The Political Market Failure: Nigeria’s Permanent Leadership Deficit -By Isaac Asabor

There is something fundamentally wrong with Nigeria’s political marketplace. It is not that Nigerians do not know what they want. It is not that the country lacks educated, talented and capable citizens. It is not even that Nigerians have become indifferent to the consequences of bad governance.

On the contrary, the demand for competent leadership has perhaps never been greater. Nigerians want electricity that works. They want roads that are motorable, hospitals that can treat them without forcing them to travel abroad, schools that prepare their children for the future, security agencies capable of protecting lives and property, an economy that creates opportunities and a government that can account for public resources.

Yet, despite this enormous demand, the supply of competent political leadership remains stubbornly inadequate. That contradiction raises a fundamental question: “If millions of Nigerians desperately want better leadership, why has that demand not produced a corresponding increase in the supply of quality political leaders?”

The answer may be found in an unlikely place: economics. In a normal marketplace, scarcity increases value. When consumers desperately want a product that is in short supply, its high demand encourages producers to enter the market. Competition increases, innovation follows and suppliers are compelled to improve the quality of what they offer.

Nigeria’s political marketplace operates differently. Here, the demand for good governance does not automatically produce good governance. The demand for competent leadership does not necessarily produce competent candidates. And the desperation of citizens for change does not necessarily translate into a political system capable of supplying that change. This is because Nigeria’s political market is distorted.

It is neither open nor genuinely competitive. It is heavily influenced by money, political networks, patronage, ethnicity, religion, incumbency and, in some instances, coercion. The result is a system in which the people may have enormous demand for quality leadership but very limited control over the quality of the political products placed before them. The first distortion is the “prohibitive cost of political entry”.

Politics in Nigeria has become extraordinarily expensive. The cost of securing party nomination, mobilizing supporters, conducting campaigns, sustaining political structures and navigating the

informal financial demands associated with elections can be beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. This has profound consequences.

A brilliant doctor, engineer, entrepreneur, academic, civil servant or community organizer may possess the competence required to govern but lack the financial muscle required to enter the political marketplace. Meanwhile, an individual with enormous financial resources but questionable competence can find the political door considerably easier to open. That is a dangerous inversion of merit.

The question should not be how much money a prospective leader can spend. It should be what the individual has achieved, what he or she understands about governance and whether the person possesses the character, competence and capacity required to manage public resources.

Unfortunately, the Nigerian political system often makes money a prerequisite for visibility. This creates a vicious cycle. Because political participation is expensive, wealthy individuals dominate the political space. Because wealthy individuals dominate the space, political competition increasingly revolves around financial capacity. And because financial capacity becomes central to winning elections, those who finance political campaigns often expect political returns.

That brings us to the second distortion: “politics has become an investment market for some participants.” Campaign financing is rarely treated purely as philanthropy. Political financiers frequently expect access, influence, contracts, appointments or other forms of patronage once their preferred candidates secure power.

Consequently, the political system can begin to function like a commercial enterprise in which the citizen is paradoxically not the most important customer. The financiers become the shareholders. The politicians become the managers. And the citizens become the consumers who are expected to pay for the consequences. This explains one of the most frustrating features of Nigerian governance: the apparent disconnect between campaign promises and governing priorities.

During elections, politicians speak passionately about the suffering of ordinary Nigerians. They promise jobs, infrastructure, security, affordable healthcare, quality education and economic prosperity. But once power is secured, the pressure to satisfy those who financed the political enterprise can compete with, or sometimes overwhelm, the obligation to satisfy the electorate.

Given the political market situation, so to say, public resources can then become instruments for recovering private political investments. Contracts become rewards. Appointments become settlements. Government agencies become patronage platforms. And public office becomes an opportunity for political accumulation rather than public service. This is precisely where Nigeria’s political market differs from a healthy economic market.

In a properly functioning market, a company that consistently produces inferior products eventually loses customers. Competition forces it to improve or disappear. Political markets should work similarly.

A government that fails spectacularly should be rejected at the ballot box. A politician who makes promises and delivers nothing should lose political relevance. A party that repeatedly produces incompetent leaders should face electoral punishment. But Nigeria’s electoral system has often failed to provide that kind of effective feedback mechanism.

This is the third major distortion: “the electorate’s ability to punish failure is weakened by factors unrelated to performance.” Identity politics is one of them. A candidate may be evaluated not primarily on what he or she can accomplish but on ethnicity, religion, geographical origin or political affiliation. Once identity becomes the dominant criterion, performance becomes secondary. A citizen may acknowledge that a politician has performed poorly but still support that politician because of a perceived ethnic, religious or regional connection. This is disastrous for accountability.

It tells politicians that they do not necessarily need to perform exceptionally to remain politically relevant. They simply need to maintain the loyalty of their political constituency. The result is a system in which poor performance can survive.

A politician who should ordinarily be retired by public dissatisfaction can be resurrected through identity politics, political alliances, financial mobilization or the manipulation of public sentiment. This is why Nigeria’s political system can repeatedly recycle failure.

Another distortion is electoral malpractice. Where votes can be compromised, voters intimidated or electoral processes manipulated, the connection between citizens’ preferences and political outcomes becomes weakened. And once that connection is weakened, the politician has less incentive to respond to citizens.

The logic is straightforward. If a politician knows that victory depends primarily on citizens’ evaluation of performance, the politician has a powerful incentive to perform. But if victory can be secured through money, manipulation, intimidation, patronage or other mechanisms, performance becomes less important. That is a recipe for institutional decay.

Nigeria therefore faces a problem deeper than the failure of individual politicians. The country faces a “political supply-chain problem”.

The system is not adequately selecting, financing, promoting and rewarding the people most capable of governing.

This is important because blaming Nigerians alone for bad leadership is an oversimplification.

Citizens certainly have responsibilities. Voters must demand accountability. They must reject the politics of stomach infrastructure when it becomes a substitute for long-term development. They must scrutinize candidates; question manifestoes and resist manipulation.

But citizens cannot be expected to manufacture quality political choices from a system that systematically restricts their options.

Imagine walking into a supermarket demanding healthy food only to discover that the shelves contain mostly unhealthy products. It would be absurd to blame the consumer entirely for choosing badly when the marketplace itself has been distorted.

Nigeria’s political system has effectively done something similar. It has restricted access to political participation, made campaigns excessively expensive, weakened internal party democracy, encouraged patronage and allowed identity politics to compete with competence.

Then it turns around and blames citizens for electing poor leaders. That is intellectually dishonest. Nigeria does not lack capable people.

Indeed, Nigerians are demonstrating competence every day, in business, medicine, science, technology, academia, entertainment, engineering and countless other fields. Nigerians succeed in highly competitive environments around the world.

The problem is not a shortage of talent. The problem is that our political system does not consistently convert talent into political leadership.

A country can have millions of competent citizens and still suffer a leadership deficit if its political recruitment mechanism rewards the wrong attributes. This is why the solution must go beyond searching endlessly for a “Messiah”. Nigeria does not need one perfect individual to rescue it. It needs a political system capable of consistently producing, attracting and rewarding people of character, competence and capacity. That requires reform.

Political parties must become genuine institutions of democratic recruitment rather than vehicles for the ambitions of individuals and political godfathers. The cost of political participation must be reduced substantially. Nomination processes should not become auctions in which financial strength determines political viability.

Campaign finance rules must be enforced transparently. There must be meaningful disclosure of who finances candidates and how much is spent. Electoral institutions must be sufficiently independent and technologically and administratively equipped to protect the integrity of votes.

Again, political parties must also develop transparent internal processes for selecting candidates. Nigerians should not be forced to wait until general elections before discovering that their preferred candidate has already been eliminated by a party structure controlled by a handful of powerful individuals.

Most importantly, Nigerians themselves must change the way they evaluate political leadership. The most important question should not be: “Where is he from?” It should not be: “What religion does she practise?” It should not be: “Which political party does he belong to?” It should not even be: “How much money can this candidate give us today?”

The more important questions are: “What has this person achieved? What does this person understand? What is this person’s record? Can this person manage people and institutions? Does this person possess integrity? What is the person’s capacity to deliver?” That is how a political marketplace begins to correct itself. The Nigerian electorate must become a demanding customer. And political leaders must understand that public office is not an investment vehicle. It is a trust.

Until that happens, Nigeria will continue to experience the strange paradox of a country with an enormous demand for good governance but an inadequate supply of leaders capable of providing it.

The tragedy is that this leadership deficit is not permanent because Nigerians lack capable people. It becomes permanent because the system keeps filtering out, discouraging or marginalizing many of the people who could provide better leadership while rewarding attributes that have little relationship with effective governance.

The political market, therefore, needs regulation, competition and accountability just as much as the economic market does. A healthy democracy should make competence competitive, integrity valuable and performance profitable at the ballot box. It should make failure expensive. It should make corruption politically dangerous. It should make incompetence difficult to defend.

And it should make public service attractive to people who genuinely want to serve rather than merely people who can afford to compete.

Nigeria’s greatest political challenge may therefore not be the absence of leaders. It is the failure of the political marketplace to identify, select and reward the right ones.

Until that market is fixed, Nigerians may continue demanding good leadership while being repeatedly presented with inadequate choices. And that is perhaps the most dangerous form of scarcity of all: “not the scarcity of capable people, but the scarcity of a system capable of giving capable people a fair chance to lead.”