They are crafts. Crafts improve with practice.
Examples from other emerging economies are not medals to hang on a wall. They are reminders that the work is doable. Rwanda’s visible performance contracts demonstrate how public accountability can reset expectations after trauma. Aadhaar in India shows that a minimal, interoperable public good can unlock many private innovations when designed with restraint. Kenya’s mobile money revolution proves that leapfrogging can occur when a clear job is served on a platform people already use. Vietnam’s steady climb through manufacturing illustrates how clusters, supplier development, and predictability attract commitment. Indonesia’s progress on tax administration and procurement shows how patient system building raises revenue and trust together. Bangladesh’s rural digital models illustrate the power of aligned incentives across public, private, and social actors. None of these examples is a blueprint. Each is a provocation to ask what the Nigerian equivalent would look like under our constraints and with our strengths.
As we enter the sixty-fifth year of independence, the choice before Nigerian leaders is not between idealism and realism. It is between a loud cycle of fresh promises and a quieter craft of institutional improvement that compounds. The second path is less dramatic, yet it is how countries change without fanfare. It begins with leaders who listen before they speak and who effectively communicate the reasons that informed their choices. It gains speed with teams who test efficiently, measure honestly, and stop what does not work. It consolidates with organisations that scale what works, protect their edge, and reinvest in capability in good times and bad. I wrote earlier that the mood is sober and promising. It will remain promising only if it becomes disciplined.
The most powerful sentence I have heard in the past year came from a nurse in a secondary hospital who said that the only thing that had changed her day was a new process that meant a critical drug arrived on Wednesday without fail. It made her sound less like a hero and more like a professional. That sentence is the heart of development. When essential functions become reliable, professionals emerge, and citizens begin to trust. The path to that sentence is neither glamorous nor impossible. It asks us to reflect with candour, to reinvent with humility, and to win with patience. If we make those verbs our habit in the year ahead, the country we will write about at seventy will look less like a set of crises to manage and more like a system that works. That would be an independence worth celebrating.
- Dr Alim Abubakre is the Founder of TEXEM and Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Business School
