Beneath the Surface By Dakuku Peterside
Anniversaries invite celebration, but consequential ones must also provoke introspection. As the Nigerian Institute of Management marks 65 years, the occasion should rise above ceremonial speeches, awards, commemorative photographs, and congratulatory messages. It should compel Nigeria to confront a troubling contradiction: after more than six decades of management education, professional certification, and leadership conferences, why does the country remain so poorly managed?
The question extends beyond NIM. It goes to the heart of Nigeria’s development crisis. We speak endlessly about oil, minerals, population, infrastructure, investment, technology, and public policy, as though these assets automatically produce prosperity. They do not. Resources create value only when competent people and effective institutions convert them into results.
Countries do not develop merely because they possess natural wealth or produce ambitious plans. They develop because they can organise people, allocate resources intelligently, execute decisions, measure performance, and correct failure. Nations rise or decline, in considerable measure, on the quality of their management.
That is why NIM’s anniversary matters. For 65 years, the Institute has trained and certified generations of managers. Yet the evidence of national transformation attributable to this managerial ecosystem remains painfully inadequate. Public institutions are routinely inefficient. Infrastructure deteriorates soon after commissioning. Projects exceed budgets and deadlines. Businesses struggle with productivity. Policies celebrated at launch disappear during implementation. Too many organisations still depend on their leaders’ personality and connections rather than durable systems.
The uncomfortable truth is that Nigeria’s governance crisis is, to a significant extent, a management crisis.
This is not to hold NIM responsible for the country’s failures. Such a conclusion would be simplistic and unfair. Political leadership, corruption, insecurity, weak institutions, poor policy choices, structural economic constraints, and limited accountability all contribute to Nigeria’s condition. But managerial capacity is not incidental. A brilliant policy badly executed can be almost as damaging as a bad policy. A well-funded project poorly managed becomes a monument to waste. A sound institution placed under incompetent leadership can quickly become dysfunctional.
Nigeria has spent too much time debating what government should do and too little time asking whether those charged with doing it possess the competence, discipline, and integrity to deliver.
Our governance culture illustrates the problem. We have become preoccupied with approvals, budget releases, expenditure, procedures, and compliance while neglecting outcomes. Officials are applauded for exhausting allocations rather than solving problems. Agencies celebrate the commissioning of projects without accounting for their functionality years later. Managers are rewarded for producing reports, attending meetings, and launching initiatives even when institutional performance remains unchanged.
This is not management. It is administrative ritual.
Management must ultimately be judged by what it changes. A government that spends billions without delivering dependable public services has not demonstrated managerial success. A company that expands its bureaucracy without improving productivity is not practising managerial excellence. An institution that becomes paralysed whenever its chief executive leaves was never truly institutionalised.
The first major challenge for NIM, and for management education generally, is the persistent gap between what is taught and the environment in which Nigerian managers operate.
Much of management education relies on theories, frameworks and case studies developed elsewhere. Learning from successful organisations and economies is valuable. But foreign models cannot simply be transplanted into an environment shaped by weak institutions, political interference, informal power networks, infrastructure deficits, unreliable data, corruption risks, inequality, and regulatory uncertainty.
The Nigerian manager does not operate in the controlled environment of a textbook. He or she must often make decisions where rules are ambiguous, institutions are fragile, resources are scarce and competing interests are powerful. The challenge is not merely to formulate strategy but to execute it in an environment where implementation is itself a battlefield.
Nigeria therefore needs a different kind of management education: one that teaches professionals to build systems where institutions are weak, manage uncertainty without abandoning standards, navigate competing interests without sacrificing principles, resist patronage, deploy scarce resources efficiently and produce measurable results under pressure.
Nigeria does not merely need people who understand management. It needs people who can manage Nigeria.
A second challenge is elevating certification above competence. Across the professional landscape, people too easily confuse attendance with learning and credentials with capability. People attend seminars, collect certificates, take photographs, update their profiles, and return to workplaces where nothing changes.
A certificate cannot reduce waste, improve patient outcomes, make a port more efficient, raise factory productivity, or make a government agency more responsive. It proves that someone completed a programme; it does not prove that the person can transform an institution.
The real examination should begin after the classroom. Did the manager reduce costs without weakening service? Improve productivity? Strengthen internal controls? Motivate staff? Complete projects on schedule? Raise citizen or customer satisfaction? Develop successors? Build systems that survived his or her departure?
If professional education cannot be connected to such outcomes, something fundamental is missing.
More troubling is the moral deficit in management. Training programmes often celebrate strategy, innovation, efficiency, and negotiation while treating ethics as a supplementary subject. Yet Nigeria’s management problem is not only technical; it is profoundly ethical.
A manager who manipulates procurement, falsifies performance, protects incompetence, rewards loyalty over merit or converts institutional resources into private privileges may possess impressive technical knowledge. But such a person is not an effective manager. He is an institutional liability.
Nigeria has never lacked intelligent people. It lacks enough institutions and leadership cultures that consistently reward competence, integrity, and results. Management must therefore be taught and practised as stewardship. Authority is a trust. Public resources are not private assets. Corporate resources are not executive entitlements. Leadership is not an opportunity to accumulate influence; it is an obligation to create value and leave an institution stronger than one found it.
This principle should define NIM’s next era.
The Institute must also confront the distance between training individuals and transforming organisations. Too often, training providers know little about what happens after participants return to work. Post-training mentoring is limited, institutional follow-up is weak and outcomes are rarely measured.
A manager may return from an excellent programme determined to introduce reforms, only to encounter a workplace that punishes initiative, rewards conformity and allows vested interests to frustrate change. In too many institutions, professionals quickly discover that proximity to power is valued more highly than competence.
NIM must therefore enlarge its ambition. It should not merely train individuals; it should help institutions solve problems. It should work with boards, businesses, ministries, departments, agencies, and state governments to identify specific management failures and design interventions around them. Participants should be required to apply what they learn, with progress assessed against agreed institutional outcomes.
That would mark the transition from management education to management impact.
It would also require NIM to challenge Nigeria’s culture of appointing people to critical positions for reasons unrelated to competence. Political loyalty, ethnicity, seniority, patronage, and personal relationships too often determine who leads important institutions. Each such appointment sends a destructive message: competence is optional and performance negotiable.
The consequences are visible in abandoned projects, weak planning, bloated bureaucracies, financial waste, and organisations that deteriorate once a powerful individual departs. No serious country can build sustainable institutions on such a foundation.
The answer is not to dismiss professional management bodies but to reinvent them as laboratories for national renewal. NIM’s curriculum should engage more deeply with Nigeria’s most urgent challenges: public fiscal management, project execution, institutional reform, crisis leadership, digital transformation, productivity, succession planning, conflict resolution, risk management, and anti-corruption systems.
Its case studies should increasingly be Nigerian. Our ports, hospitals, schools, banks, factories, energy companies, local governments, and public agencies provide abundant material. Nigeria’s failures should become classrooms rather than embarrassments to be concealed. Why do projects on which billions have been spent collapse? Why do public institutions struggle to retain talent? Why do apparently sound reforms fail during implementation? Why do organisations weaken after successful leaders leave?
A nation begins to learn when it studies its failures honestly.
Ultimately, management education’s success must be measured by impact, not activity. Certificates issued, conferences held, and participants trained are activities. Stronger institutions, reduced waste, better public services, higher productivity, sustainable jobs, and ethical systems that outlive individual leaders are impact.
At 65, NIM has earned the right to celebrate its endurance. But longevity is not the same as relevance. The defining question is not whether the Institute has survived for 65 years; it is whether its next 65 years will help produce a demonstrably better-managed Nigeria.
Nigeria does not need more people who speak elegantly about leadership. It needs managers who turn plans into execution, resources into value, organisations into institutions and authority into stewardship. The ultimate measure of leadership is not the awards displayed, conferences attended or speeches delivered in one’s honour. It is what continues to work after one has left.
Nigeria’s greatest deficit may not be resources or ideas. It may be the managerial capacity—and moral courage—to transform what we have into what we need.
If NIM can help close that gap, its next 65 years will become a contribution to nation-building worth remembering. If it cannot, Nigeria may continue producing an impressive army of certified managers while remaining, paradoxically, a fundamentally under-managed country.
That would be the most damning anniversary verdict of all.
•Dr Dakuku Peterside, Fellow of NIM, is the keynote speaker for NIM@ 65 annual conference.