In the last column I argued that most public sector boards in Nigeria are clubs rather than boards, and I named the composition failure that produces this. Today I want to take the argument one layer further, into the behavioural consequence that follows from a club like composition. It is one of the most common pathologies of our public sector boardrooms, and it operates so quietly that we have come to mistake it for cooperation, or for harmony, or for the good order of a well-run institution.
I am referring to rubber stamping. The behaviour, repeated meeting after meeting, year after year, term after term, in which a board approves what management puts in front of it without genuine examination, without serious challenge, and without the kind of friction that good decisions actually require.
In private, this behaviour is sometimes spoken of with a sigh and a shrug, as if it were unavoidable. In public, it is rarely named at all. I want to name it today, because once we see it clearly, we will recognise it as the silent destroyer of institutional performance that it is. And we will see, I hope, that it is fixable.
What Rubber Stamping Actually Looks Like
Let me describe rubber stamping not as a concept but as a sequence of behaviours, so the reader can recognise it.
