The Madness of a Mantra: Nigeria Has Spent Nearly 50 Years Blaming Leadership While Ethnicity Manufactures the Leaders It Gets

Lagos — 15 September 2026

There is a sentence Nigerians recite with the confidence of people who believe they have diagnosed their country. It is usually attributed to Albert Einstein, though the attribution is less important than the use to which it is put: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is madness.

It is one of the few imported maxims that has found a permanent home in Nigerian public speech. It is invoked against failed governments, recycled parties, repeated elections and the same promises dressed in new slogans. What is rarely noticed is the irony. For nearly half a century, the same country that recites that warning has repeated another sentence as if it were holy writ: that the primary problem of Nigeria is leadership.

That second sentence has become a national habit. It is older than most of the people who now repeat it. In 1983, Chinua Achebe opened The Trouble with Nigeria with the line that still organises public argument: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” There is, he insisted, nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character, land, climate, water or air. The problem was the unwillingness or inability of leaders to rise to responsibility and personal example.

The diagnosis was sharp, memorable and incomplete. It also became a lullaby. Once the trouble was named as leadership, the public task seemed obvious: wait for a better man. Wait for a clean messiah. Wait for the one figure who would arrive from somewhere above the dirt of politics and redeem the rest. That wait has now lasted through military regimes, the return to civilian rule, successive republics, zoning bargains, party realignments and a long procession of men who were each, at the moment of their arrival, described as different.

Fifty years is a long time to keep repeating a diagnosis and expecting a different country.

The messiah the system will not produce

The leadership thesis treats the Nigerian state as a factory that occasionally ships a defective product. Change the manager, the argument goes, and the factory will work. The more stubborn fact is that the factory is designed to produce a particular kind of manager.

Nigeria’s political market does not primarily reward national competence. It rewards the ability to assemble an ethnic and regional coalition, to speak as the champion of a bloc, and to convert that bloc into votes, appointments, contracts and protection. In such a market, the candidate who presents himself as a national reformer is often weaker than the candidate who can say, credibly, “it is our turn.” Zoning, federal character, rotational claims and the everyday arithmetic of “who gets what” are not side issues. They are the operating system.

That system does not sit idle while Nigerians hunt for a saviour. It keeps generating ethnic champions and then dressing them as leaders. The champion’s first constituency is not the republic. It is the group that believes it will be safer, richer or more respected if one of its own occupies the centre. Once in office, the same logic continues: appointments are read as ethnic victories or ethnic insults; budgets are read as gifts to “our people” or punishment of “their people”; criticism from outside the group is treated as hostility to the group itself.

This is why the search for a “clean messiah” keeps failing. A messiah, in the popular Nigerian sense, would have to stand above the blocs, punish his own as readily as he punishes others, and treat the state as a common trust rather than a captured inheritance. The political machinery that produces presidents, governors, ministers and party leaders is not built to select that person. It is built to select the most effective broker of ethnic claim.

Achebe was not wrong that many Nigerian office-holders have failed the test of personal example. He was wrong, or at least incomplete, in treating that failure as the root rather than the harvest. Poor leaders are not an accident that ethnicity merely accompanies. They are one of the products ethnicity is organised to manufacture.

How ethnicity became the hidden constitution

Ethnicity in Nigeria is not a private sentiment. It is a public technology.

From the First Republic through the civil war and into the long years of military rule and the Fourth Republic, political competition has repeatedly been organised around the fear that one nationality will capture the centre and lock the others out. The 1966 coups, the pogroms that followed, the Biafran war, the multiplication of states, the federal character principle of 1979, and the later conventions of zoning were all attempts to manage that fear. Some of those attempts were understandable. A country of hundreds of languages and several large nationalities cannot pretend that identity is irrelevant.

But management hardened into doctrine. Federal character, conceived as a guard against domination, became in practice a routine licence to place origin above competence. Quota logic and kinship networks shape recruitment, promotion and the staffing of agencies, often at the expense of merit and institutional performance. What was meant to produce loyalty to Nigeria has frequently produced loyalty to the bloc that got the slot.

Elections complete the circuit. Citizens who complain bitterly about electricity, security, hospitals and the naira still, in large numbers, vote by tribe, religion and region. The politician understands this better than the editorial writer. He does not need a record of national delivery if he can keep the emotional lease on his base. Failure can be forgiven if it is “our failure.” Success elsewhere can be dismissed if it is “their success.” Accountability dies at the boundary of kinship.

This is the mechanism that turns every new administration into another chapter of the same book. The faces change. The regions rotate. The complaint remains: leadership. Meanwhile the selection process that produced the last disappointment is left untouched, because it is the process through which groups believe they survive.

The wrong object of anger

The leadership mantra has one political convenience. It keeps the argument personal. It allows the public to rage at a president, a governor, a minister, a “cabal,” and then to transfer the same hope to the next person from the next zone. It is emotionally satisfying. It also protects the deeper arrangement.

If the problem is only the man in the chair, then the chair itself needs no examination. The ethnic veto over who may sit there, the ethnic reading of every appointment, the ethnic defence of mediocrity, the ethnic panic that greets any serious attempt to build a national standard — all of that can remain in the shadows. The country can continue to wait for a saint from a machine that does not mint saints.

There is a harder sentence waiting underneath Achebe’s famous one. The trouble with Nigeria is not first the poor leaders generated by entrenched ethnicity. It is entrenched ethnicity that generates poor leaders and then sells them as the only available form of leadership.

That does not mean every Nigerian politician is a tribalist and nothing else. It does not mean competence never appears. It does not mean colonial history, oil rents, weak institutions and corruption are imaginary. It means those other failures are recruited, organised and made durable by a political culture in which the highest currency is still group capture of the state.

A leader produced by that culture may speak the language of one Nigeria. His survival will still depend on whether his people believe the spoils are flowing home. The public, watching another disappointment, will say again that the problem is leadership. Then it will look for the next champion.

What reflection would actually require

If the Einstein line is to mean anything in Nigeria, it cannot be aimed only at politicians. It has to be aimed at the national habit of asking the same question.

Reflection would mean admitting that a system organised around ethnic championship cannot reliably produce national trustees. It would mean judging parties and candidates first by the standards they apply to their own, not by the poetry of their campaign. It would mean treating zoning as a political bargain with costs, not as a moral law. It would mean rebuilding public institutions so that the first question in an appointment is fitness for the job, not the map of origin. It would mean citizens accepting that a competent outsider is less dangerous than a beloved incompetent.

None of that is easy in a country where memory of exclusion is real and trust is thin. Ethnicity persists because people have reasons to fear being left outside the room. The answer to that fear cannot be another sermon about good leaders. It has to be a state that is predictable enough that people do not need a kinsman in power in order to feel safe.

Until that shift occurs, Nigeria will continue to do what it now does with remarkable consistency: condemn the product, protect the factory, and call the repetition wisdom. The messiah will be announced again. The champion will arrive again. The result will be familiar again.

After nearly fifty years of that cycle, the madness is not that Nigerians know the proverb. It is that they apply it to everything except the diagnosis they refuse to retire.

By John James