Nigeria’s trouble is a failure of leadership. The most quoted phrase in Nigerian public life. The one that closes the most arguments and opens the fewest.
It is partially true. That is not what makes it dangerous. Every diagnosis positions the diagnoser in relation to both the problem and the solution. A useful diagnosis places them inside the work. The diagnosis of bad leadership does the opposite. It places the problem at the top and the solution at the top, and leaves the diagnoser standing outside both, with nothing to do but wait and complain.
It does something else, too. Like corruption, the first alibi in this series, the leadership diagnosis implies that the solution is cheap. Find the right person. Replace the wrong one. If the cure is that simple, then sixty years of failing to apply it is no longer a tragedy. It is something else. A limit of capacity, perhaps. Or a cynicism so deep it has grown insensitive to suffering it could have ended.
Below the level of policy, the “Bad leadership” tag does its most important work. At the psychic level, the primary function of this tag is not to solve anything. It is to provide coherence for the sufferer. Hunger, fear, instability, dispossession — these are unbearable when they are unattributed. The tag gives them a face. It transfers the weight of unexplained pain onto a single human figure who can be blamed, hated, replaced, and then blamed again. The leader’s deepest role, in this frame, is not governance. It is, meaning. He carries the suffering by being the explanation for it. Without him, the pain would have to be borne without an author. With him, it can at least be narrated.
This is why the diagnosis cannot be cured by replacement. The leader is doing exactly the job the diagnosis assigned him. He is the place where the pain is housed.
A word invented to name an absence
Leadership did not begin as a quality. It entered English in the early nineteenth century, at a moment when older forms of authority were failing. Hereditary rights were weakening. Divine sanction was contested. Social energy was rising faster than institutions could contain it. The word did not describe what existed. It named what was missing.
Over time the meaning reversed. What began as a question — what fills the gap? — became an answer: find the right person. The diagnostic function disappeared. The absence was converted into a trait, something people were said to possess or lack. That is the version Nigeria inherited. When Chinua Achebe wrote in 1983 that the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership, the sentence fixed itself into the national mind. It has been repeated ever since. But the word inside the sentence had already been altered. The question had already been removed.
What the sentence permits
Bad leadership is not one claim. It is several, collapsed into a single phrase. A moral, competence, performance and legitimacy failure. Each implies a different remedy. Collapsed into one, they require none. The sentence commits to nothing, explains nothing, and accuses of everything. Every leader inherits the accusation intact. No leader can satisfy it — not because they fail, but because the charge was never precise enough to be answered.
This is the second alibi. Not a statement about leaders, but a permission structure for non-participation.
The structure of judgement
There is a simpler proof that the verdict is not functioning as analysis. Most Nigerian leaders are vilified during their time in office and rehabilitated after their death. The one in power is a failure. The one removed becomes a possibility. The one gone becomes a statesman. Awolowo was attacked throughout his active career and is now quoted as a prophet. Zik was ridiculed in his last years and is now invoked as a founder. Abacha, whose name opened this series, is already being quietly rehabilitated in quarters where he was once unspeakable. Even Jonathan, abused from every direction during his presidency, is now described by some of his former critics as the last president who did no particular harm. Good leadership, as we use the category, is largely retrospective. It cannot guide action in the present because it only becomes visible when the present is over.
From heaven to Aso Rock
The move is older than it looks. We have performed it before in a different vocabulary.
Nigerians have built, many times over, some of the largest churches in the world, on the hope that with loud enough cries God might change something he had so far declined to change. The pulpit that once hosted sermon and prayer now hosts the blaming of government. The vocabulary has been updated. The stance has not. In both frames, the agent is elsewhere — in the heavens, in Aso Rock — and the self is a spectator waiting for something to happen for them rather than with them.
This is progress, but only halfway progress. The leadership frame did something decisive. It pulled the cause down, from heaven to a human being, from fate to an office. That is real.
A leader draws on the trust his people display in his judgement. Without that trust, there is nothing for him to draw on.
When leadership becomes theatre
In a functioning system, leadership coordinates what already holds. In a failing one, it concentrates what does not. Every pressure, every unresolved failure, every expectation without a channel rises to the top. The leader becomes the surface on which the system registers its stress. A president facing security crises he cannot resolve, economic pressures he cannot reverse, and expectations no budget can meet is not exercising control. He is containing overload.
This is not execution. It is absorption. Holding together what cannot yet hold itself. From the outside, this looks like weakness, because what is visible is not control but strain. And so the system selects for the opposite — leaders who perform control, project certainty, reflect pressure outward instead of containing it. They appear stronger. They are less capable of the actual task.
When leadership becomes a game of hiding from the people what they can sense, performance replaces decisiveness. What is called leadership failure is often something else: channel failure misread as personal failure. No individual can absorb what a system refuses to distribute. A functioning society does not push everything upward. It disperses through institutions, associations, everyday practices that carry load without spectacle. Without those, every seat at the top hollows. Every occupant performs. Every performance is then named inadequate. The loop requires no one’s intention. Only its continuation.
The asymmetry
The tag has migrated accordingly. The national military, fighting on multiple fronts, is described as corrupt and incompetent by commentators whose own relatives serve in no capacity at all. The fluency of the critique rises as the proximity of the critic falls.
A journalist places the Minister of Defence in front of a live camera a few days after a Brigadier General has been killed in action and asks him to respond to rumours of corruption in military leadership. What truth does that serve? The officer is dead. His unit is still in the field. His family is still grieving. No procurement truth can be established in a television segment. The journalist is not seeking truth. He is producing a clip. The minister knows this. The audience knows this. The soldier who died is collateral to a conversation that will not mention him by name twice.
This is what the accountability we have constructed looks like in its actual operation. It is not accountability. It is the performance of accountability, offered to an audience that has substituted watching performance for participation because participation would require contributions the audience has not been prepared to make.
The test
You can describe the failures of leadership in detail. Most of us can. Try the reverse. Describe, with the same precision, what you owe the system you are criticising. Not in principle. In action. What you would refuse. What you would forgo. What you would do differently when the cost is yours. Without waiting for others. Without waiting for the right leader.
The asymmetry between the two accounts is not accidental. It is the shape of the alibi. Those who know what good leadership is also know what responsible citizenship demands. The first account is fluent. The second is absent.
What the task actually is
The reality a society calls its experience is not something one person could create. However much we may want to hide from it, this country is the cumulative result of our daily small actions. No long-lasting change in human affairs happens through the wisdom of one man, or within a short period of time. The leader we are waiting for will not come, because the conditions under which he could operate have not been constituted by us. No replacement will close this gap. No election will. No reform will.
What would close it is the patient daily work of building the channels that would make individual capacity usable at scale, performed by enough people over a horizon long enough to accumulate. The second alibi tells Nigerians to search for the right person. That search has been repeated for decades. It has produced replacement without resolution. Because the question is wrong. Not who will lead us, but whether we are willing to build what would make leadership no longer carry what we refuse to carry.
The Brigadier General is still in the ground. The minister has moved on to another segment. The journalist has his clip. The officer died trying to hold together an institution the rest of us have already composed our verdict on. We did not vote. We did not serve. We did not fight. We watched.
We will deliver our verdict with the usual fluency. A fluency that has, by now, become indistinguishable from abdication.
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Damilare Ebeniza studied Political Science and International Relations in Nigeria, Benin Republic, and France, with a research focus on Nigerian history, economy, and foreign politics. He has experience as a conference interpreter and external relations management across Chad, Niger, Mali, and Guinea Conakry, for governmental, regional and international organisations in West Africa. Proficient in French, English, and four additional non-Nigerian African languages, he embodies a commitment to cross-cultural understanding and effective communication. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com
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