By Suleyman A Ndanusa PhD OON
The responses to my earlier intervention on good people, strong leadership and strong institutions have raised questions that deserve more than passing answers. Indeed, some of the questions have helped me to refine my own thinking.
Rather than regard them as challenges to the original argument, I see them as precisely the reason for starting the conversation in the first place. Ideas become more useful when they are interrogated.
I have therefore brought together some of the recurring questions and my responses to them. I hope others will add more questions, disagree with some of the answers and, perhaps, provide better ones. After all, the purpose is not to win an argument. It is to understand more clearly what Nigeria must do differently.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. If Nigeria’s problem is weak institutions, who builds strong institutions if not good people?
This is perhaps the most important challenge to the argument.
Institutions do not descend from heaven. People create them, operate them, reform them and defend them. So, yes, we need good people.
But that is only half of the story.
The objective of institution building is precisely to reduce society’s dependence on continuously finding exceptionally good people. A well designed institution should enable reasonably competent people to produce acceptable outcomes while constraining even powerful people when they are tempted to abuse authority.
Good people are therefore necessary to build institutions, but good institutions are necessary because we cannot guarantee that good people will always be in charge.
The relationship is circular:
Good people build institutions.
Good institutions discipline people.
Good political culture protects both.
Nigeria needs all three.
2. But haven’t we had good people in government who eventually disappointed us?
Precisely.
That experience should make us cautious about constructing governance around personal virtue.
People do not operate independently of their environment. Political systems contain incentives, pressures, rewards and penalties. Put an otherwise decent person into a system where rules are routinely circumvented, accountability is weak, patronage is rewarded and wrongdoing carries little consequence, and the environment gradually begins to redefine what appears normal.
This was the uncomfortable proposition in the original paper: weak institutions do not merely permit bad people to behave badly; they can gradually teach good people how to behave badly too.
The reverse can also be true. Strong institutions can compel imperfect people to behave better than their natural inclinations might otherwise suggest.
That is why institutional design matters.
3. What then about America and Donald Trump? If American institutions were supposedly strong, what went wrong?
This question provides an important stress test for the argument.
Perhaps our mistake is to imagine strong institutions as structures possessing strength independently of the people operating them. They do not.
A constitution does not defend itself. A legislature does not automatically exercise oversight. Courts ultimately depend upon respect for their authority. Institutional strength consists not merely of laws and procedures but also of political norms, professional ethics, civic culture and the willingness of people to defend institutional boundaries, sometimes even against their own partisan interests.
The American experience suggests that formal institutions may remain relatively strong while some of the informal norms supporting them deteriorate.
Political polarisation, distrust of institutions, economic and cultural grievances, partisan loyalty and fragmentation of the information environment did not suddenly appear with Trump. He arguably discovered, mobilised and tested conditions that had been developing for some time.
The important lesson is therefore not simply about Trump.
Strong institutions are not institutions that are never challenged. They are institutions capable of restraining leaders, surviving their excesses and correcting themselves afterwards.
4. Does that mean even strong institutions can become weak?
Absolutely.
Institutional strength is not a permanent certificate awarded to a country after it reaches a particular level of development.
Institutions can deteriorate.
Rules can remain formally intact while conventions surrounding them weaken. Conduct considered unacceptable yesterday can become debatable today and normal tomorrow.
That process is particularly dangerous because institutional decline is often incremental rather than dramatic. There may be no announcement that an institution has become weak.
It simply becomes less capable of saying No to power.
Institutional strength should therefore be understood as something that must continuously be maintained rather than something permanently achieved.
5. How does a society pull back once institutional erosion has gone far? Where does the will for renewal come from?
This is probably the hardest question.
Institutional decline is not necessarily irreversible, but institutional recovery is never automatic.
The impulse for correction does not have to originate from one heroic leader. It can emerge simultaneously from courts, legislatures, professional bureaucracies, universities, the media, civil society, business leadership, political parties and citizens themselves.
Sometimes crisis itself creates the consciousness necessary for renewal. A society may come sufficiently close to the edge to rediscover why the guardrails were erected in the first place.
But something fundamental must occur: enough people must decide that preserving the rules of the game is ultimately more important than winning the next game.
That becomes especially difficult in polarised societies because people are tempted to excuse institutional violations when committed by their own side.
A powerful test is therefore very simple:
Would I still support this exercise of power if my political opponent possessed it tomorrow?
Once citizens and political leaders begin asking that question seriously, institutional recovery may already have begun.
6. What if a “Trump 2” emerges? Can repeated disruption permanently change a society?
Yes, repeated disruption can change institutional expectations profoundly.
But the more interesting danger is that “Trump 2” may not resemble Trump at all.
Once boundaries have been crossed, successors inherit knowledge of what is politically possible. What began as exceptional behaviour under one leader can become precedent for another.
That is how institutional erosion becomes self reinforcing:
Yesterday’s outrage becomes today’s controversy; today’s controversy becomes tomorrow’s convention; and eventually society forgets where the original boundary stood.
At that point the problem is no longer simply the individual leader. The political culture itself has changed.
That is why institutional defence must begin before exceptional behaviour becomes normal behaviour.
7. Are strong leaders therefore unnecessary?
Not at all.
Nigeria needs strong leaders. But we must distinguish strong leadership from strongman leadership.
A strong leader possesses the political authority, competence and courage to make difficult decisions, coordinate institutions and insist upon implementation.
A strongman gradually substitutes himself for institutions.
The difference is fundamental.
The strongest leader may actually be the one who deliberately builds institutions capable of functioning without him.
The ultimate test of leadership is therefore not merely, “What happened while you were there?” It is also, “What continued to work after you left?”
8. So what exactly does Nigeria need: good people, strong leaders or strong institutions?
Perhaps the debate presents us with a false choice.
Nigeria needs good people because institutions are built and operated by human beings.
Nigeria needs strong leadership because institutional reform frequently requires political courage and sustained implementation.
And Nigeria needs strong institutions because neither good people nor strong leaders remain in office forever.
But there is a fourth requirement that deserves equal attention: political culture.
A country can write excellent constitutions, establish sophisticated agencies and appoint competent people, but if society progressively tolerates institutional abuse whenever it benefits its preferred political side, those institutions will eventually weaken.
The sustainable formula therefore becomes:
Good People + Strong Leadership + Strong Institutions + Democratic Culture = Sustainable Governance.
None is sufficient alone.
9. What, then, is the central lesson for Nigeria?
Perhaps it is this.
We have spent too much time searching for the leader who will rescue Nigeria and too little time asking what kind of system would make Nigeria progressively less dependent upon being rescued.
Leadership matters enormously. Character matters. Competence matters.
But the real achievement of leadership is to convert personal competence into institutional competence; personal integrity into systems of accountability; political vision into durable public policy; and temporary authority into institutions that survive the individual who exercised it.
America’s present difficulties therefore should not make us abandon the case for strong institutions. They should deepen our understanding of it.
They remind us that no country finally “arrives” at institutional strength.
Democracy has no graduation ceremony.
Every generation inherits its institutions on temporary custody. It can strengthen them, merely enjoy them, or gradually consume them.
And perhaps that is where our Nigerian conversation should now proceed.
Instead of asking only:
Where are the good people?
Or:
Where is the strong leader?
We should increasingly ask:
What institutions are we building that will make good governance less dependent upon the goodness of whoever happens to be in power?
That, for me, is the question worth keeping alive.
Because institutions protect society but ultimately, society must also protect its institutions.
Suleyman A. Ndanusa, PhD, OON, is an economist, lawyer, strategic studies scholar, and public policy thinker and practitioner with extensive experience in financial markets, regulation, governance, national Security and development.”
Addendum to the earlier paper on Good People, Strong Leadership and Strong Institutions.
