The State That Cannot Say No

How political power defeats institutional reform in Nigeria

Nigeria has no shortage of laws, agencies or reform programmes. Its deeper problem is that political power can still determine when institutions become consequential. Until institutions can constrain power, even when doing so is politically inconvenient, reform will remain stronger on paper than in practice.

John Onyeukwu | The StateCraft Report (TSR) | Syndicated |

Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of reforms. It suffers from a shortage of institutions capable of saying no to power. The country has laws, regulators, courts, auditors, anti-corruption agencies, procurement rules, legislative committees and constitutional checks. Governments routinely announce reform programmes and establish new mechanisms for transparency and accountability. Yet familiar weaknesses repeatedly return: rules are selectively enforced, oversight is often negotiated, public institutions remain vulnerable to political influence, and accountability becomes most uncertain when powerful interests are involved.
To describe this simply as institutional weakness is to miss the deeper problem. Nigerian institutions operate within a political economy in which powerful actors often have incentives to preserve discretion, dependence and selective enforcement. An institution may therefore possess substantial authority on paper while lacking the political capacity to exercise it when doing so becomes inconvenient to those who control power.
Institutional strength cannot ultimately be measured by the number of laws establishing an agency, the breadth of its mandate or the size of its budget. The harder test is what happens when an institution’s lawful exercise of authority collides with the interests of a politically powerful actor. Can a regulator enforce its rules when the regulated entity has political connections? Can an auditor publish an adverse finding when powerful interests are implicated? Can an anti-corruption agency pursue a politically sensitive investigation without fearing retaliation? Can a legislature meaningfully scrutinise executive expenditure? Can an electoral institution enforce its rules when the consequences affect the incumbent?
These are the circumstances in which the actual strength of the state becomes visible. A state whose institutions can regulate ordinary citizens but cannot reliably constrain political power is not institutionally strong, however impressive its formal architecture may appear.
Nigeria’s rule-of-law record illustrates the difference between institutional architecture and institutional effectiveness. The World Justice Project’s 2025 Rule of Law Index ranked Nigeria 120th out of 143 countries and 23rd out of 34 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria’s overall score improved by less than one percent. More revealing is the composition of its score. In the 2024 Index, Nigeria recorded 0.49 for Constraints on Government Powers, compared with 0.32 for Absence of Corruption and 0.42 for Open Government.
These figures do not describe a state without constitutional or institutional checks. They describe a state in which formal checks do not consistently translate into effective accountability. The WJP’s measure of constraints on government power considers whether legislatures, courts, audit institutions, media and civil society can actually scrutinise and limit government action. The Nigerian challenge therefore lies in the distance between the formal allocation of authority and the practical capacity to exercise it when political stakes are high.
The corruption data reinforces the concern. Nigeria scored 26 out of 100 and ranked 142nd among 182 countries in the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, unchanged from the previous year. Ghana scored 43, South Africa 41 and Senegal 46. The CPI cannot establish that any particular institution has been captured. It does, however, demonstrate that Nigeria’s public-sector institutional environment continues to generate very weak confidence in integrity. The reform question must therefore extend beyond individual misconduct to the institutional incentives that determine whether misconduct is detected, challenged and punished.
Every meaningful institutional reform redistributes something. Procurement reform can reduce discretion over contracts. Stronger auditing can expose expenditure decisions that previously escaped scrutiny. Independent regulation can constrain politically connected businesses. Fiscal transparency can reduce government’s informational advantage over citizens. A professional civil service can reduce the political value of patronage. Electoral reform can alter the conditions under which political power itself is acquired and retained.
This is why reform is not simply a technical exercise. The conventional questions, whether a reform is efficient, legally sound or administratively feasible, are necessary but incomplete. The political-economy questions are harder: who gains power if the reform succeeds, who loses discretion, and whose existing interests become harder to protect?
Once these questions are asked, many apparent implementation failures become more intelligible. Resistance does not always take the form of openly rejecting reform. It can appear through delayed implementation, weak funding, ambiguous rules, politically influenced appointments, selective enforcement or parallel structures that dilute institutional authority.
Power does not always defeat reform by stopping it. Sometimes it absorbs reform while preserving the underlying distribution of discretion. An institution may receive new powers without sufficient independence to use them. A transparency system may produce more information without producing consequences. A regulatory framework may become more sophisticated while politically negotiated exemptions remain possible. Reform then changes the appearance of the state more than its underlying political equilibrium.
Fiscal governance provides a clear illustration. Nigeria scored only 31 out of 100 for budget transparency in the 2023 Open Budget Survey, ranking 92nd among 125 countries. Ghana scored 46, Liberia 52 and Sierra Leone 55. Nigeria’s public-participation score was only 19, although its combined legislative and audit oversight score reached 61.
These results complicate the claim that Nigeria simply lacks oversight institutions. It has legislative scrutiny, audit mechanisms and formal budget procedures. The more important issue is whether these mechanisms operate when they can still influence behaviour. The Open Budget Survey identified weaknesses in the timely publication of in-year reports and mid-year reviews and noted that the 2020 audit report was not published until January 2024.
The distinction between transparency and accountability is critical. Information released after decisions have been implemented may satisfy a formal disclosure requirement without creating meaningful opportunities for correction. Similarly, an audit finding that produces no institutional response becomes documentation rather than accountability.
The budget is also a map of political power. It determines which priorities receive resources, which interests are protected and which institutions gain administrative capacity. Fiscal transparency therefore changes the distribution of political information. The question is not merely whether citizens can see government spending, but whether they can see it early enough and clearly enough to challenge decisions.
The August 2026 confrontation involving the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Osun State Government offers a useful test of institutional independence. The EFCC obtained a court order freezing Osun State Government accounts, after which President Bola Tinubu directed the commission to return to court to vacate the order and discontinue the action, citing concerns about the timing of the action in relation to the state’s governorship election and the need to avoid an appearance of federal interference in the electoral process.
The President’s rationale raises a legitimate institutional concern. Enforcement action involving a state government immediately before an election can create questions about political neutrality, particularly where federal institutions are perceived as capable of influencing state-level competition. Yet the episode also exposes a deeper question: what should happen when an ostensibly independent institution exercises its lawful powers in a way that becomes politically sensitive?
Should the executive intervene to prevent perceived electoral manipulation? Should the enforcement agency proceed and defend its action? Should the courts provide the principal safeguard? Or should there be institutional procedures for independently reviewing politically sensitive enforcement without requiring presidential intervention?
The significance of the episode therefore goes beyond deciding whether the EFCC or the President was right. It demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining credible institutional independence when independent action produces politically consequential outcomes. An institution may be formally independent while its decisions remain vulnerable to political intervention. Conversely, political leaders may have legitimate responsibilities to protect electoral neutrality and prevent state institutions from distorting political competition.
The real institutional challenge is to establish rules that accommodate both imperatives without allowing either to routinely defeat the other.
The most valuable resource in a weak institutional environment is often not money but discretion. Discretion determines which cases receive priority, which rules are enforced aggressively, which actors receive exceptions and which decisions remain outside effective public scrutiny.
Institutional capture does not always require an explicit political instruction. Officials learn where political boundaries lie. A sensitive investigation may be delayed; a controversial decision may be escalated; an appointment may signal the limits of institutional autonomy. Over time, officials anticipate consequences before political intervention becomes necessary.
This is more difficult to detect than direct interference because the institution continues to function. It produces reports, conducts investigations and issues regulations. What changes is the range of actions that officials consider politically possible. The institution becomes formally autonomous but behaviourally cautious.
This is why reform must address not only statutory mandates but also appointments, tenure, financing, professional incentives and the credibility of sanctions against interference.
Selective enforcement has consequences beyond individual cases. When citizens see ordinary violations punished while politically connected actors can delay, negotiate or escape consequences, they rationally alter their relationship with the state. Businesses invest in political relationships as insurance against regulatory uncertainty. Citizens seek access rather than relying on rights. Officials learn that political loyalty can carry greater practical value than institutional compliance.
The result is a self-reinforcing equilibrium. The more society depends on political connections, the more valuable those connections become; the more valuable they become, the greater the incentive to influence institutions; and the more institutions become vulnerable to influence, the less citizens trust formal rules.
Corruption is therefore not simply a collection of individual acts. It can become an equilibrium produced by the interaction between political incentives and institutional design.
Nigeria’s instinct when confronting governance failure is frequently to create another institution, committee, task force or reporting mechanism. Sometimes this is necessary. But institutional multiplication can also obscure the real problem.
Every new institution creates another appointment process, another budget and another potential point of political influence. More institutions do not automatically mean more accountability. They can produce overlapping mandates, fragmented responsibility and opportunities to move difficult questions between institutional arenas.
The better question is therefore not always what institution should Nigeria create next? It is why can the institution that already exists not exercise the authority it already possesses?
If the problem is inadequate legal authority, change the law. If it is technical capacity, build capacity. If it is funding, provide resources. But if the problem is political dependence, another statute or agency may simply reproduce the same weakness under a different institutional name.
Political problems cannot be solved indefinitely through administrative engineering.
Nigeria’s experience cannot simply be explained by being a large, diverse African democracy. Comparative evidence demonstrates substantial variation in institutional performance among countries facing their own governance challenges. In the 2025 CPI, Nigeria scored 26, compared with 43 for Ghana, 41 for South Africa and 46 for Senegal. None of these countries has eliminated corruption or political interference, but the differences demonstrate that countries within the same broad regional environment can produce different institutional equilibria.
Senegal is particularly instructive because the World Justice Project identified it among the world’s top improvers in the 2025 Rule of Law Index. Ghana’s experience with competitive political alternation provides another lesson: when political actors believe they may genuinely become opposition parties, they have incentives to preserve institutions they may later need to constrain their successors. South Africa offers a different example of constitutionally entrenched checks developing significant practical authority, even while political pressure continues to test them.
The lesson is not that Nigeria should copy these countries. It is that institutional weakness is not a fixed cultural condition. Institutions become stronger or weaker through political bargaining, institutional learning, public expectations and the incentives facing political actors. Institutional equilibria are politically constructed, and therefore politically changeable.
One reason politicians may resist strong institutions is the high stakes associated with political office. Where public office provides substantial control over resources, appointments and access, losing power can carry significant consequences. Incumbents consequently have incentives to maximise institutional influence while they control government.
But this creates a collective-action problem. The governing party benefits from weak constraints while in office but may later become the opposition and discover that the same weakened institutions cannot protect it. Political actors can therefore support strong institutions in principle while benefiting from weak institutions in practice.
Institutional reform becomes durable only when political actors conclude that they are better protected by predictable rules than by discretionary power. That requires political competition in which losing office does not mean losing every meaningful institutional protection.
A reform should not be considered institutionalised simply because it works under a particular president, governor or minister. The harder test is whether it continues to work when political leadership changes and the new government has incentives to weaken it.
A regulator that remains independent only because the current leadership chooses not to interfere is vulnerable. A transparency mechanism that functions only when political leaders favour disclosure is fragile. An anti-corruption institution that is effective when investigations target opponents but constrained when they reach allies is not genuinely independent.
Rules become institutions when they become more durable than the preferences of individual officeholders. Political turnover is therefore one of the clearest tests of institutionalisation: does the state inherit constraints, or does every new government renegotiate them?
Nigeria’s institutional reform agenda should therefore focus less on creating new agencies and more on strengthening the autonomy, legitimacy and counter-power of institutions that already exist. Critical appointments require credible selection processes and protection against arbitrary removal. Institutions charged with scrutinising government require predictable resources sufficient to perform their functions without making their survival dependent on political goodwill.
Oversight must also become consequential. Audit reports, legislative findings, regulatory decisions and investigative conclusions have little deterrent value if they routinely end as documents. Accountability requires a credible chain from finding to response and from response to consequence. Similarly, unnecessary administrative discretion should be reduced through clearer criteria, transparent procedures, digital processes and traceable decisions.
Institutional independence also requires constituencies capable of defending it. Courts, legislatures, professional bodies, media, civil society and citizens must regard institutional autonomy as a public interest rather than something that matters only when their preferred political actors are under scrutiny. An isolated institution is easier to capture than one whose independence carries political and reputational value.
Nigeria’s reform conversation asks too often what policy government should adopt. The more important question is what political incentives will determine whether that policy is implemented. It asks what institution should be established when it should ask what political forces will determine whether that institution can exercise its mandate. It asks what law should be amended when it should also ask who benefits from the existing arrangement and who loses discretion if the law changes.
These questions move reform from technical design into StateCraft. Institutions do not operate outside politics. They operate within political settlements that determine who has authority, who controls information, who controls resources and who can impose costs on whom. Reform becomes durable when it changes those relationships sufficiently to make new rules credible.
A stronger state is therefore not simply a state with more power. It is a state whose institutions can exercise legitimate authority while constraining one another. A regulator must be able to regulate politically connected interests. An auditor must be able to expose financial irregularities. A legislature must be able to scrutinise executive expenditure. A court must be able to review government action. An electoral institution must be able to administer elections without becoming an extension of the incumbent. An anti-corruption agency must be able to investigate politically inconvenient cases through procedures that protect both independence and due process.
These constraints do not weaken the state. They make its authority more legitimate, predictable and durable.
Nigeria already knows many of the technical reforms it needs. It knows how to improve procurement, strengthen public financial management, publish better fiscal information, professionalise institutions and improve regulatory systems. The harder question is whether those reforms will alter the distribution of information, discretion, appointments, enforcement and political veto power.
If they do not, reform will remain largely procedural. Nigeria will continue to produce laws, agencies, strategies and announcements while reproducing many of the same governance outcomes. The problem will not be that government has failed to reform. It will be that reform has failed to change the political conditions under which institutions operate.
The StateCraft test is therefore more demanding than asking whether a reform has been announced or an agency created. It is whether an institution can act according to law when doing so is politically inconvenient; whether oversight can produce consequences when powerful interests are implicated; whether public information can become a basis for challenge rather than merely a record of decisions already taken; and whether institutional rules remain effective after political leadership changes.
If an institution can say no only when saying no carries little political cost, its independence remains conditional. If it can say no when saying yes would be safer for its officials, more convenient for its political masters and more profitable for those benefiting from the existing order, then institutionalisation has begun.
That is the deeper reform challenge Nigeria faces. The country does not simply need institutions with more powers. It needs institutions with enough autonomy, legitimacy and counter-power to make those powers real. It needs a political system in which today’s governing actors understand that tomorrow’s opposition may depend on the same institutional constraints they are tempted to weaken today.
A strong state is therefore not one in which government always gets its way. It is one in which government knows that there are lawful things it cannot do, and institutions possess the authority and protection necessary to make that limitation credible. That is not a failure of government. It is the architecture of constitutional government.
Until Nigeria builds institutions capable of saying no to power, many of its most ambitious reforms will remain reforms of the state on paper rather than reforms of the state in practice.