Over more than two decades of advising organisations on performance and strategy, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about what makes some institutions perform and others stagnate. The single variable I keep returning to, the one that does more work than any other, is how the leadership at the top is composed and how it operates.
In the private sector, where I have done most of this work, the lesson is one I have come to hold strongly. In the public sector, where I have advised leaders and where I have studied the patterns from outside, the lesson is, if anything, sharper. And it is this lesson I want to share plainly in this column, because I believe naming it is the first step to changing it.
‘Most public sector boards in Nigeria are not boards. They are clubs.’
I do not say this casually, and I do not say it to be provocative. I say it because the distinction matters, and because mistaking one for the other is one of the most consequential errors in our public sector.
A club is a body of people who have been brought together because they belong together. A board is a body of people who have been brought together because, between them, they can govern an institution. These are different things. They require different compositions. They produce different results.
‘The most dangerous board in our public sector is not the hostile board. It is not the divided board. It is the friendly board.’
It is the board where everyone gets along, no one disagrees publicly, the Chair is universally respected, the Chief Executive enjoys cordial relations with every member, and the meetings end on time with smiles all round. This is the board most likely to preside over an institution’s slow drift into irrelevance, and to be surprised when the country eventually notices.
Today I want to say why this is so, and to offer a frame for what we should be aiming at instead.
How a board becomes a club
The Boards in our public sector become clubs by a process so familiar that we barely notice it. Let me describe it. A vacancy arises. An appointment process is initiated. The appointing authority, whether a Minister, a Governor, a Permanent Secretary or a regulator, consults. The consultation, in practice, draws on the relationships and networks of the people doing the consulting. Names are floated. Some are added because of their party loyalty. Some are added because of zonal balance. Some are added because they are owed something. Some are added because they themselves have made the case for their inclusion through trusted intermediaries. Some are added because the appointing authority knows them personally and trusts them.
By the time the list is finalised, the people on it have one thing in common. They have been chosen by, or with the consent of, the same group of people. They share a social network. They share a political affiliation, or at least a political accommodation. They share a sense of mutual obligation. They will, when they meet for the first time, recognise each other.
This is how a club is composed. It is also how most public sector boards in Nigeria are composed today.
The competencies required to govern the institution have not been the primary criterion. The independence of judgement required to challenge management has not been tested. The diversity of perspective required to anticipate what the institution may face over the next five years has not been engineered. These have, at best, been residual considerations after the political and relational arithmetic has been completed.
I want to be careful here. I am not saying that the people who emerge from this process are bad people. Many of them are excellent. Many of them have served their country with distinction. The country has been fortunate, over the years, that political appointment has sometimes produced governance grade directors by accident. My argument is not about the individuals. My argument is about the design of the selection process, which is not engineered to produce a board capable of governing. It is engineered to produce a list capable of being announced.
A list that can be announced and a board that can govern are not the same thing. The country has confused them, repeatedly, for decades. The board has become a club, and clubs cannot govern.
Why clubs cannot govern
A club can do many things. It can convene. It can deliberate amicably. It can endorse the decisions of those who lead it. It can preserve its own cohesion. It can manage its internal relationships skilfully. These are all genuine capabilities. They are not, however, the capabilities required to govern a public institution.
Governance requires capabilities that a club, by its nature, struggles to produce.
Governance requires challenge. A board must be able to push back against management, sometimes firmly, and against the conventional wisdom inside the institution. A club cannot do this without rupturing its own social fabric, and so it tends not to do it at all.
Governance requires independence. Each director must be able to form a view independently of the others, and to express that view even when it is unwelcome. A club, by its nature, produces convergence. Members reach for the consensus position because the consensus is what holds the club together.
Governance requires range. The board must collectively cover the technical, financial, strategic and contextual ground that the institution operates on. A club, drawn from a single network or political accommodation, tends toward similarity, not range. The same conversations recur because the same minds are in the room.
‘This is why the friendly board is so dangerous. It has all the visible attributes of a working board.’
Members attend. Resolutions are passed. Minutes are recorded. Annual reports are signed. But the conversations that would actually change the trajectory of the institution are not happening, because nothing about the room is engineered to make those conversations possible.
What a board of builders looks like
The alternative to a board of friends is not a board of enemies. It is not a board of strangers. It is what I will call, in this column and in those that follow, a board of builders.
A board of builders is a body of people who have been deliberately composed for the purpose of governing an institution. They may, or may not, have known each other before they joined the board. That is incidental. What matters is that they have been brought together because, together, they can do the work.
There is a positive Nigerian example of what this looks like in practice, and I have referenced it before. When the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) was being designed, those responsible for its founding composition paid deliberate attention to what the board would need to do, and selected directors accordingly. The result was a board with the financial competence to engage with sovereign wealth management at international standards, the independence to push back when needed, and the range to operate across the full mandate the institution had been given. The institution has performed accordingly.
The Federal Inland Revenue Service under Ifueko Omoigui Okauru, during the reform period from 2004 to 2010, offers another example. The reform of FIRS was not approached as a matter of filling seats, preserving old arrangements or satisfying internal constituencies. The institution had to rebuild tax administration, strengthen technical capacity, automate collection, improve enforcement and restore public trust in a system many citizens had come to doubt. Omoigui Okauru understood that this could not be done with a club. It required a reform team with internal knowledge, external competence, professional discipline and the courage to disturb entrenched interests. The result was not simply an increase in revenue. It was the rebuilding of a national revenue institution on a more professional footing.
These are not exceptions to be admired. They are examples to be studied and replicated. A board of builders is something we can compose, deliberately, in every public sector institution in Nigeria. It is not a matter of luck. It is a matter of design.
Five tests to distinguish a club from a board
After all is said and done, here are five tests you can apply to any public sector board in Nigeria today. They will tell you, quickly and reliably, whether what you are looking at is a club or a board.
Test one. Did the board come from one network, or many? A board of builders is composed from multiple networks, by design, so that no single relational map dominates the room. A club draws from one.
Test two. Were the directors chosen because of who they are, or because of what they bring? A board of builders is composed for the competencies the institution needs. A club is composed for the identities the appointing authority needs to accommodate. The first asks, what work is required and who can do it. The second asks, who must be included and what can we give them.
Test three. Can the board genuinely disagree? In a board of builders, disagreement is normal, expected, and survivable. In a club, disagreement is rare, awkward, and treated as a relational injury. Watch a few meetings. The answer will be obvious.
Test four. Is the Chief Executive ever pushed back against, on substance? In a board of builders, the Chief Executive is challenged regularly, and respects the board more for it. In a club, the Chief Executive is rarely pushed back against, and the board mistakes this for cooperation. It is not. It is abdication.
Test five. Could the board lose a member without losing its capacity? A board of builders is resilient because each member is in the room for what they bring, and the composition has been designed for collective coverage. A club is fragile because each member is in the room for who they are, and the loss of any member disrupts the relational architecture.
Score any board against these five tests, honestly. A board that fails three or more of the five is a club, whatever it calls itself. A board that passes four or five is a genuine board, whatever its imperfections.
The work ahead
I want to be direct about what this column is calling for, because the implications are significant and they need to be said.
We need to change how public sector board appointments are made in this country. The political and relational considerations that currently dominate the process cannot continue to dominate. They must be subordinated to competence, independence and range. The appointing authorities, at every level, must be willing to put before the public the criteria against which their nominations have been made, and to defend those criteria.
It removes a significant amount of patronage capacity from the political system. It requires the appointing authorities to develop, and to publish, the competency profiles that each board needs. It requires that nominees be subjected to a genuine assessment against those profiles, rather than a confirmation hearing that confirms what has already been decided.
It is uncomfortable, but it is necessary.
‘Until we build boards of builders rather than boards of friends, our public institutions will continue to perform at the level their composition permits, which is to say, below their potential.’
The board sets the ceiling. The composition of the board sets the board. The composition is something we can change, if we are willing to.
Boards built for governance produce governance. Boards built for ceremony produce ceremony. The choice is one we keep on making.
Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.
