The Leadership –Followership Debate

I  was recently invited to contribute my perspective on a conversation between two brilliant submissions on the primacy and priority of leadership or followership in Nigeria. I have not come across a more comprehensive and fulsome debate on this topic hence my decision to lay it before the Nigerian audience. After presenting the two opinions, I will then offer my own paradigm. Here we go:

The leadership perspective

“Everything else, citizenship, innovation, resilience, multiplies or diminishes based on that one variable, Leadership

“Let me illustrate”.

“Take the Abia power project. The foundation was laid as far back as 2004 by Barth Nnaji and commissioned in 2014. Yet for nearly a decade, it remained dormant. It was not until 2024, when Alex Otti assumed office, that decisive leadership engaged regulators, secured gas supply, and unlocked the project within months. The contrast is stark: eight years of inertia under previous Governor Ikpeazu followed by eight months of execution under Alex Otti. The variable that changed was not the people; it was leadership. The same pattern played out in Lagos under Babatunde Fashola. Governance improved, systems worked, and citizens responded positively, even voluntarily complying with taxation because they could see results. Nigerians are not allergic to responsibility; they are responsive to results”.

*The Nigerian Paradox”:

“Nigeria is not lacking in capable people.

Consider Aliko Dangote and Mike Adenuga; individuals who built world-class enterprises despite systemic obstacles. Across the country, millions of small and medium-scale entrepreneurs display extraordinary resilience daily. Yet, despite this, tens of millions remain in poverty.  Millions of children are out of school. Infrastructure deficits persist.”

“Why? Because individual success does not translate into national development without effective governance. Dangote’s wealth cannot fix education in Northern Nigeria. Only coordinated  government policy can do that. And policy effectiveness is determined by leadership quality. Answering your questions directly, when will such a leader arise? Such leaders already exist.They are visible in: the private sector, reform-driven subnational  governments, certain technocratic institutions. The issue is not absence, it is selection failure. Too often, competence is sacrificed on the altar of ethnicity, religion, and patronage”.

“How do we get such leaders?

By fixing the incentive structure of leadership recruitment.The elite; political, economic, and social, must shift from: supporting loyalty, rewarding patronage to:  Backing competence

Prioritizing integrity. Enforcing accountability. Until the system rewards merit over mediocrity, outcomes will not change. Where will the leader come from? Yes- from current followers.

But not all followers become leaders. Leadership must be deliberately filtered and elevated. At present, the entry bar into leadership is dangerously low. For example, the minimal educational requirement for the presidency is primary school education. This sends the wrong signal about the seriousness of governance.”

“Final Thought”

“There is no “Nigerian way” to development, just as there is no Nigerian way to fly a plane.You either follow the proven principles that make systems work, or you crash. Until we prioritize leadership built on discipline, competence, and integrity, we will continue to recycle failure, no matter how hardworking or resilient our people are. Leadership is not just a factor in nation building. It is the decisive factor”.

Response (The followership perspective)

“I receive and respect your argument with the seriousness it deserves. Few have stated the case for leadership as decisively as you have. On much of it, we are not in disagreement. Leadership matters. Profoundly. Where governance is broken, even the best citizens are forced to perform on a collapsing stage. I concede that point fully. Otti’s Abia and Fashola’s Lagos are real, and they are instructive”.

“But permit me to press back, respectfully but firmly. Leadership and citizenship are not rival forces in nation-building. They are not even unequal partners locked in hierarchy. They are co-authors of the same outcome, and history bears me out. Consider the very models you invoke: Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, China. Lee Kuan Yew did not transform Singapore alone. He transformed it with a citizenry that accepted discipline, embraced education, and met his demands with sweat. Park Chung-hee’s Korea worked because Koreans showed up, generation after generation, to honour the social contract leadership offered them. Even your own example, Fashola’s Lagos, succeeded precisely because Lagosians responded; they paid taxes voluntarily, as you yourself noted. That response was not incidental. It was constitutive”.

“A leader without a responsive citizenry is a candle in our Lagos 7-day rain. A citizenry without responsive leadership is wasted potential. Neither rises without the other. And this brings me to a truth we must say plainly, with gratitude. Long before the proverbial leader arrives, Nigerians have been building Nigeria. Aliko Dangote did not wait. Abdul Samad Rabiu did not wait. Tony Elumelu did not wait. Jim Ovia did not wait. Afe Babalola did not wait. Mike Adenuga did not wait”.

“They lit candles where governments could not, would not, or did not. Cement, sugar, banking, telecoms, education, energy, philanthropy, these are not gifts handed down by visionary presidents. They are monuments raised by citizens who refused to be paralyzed by the absence of one. And behind them now stands a younger generation lighting their own candles. Our founders in tech, building fintechs and platforms that have put Nigeria on the global map. Our bankers reimagining finance for a digital economy. Our musicians, filmmakers, and creatives carrying the Nigerian story to every corner of the earth, Afrobeats, Nollywood, fashion, content. Our food entrepreneurs reshaping how a continent eats. Our farmers, our teachers, our nurses, our small business owners. These are not bystanders waiting for rescue. These are nation-builders already at work”.

“We owe them gratitude. Loud, unembarrassed gratitude. Because they have proven, with their lives, the very point I am making: nation-building cannot be outsourced to one man at the top. It is the daily, deliberate work of citizens who refuse to surrender. This is why I cannot, in good conscience, wait for the miracle leader to descend before doing my own work. To wait passively is to abdicate. While we reform the recruitment of leaders, a cause I support without reservation, we must simultaneously be raising the citizens who will demand them, vote for them, defend them, and respond to them when they arrive”.

“And here lies my deepest concern.

We are outsourcing too much.

We are outsourcing the discipline of our homes to the  government. We are outsourcing the education of our children to a system we know is broken. Yes, my brother: Demand better leadership, loudly, relentlessly. But raise better citizens, quietly, daily, in your home

This is why I have insisted, and will continue to insist: pending when the leader emerges, we keep lighting candles instead of cursing the darkness. Not because the darkness is acceptable, it is not, but because a nation of candle-lighters is precisely the soil from which true leaders grow”.

“*Leadership is decisive*.

*Citizenship is foundational*.

Nation-building belongs to those who refuse to surrender either.

We move forward, together.

NIGERIA will rise better when Nigerians rise!”

My Intervention

The Followership-Leader-Organising Principle Triad

Let me add the third perspective on the leadership – Followership Debate -a nation can exist with bad leadership but no society can endure without a  constitution, the organising principle laws, rules and regulations-elements that make a thing what it is and without which it would not exist (elements that make Nigeria what it is, and without which it would not exist). This is what regulates the interaction amongst the citizens and determines how the leadership emerges from among the citizens. The most functional constitution is one that is grounded on the concept of autochthony-a situation in which the constitution derives from the indigenous society. The constitution is autonomous of leadership but leadership cannot be autonomous of the constitution.

This is why the constitution is notionally stipulated by “We the people”.

Both leadership and followership are two sides of the same coin. Without leadership, there cannot be a followership and without followership there cannot be leadership. You cannot lead yourself nor can you follow yourself. To argue that the leadership factor is a crucial variable to the determination of the development of society amounts to platitude and tautology.There is no situation or context to which leadership is not integral, from the basic social unit of the family to the height of sociopolitical governance. No one contests this truism, what is being contested is the Superman theory of leadership. The anticipation of good leadership is more in hope than expectation.

Nigeria is a peculiar case. Nigeria did not derive from the people, it was imposed on them, hence there are no foundational articles of association. A country of this nature, with large scale cultural disparities can only function by the acknowledgement of this background in its constitutive rule (as the Independence constitution did). States derive from societies not the other way round. This was the point Awolowo was making when he cited Nigeria as a ‘mere geographical expression’. Nigeria did not organically evolve from a Nigerian society or nation, the way Germany evolved from a prior German nation, England from English, Wales from Welsh. He would not be the first commentator to note the incongruity of the establishment of a state prior to its existence. The great Nigerian scholar, Claude Ake similarly argued that it is the alienness of the state in Africa — its lack of conformity with the practices of the people — that makes it inadequate for its purpose in the continent.

This critical observation led Awolowo to the recommendation of federalism as of the essence, the irreducible minimum for the Nigerian state if it were to stand a chance of success. If you get the constitution right, it limits the capacity of bad leadership to harm the nation while it optimally potentiates the utility of good leadership. If you do not, then there is no basis for the expectation of good leadership.

In making the case for an internally consistent constitution for Nigeria, Chief Obafemi Awolowo famously ruminates in his seminal book Path to Nigerian Freedom (1947) that because Nigeria is a multi-lingual and multi-national country, where a unitary constitution would breed intense hostility, making federalism the only viable arrangement for sustainable peace, harmony, and equitable national integration.. He remonstrates “The work of  government in Nigeria under unitary constitution is bound to become unduly complex, inextricably tangled, extremely unwieldy  and wasteful, and productive of disharmony and discontent,”… unless you have a Superman at the helm, “the administrative machinery would eventually disintegrate and break down under the crushing weight of bureaucratic centralism” Federalism distributes power, buffers cultural disparities, and limits harm from bad leadership.