Accidental Leadership Syndrome: The Nigerian Experience

By Ogiri John Ogiri

I stand before you today with a huge sense of responsible humility to speak on an experience that has almost become a norm as far as leadership is concerned in our country. That norm is what I have chosen to title "Accidental Leadership Syndrome," a syndrome that has characterized our leadership experiment and experience in Nigeria.

With your permission, I would like to take you down memory lane. As many of us are aware — whether such awareness was obtained through armchair participation by reading history books in schools and colleges, or through active involvement in the past historical experiences of our own kind of leadership experiment — it is common knowledge that the nation called Nigeria today was brought into existence on January 1st, 1914, via an audacious and ambitious amalgamation of the Northern Protectorate and the Southern Protectorate by the colonial administration of Lord Frederick Lugard.

After about 46 years of colonial rule in Nigeria, the colonial government decided to relinquish administration of Nigeria to Nigerians. That handover happened after much physical, diplomatic and intellectual pressure by our nationalists and their various non-violent revolutionary movements. Interestingly, by October 1st, 1960, Nigeria became independent.

A significant point to note is that, prior to the Independence day, questions arose as to whom the mantle of leadership should fall on in order to lead the newly independent country and drive it to the desired destination. It was then that the issue of power-sharing was factored in, and so Nigeria decided to adopt the parliamentary system of government modelled after the British style of government in London.

Consequently, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa from the Northern region was appointed Prime Minister, while Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was made President. While the Prime Minister possessed and wielded the true executive powers of government, the President possessed the ceremonial powers. By 1963, Nigeria became a Republic.

From the background set in the foregoing, we can see that our first set of leaders inherited a country rather than built one. There was no clear roadmap for driving national economic revolution, no deliberate framework for grooming successors, and no shared national ideology to hold the new federation together. But then, they were, at the very least, the only ones who seemed to have prepared for leadership — men who had sat in colonial legislative councils, negotiated at constitutional conferences in London, and organised political parties before the flag was ever lowered. That, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, is the last moment in our history where preparation, however imperfect, preceded power. Everything that came after tells a different story — the story of a nation that has been governed, again and again, by men who did not set out to lead it, but who found themselves at the helm by accident of circumstance.

Defining the Syndrome

Permit me, at this point, to define what I mean by "Accidental Leadership Syndrome." It is that recurring condition in our national life whereby individuals ascend to the highest offices of the land not primarily through a deliberate, merit-based process of preparation, vetting, and popular mandate for a clearly articulated vision — but through the accident of coups, the accident of sudden death, the accident of zoning and ethnic balancing arithmetic, or the accident of being the least objectionable compromise candidate to competing power blocs. It is leadership by default rather than leadership by design. And a nation that is perpetually led by default will, understandably, struggle to develop by design.

The Military Interregnum: Coups D’État as the Driver of Accidental Leadership

Barely six years into our independence, on January 15, 1966, a group of young soldiers, all majors by ranks, struck, interrupting very violently the first Nigeria's democratic experiment. In the aftermath, General Johnson Thomas Umunna Aguiyi-Ironsi, then the most senior officer in the Nigerian Army, found himself Head of State — not because he plotted the coup, not because he campaigned for the office, but because the coup plotters failed to consolidate power and the mantle fell, almost by default, on the highest-ranking soldier left standing. Six months later, a very bloody counter-coup swept him away, and in his place emerged Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon — a young officer who, by his own admission, was not even the most senior officer available at the time ( for Brigadier General Ogundipe was the most senior officer at the time), but was accepted as a compromise candidate acceptable to the Northern officers who staged the counter-coup. Gowon did not seek the office through any contest of ideas or programmes; he inherited a fractured army and a fragmenting country almost overnight, and was thrust into steering Nigeria through a civil war he had not chosen to fight.

The pattern repeats itself with remarkable consistency as General Murtala Ramat Muhammed came to power in 1975 through yet another coup, promising a swift return to civil rule — only to be assassinated by Col. Bukar Sukar Dimkar, in an abortive coup attempt in February 1976. His deputy, Lieutenant General Olusegun Obasanjo, thereby became Head of State not because the nation chose him, but because he happened to be next in the chain of command when tragedy struck. This is, perhaps, the most textbook illustration of accidental leadership in our entire history: a man elevated to the highest office in the land by the bullet that killed his principal, rather than by any process that tested his own fitness for that specific office.

By 1979, the processes of return to civil rule had been set in motion by General Obasanjo. Eventually, Alhaji Shehu Shagari was elected President of Nigeria beginning a new democratic dispensation. However, by December 1983, his government was truncated by Major General Muhammadu Buhari's coup of December 1983. This consequently truncated the Second Republic. Almost in quick succession, General Ibrahim Babangida's palace coup of August 1985 truncated Buhari's regime in turn. After almost 8 years in office , a new election was conducted. The election was allegedly won Chief MKO Abiola. However, the election was annulled by the Babangida regime. Following the annulment of the June 12 election — itself one of the gravest wounds this nation has ever inflicted on itself — he did not hand over to the man Nigerians had actually voted for, Chief MKO Abiola, Babangida was forced to"stepped aside" in 1993. Since he did not handover power to the acclaimed winner, Chief MKO Abiola, he installed an Interim National Government headed by Chief Ernest Shonekan, a respected businessman who had never contested an election in his life and who lasted a mere 82 days before General Sani Abacha eased him out. And when Abacha himself died suddenly in June 1998, it was General Abdulsalami Abubakar — again, simply the most senior officer available at that moment — who found himself, almost overnight, tasked with midwifing Nigeria's transition back to civilian rule.

Does Accidental Leadership End With Military Rule?

It would be convenient, but dishonest, to suggest that this syndrome was purely a military affliction that vanished with the return to democracy in 1999. The truth, distinguished compatriots, is that it simply changed its clothes.

Chief Olusegun Obasanjo's return to power in 1999 — this time as a civilian President — was itself substantially a product of political arithmetic rather than a groundswell of preparation or popular ideological consensus. In the aftermath of the annulled June 12 election and the death in detention of its presumed winner, the political establishment settled on Obasanjo, a Yoruba man, largely as a conciliatory gesture to appease the South-West and atone for the injustice of 1993. It was less a coronation of a prepared statesman than the pragmatic product of a zoning calculation.

President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua ascended to office in 2007 substantially on the strength of a "zoning" arrangement within the ruling party that decreed the presidency should rotate to the North. Tragically, he died in office in May 2010, and his Vice President, Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan — a man whose own political rise had already been remarkably fortuitous, moving from Deputy Governor to Governor of Bayelsa State after his principal was impeached, and then to the Vice Presidency as a zoning "balance" pick — suddenly found himself President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Dr Jonathan himself would later famously describe his own trajectory in almost providential terms, noting how each step of his political journey came to him unexpectedly rather than through calculated ambition. Whatever one makes of that admission, it is perhaps the most candid confession any Nigerian leader has ever offered of the very syndrome we are examining today.

Even where a leader emerges through the ballot box, as with President Muhammadu Buhari's election in 2015 or President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's in 2023, the underlying architecture of our politics — heavily driven by zoning formulas, godfatherism, ethnic and religious balancing, and the internal horse-trading of political godfathers rather than by transparent, ideology-driven party primaries and rigorous public vetting of competing visions — means that the syndrome persists in a subtler, more civilian-friendly form. The uniform has changed; the underlying logic of accession by circumstance rather than by preparation has not.

The Consequences of a Nation Led by Accident

Fellow Nigerians, this is not merely an academic or historical curiosity. It is, I submit, one of the central explanations for the gap between Nigeria's staggering potential and its persistent underdevelopment. When leadership is acquired by accident rather than earned through rigorous preparation, several consequences inevitably follow:

1. Discontinuity of policy. 

Each accidental leader typically arrives without a fully formed programme of his own, and often spends his early months — sometimes years — improvising, or worse, simply reversing the policies of his predecessor rather than building upon them. National development, however, is a relay race; it requires successive leaders to carry the baton forward. Ours has too often resembled a series of false starts.

2. Weak institutions and strong personalities. 

Because accidental leaders frequently owe their position to a narrow circle of godfathers, kingmakers, or fellow officers rather than to a broad, programmatic mandate from the people, they tend to govern by patronage and personal loyalty rather than by strengthening independent institutions. It is far easier to reward the men who made you President than to build the institutions that might one day hold you accountable.

3. The poverty of succession planning. 

A syndrome in which leaders emerge from sudden vacancies — a coup, an assassination, a death in office — is, by definition, a syndrome in which succession planning is chronically neglected. Political parties invest little in cultivating a deep bench of thoroughly prepared future leaders, because the system has repeatedly demonstrated that one does not necessarily need such preparation to reach the very pinnacle of power.

4. A crisis of national vision. 

Leadership that arrives by accident rarely arrives with a mandate for a specific, tested vision of where the nation should go. It arrives, instead, with the more modest task of simply managing the circumstances that produced it — managing a fractured military, managing a zoning arrangement, managing an aggrieved region. Managing a crisis is not the same thing as building a nation, and Nigeria has had far more of the former than the latter.

The Way Forward

It would be an incomplete exercise for me to offer a litany of this syndrome without daring to suggest a cure, however modest my prescription might be against the scale of the ailment. First of all, we must, strengthen internal party democracy, so that leaders emerge from rigorous, transparent contests of ideas and programmes rather than from backroom consensus among a handful of godfathers. Secondly, we must, insist on ideology-based rather than purely patronage-based politics, so that citizens can vote for a vision and hold its bearer accountable to it, rather than simply endorsing whoever the zoning arithmetic has anointed. Thirdly, we must invest deliberately in leadership recruitment and grooming — in local government, in the National Assembly, in the civil service, in our universities and youth movements — so that by the time an individual approaches the highest office, that office is the product of a long, visible process of preparation rather than a sudden accident of fate. The African Leadership Academy in Southern Africa is a great initiative. We can have the Nigerian Leadership Academy here in our country. Fourthly we must, strengthen our institutions — an independent judiciary, a professional and a civil service free political interference, a truly independent electoral body — so that the character of the nation is not so completely at the mercy of the character of whichever individual accident places at its head. 

Finally, it is important that we invest in civic education, so that the Nigerian electorate itself increasingly demands preparedness and demonstrated capacity from those who seek to lead, rather than settling passively for whoever emerges from the corridors of power.

Conclusion

Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, I do not stand before you today to dismiss any individual who has led this country, or to suggest that accidental leadership always produces failure — history reminds us that some men, thrust suddenly into office by circumstance, have nonetheless risen admirably to the occasion. But I stand before you to insist that a nation cannot continue, indefinitely, to entrust its destiny to accident and expect the deliberate, sustained, patient work of nation-building to somehow take care of itself.

Nigeria at over sixty years of age can no longer afford the luxury of accidental leadership. We have been fortunate, on occasion, that accident produced competence. Yet, we cannot continue to gamble our collective future on such fortune. The task before us — before every political party, every civic institution, every young Nigerian nursing ambitions of public service, and indeed every voter who will one day mark a ballot — is to begin, deliberately and urgently, the work of replacing the accident of leadership with the architecture of leadership: a system in which those who rule us have been prepared, tested, and chosen for that very purpose, long before the accident of circumstance ever has the chance to choose for us.

Thank you, and God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

© Ogiri John Ogiri 

( Economist, Educator, Public Policy Commentator, Tourism Manager)