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.
