I wrote a book some years ago called Hiring Right. It made an argument that some readers found surprising at the time, although I think it has worn well in the years since. The argument was that hiring is not a routine activity to be delegated to whomever happens to be available. Hiring is the most consequential decision a leader makes, the upstream cause of most institutional outcomes, and the place where most institutional failures actually begin, long before they are visible. Get hiring right and most things become possible. Get it wrong and almost nothing can compensate.
I want to extend that argument today, and to apply it where I believe it does the most important work in the entire Nigerian public sector.
The appointment of a board member to a public institution is a hiring decision. It is the single most consequential hiring decision the country makes, repeatedly, on a scale that dwarfs almost any other personnel choice.
In our own case, we treat it as if it were the least serious.
This is the great inversion at the heart of our public sector. We treat the appointment of a desk officer in a federal agency with more procedural rigour than the appointment of a director to its board. We require certificates, references, examinations, panels, and probation for junior staff, and we accept a phone call, a memo, and an acceptance letter for the body that governs the entire institution. The pattern is so settled that we have stopped noticing it. We should notice it.
