President Tinubu
…a leader’s true test is not only what he does with power. It is what he leaves standing after he has gone: institutions that can survive him, people who can outperform him, systems that do not require his intervention and a political culture that does not confuse loyalty with competence… That is the test of the long game.
In September 2018, when I arrived at Johns Hopkins University–SAIS to study Public Policy, I did not anticipate that President Bola Tinubu would become a case study for one of my classes. But he showed up. The course was Energy, Resource and Environment, and the case study was titled Remaking a Neglected Megacity: A Civic Transformation in Lagos State, 1999–2012.
It was not only Johns Hopkins University students who studied the case. Harvard University students studied it. The Princeton University students studied it. At Cornell, graduate students studied it. Of course, many other institutions in their league studied it. The subject was Lagos, and the man at the centre of the transformation was Tinubu.
I remember reading the case and thinking about Nigeria differently. Not because everything Tinubu did was perfect; it wasn’t. But because there was something unusually revealing about studying a Nigerian politician not as a newspaper character, a campaign slogan or the subject of partisan argument, but as a governance case.
