By Kachi Okezie, Esq.
There is a quiet revolution happening on the Atlantic coast of Lagos, and it has nothing to do with politics. At the Dangote Refinery, a $20 billion gamble on Nigeria’s future, the most radical thing about the project may not be the 650,000 barrels of crude it will process every day. It may be the way the people at the top were chosen.
Look closely at the composition of the board and you will see a deliberate architecture. Energy hands who have run refineries before. Bankers who have raised capital in London, Dubai and New York. Lawyers who understand international compliance. Manufacturers who know how to move a product from plant to market. Investment professionals who speak the language of global investors. This is not a board assembled to appease a constituency. It is a board assembled to avoid failure.
That distinction matters because it forces us to ask a question we have avoided for too long. If this refinery belonged to the Federal Government, would it have been staffed in the same way? Would we have seen the same ruthless insistence on competence, the same willingness to look beyond tribe, party and connection, the same understanding that when billions of dollars are on the line, appeasement is a luxury no one can afford? The honest answer, drawn from fifty years of experience with public enterprises, is no. And that is precisely why we must learn from what is happening at Dangote.
But to learn from Dangote, we must first remember something else. We have done this before.
There was a time in Nigeria when our public service was deliberately cosmopolitan. In the first two decades after independence, our classrooms were taught by teachers from Britain, Canada and India. Our hospitals were run by doctors and nurses from India, Pakistan, Egypt and the Philippines. Our universities were led by professors from the UK, the US, Ireland and the Caribbean. Even in the civil service, technical officers from Bangladesh, Malaysia and other parts of the Commonwealth held permanent posts in planning, audit and engineering. They were not here on short contracts. Many of them settled, raised families and became part of the Nigerian story.
And the country was better for it. The schools produced students who could compete anywhere in the world because the teachers had been trained in the best traditions of their own countries. The hospitals functioned because the matrons from Manila and the consultants from Lahore brought a culture of discipline that did not bend to “who you know.” The universities became centres of thought because the lecturers from Oxford, Harvard and the West Indies demanded rigour and gave it. Our national culture absorbed all of this: a bit of British precision, Indian industry, American ambition; and it made us more confident, more outward-looking and more capable.
Then we decided, in the name of sovereignty and indigenisation, to close that door. We replaced global recruitment with federal character. We replaced published criteria with political balancing. We told ourselves that every job must first go to “our son” or “our daughter,” even if the job required skills we had not yet built. The expatriate teachers left. The standards slipped. The institutions decayed. And we have been paying for that decision ever since.
The logic behind the Dangote board is the same logic we once used in our public service, and the same logic that has built the most successful institutions in the modern world. It is the logic of merit first and everything else second.
Consider the United Kingdom. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the Treasury in London did not ask which region the next Governor of the Bank of England should come from. It asked who had steered a central bank through a global meltdown without losing a single bank. The answer was Mark Carney, a Canadian. For seven years he ran Threadneedle Street, and no one in Westminster questioned his passport because the institution mattered more than the nationality of the man holding it.
The United Arab Emirates has taken this principle and made it the foundation of a nation. The UAE is small in population and late to industrialisation, so it could not afford the luxury of hiring only Emiratis to build world-class institutions and companies. It decided instead to hire excellence wherever it could be found. Emirates Airline was built and run for more than three decades by Sir Tim Clark, a Briton. Etihad Airways was shaped by James Hogan, an Australian. Dubai Airports, the busiest international hub on earth, has been led by Paul Griffiths, also British. None of these men were chosen to balance a quota. They were chosen because they knew how to run complex, global businesses, and because the rulers of the UAE understood that national pride is measured not by who sits in the chair, but by what the chair produces.
Singapore took it a step further. A city-state with no natural resources decided that its only resource would be human capital. Temasek and GIC are run like private equity firms. Ministers are recruited from McKinsey and from the private sector, and they are paid market salaries to ensure that talent does not drift away. Australia does something similar with its listed companies and state-owned enterprises. Board appointments are made by nomination committees, not by parliaments. Performance is published and failure is punished, with consequences.
What do these countries have in common? They have decided that institutions are more important than individuals, and that performance is more important than patronage. They have also decided that citizens will ultimately judge a government not by how many of “our people” got jobs, but by whether the lights come on, the planes depart on time and the currency holds its value.
Nigeria once understood this. The generation that built our universities and hospitals knew that to grow fast, you borrow brains. We borrowed them, we learned from them, and then we produced our own. But somewhere along the line we confused ownership with monopoly. We decided that to own an institution meant that only “us” could run it, even if “us” was not yet ready.
The Dangote Refinery is therefore more than an industrial project. It is a return to a principle we abandoned. By choosing a board built on expertise rather than appeasement, it is sending a signal to investors, lenders and partners that this company intends to be run like a global firm. That is why banks have lent to it. That is why it will list on the stock market. And that is why it stands a chance of succeeding where four government-owned refineries have failed for twenty years.
The lesson for policymakers and legislators is simple, but uncomfortable. If we want the rest of the Nigerian economy to work like Dangote Refinery, and like the Nigeria of the 1970s, we must change the rules of recruitment in the public sector. We must create an independent Board Appointments Commission that shortlists candidates for chief executive and board positions in all major state-owned enterprises based solely on published criteria. We must pass a law that requires any SOE with assets above a certain threshold to conduct a global search, to publish the CVs of those appointed, and to sign four-year performance contracts with clear targets. We must also reopen our public service to the world, not as a permanent crutch, but as a deliberate strategy to raise standards, train Nigerians and compete.
None of this is anti-Nigerian. On the contrary, it is the most patriotic thing we can do. Hiring the best Nigerian for a job is not an act of exclusion. It is an act of inclusion, because when that Nigerian succeeds, fifty million other Nigerians benefit. Hiring a foreigner when no Nigerian is yet ready is also patriotic, because it brings knowledge home, trains our people and raises the standard for everyone. That is exactly what we did in the 60s and 70s, and it worked.
The thinking class in Nigeria is tired. We are tired of ribbon-cutting ceremonies for projects that never work. We are tired of explaining to our children why other countries that started behind us are now ahead of us. The fatigue comes from knowing that the problem is not a lack of resources. It is a lack of will to choose excellence over expediency.
The Dangote board shows that another way is possible, even in Nigeria. Our own history shows that we have walked this road before and prospered. The examples of the UK, the UAE, Singapore and Australia show that this way has been tested and it works. What remains is for us to decide whether we have the courage to return to it.
A nation that insists on hiring for connection will always get mediocrity, and mediocrity in government is expensive. It costs us in lost investment, in capital flight, in young people leaving and in the slow erosion of hope. A nation that insists on hiring for competence will sometimes offend powerful interests, but it will build institutions that last.
Policymakers must now choose. We can continue to run public enterprises as employment agencies for political networks and continue to get the results we have always got. Or we can adopt the Dangote standard, the UAE standard, the Singapore standard, and the standard of the Nigeria we used to be, and decide that from now on, the only qualification that matters is competence: the ability to deliver.
Nigerians are fed up with retrogression. The antidote is not another slogan. It is a boardroom in Lagos that decided, quietly and without fanfare, that merit would be the first and last word. It is a memory of a time when our schools and hospitals were strong because we welcomed the best teachers and doctors from around the world. If we can replicate that decision across government, we may yet build a country that works.
Okezie is a legal practitioner, chartered mediator and consultant.
