In every generation, there comes a moment of reckoning, a time when a nation must ask itself: who are we, truly, and who are we meant to become? Nigeria stands today at such a crossroad, not for the first time, but perhaps with greater urgency than ever before. The weight of its history presses against its present, a turbulent cascade of broken promises, borrowed dreams, and the relentless grief of what might have been. There is sadness here, deep and unyielding. Disappointment too, loud and raw. But also, if one listens closely enough, there is still the frail murmur of optimism, bruised but breathing.
We do not suffer from a lack of intelligence. Nor are we short of ambition. What we lack is leadership – true, thoughtful, strategic leadership. Nigeria’s tragedy, to borrow the lens of John Lewis Gaddis in On Grand Strategy, is that we have mastered the language of vision without learning the discipline of execution. Gaddis, drawing from centuries of leadership – Augustus, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Isaiah Berlin – reminds us that the ability to connect lofty ends with realistic means is the essence of grand strategy. Leadership is not about motion; it is about movement with meaning. And this, in Nigeria, has become an elusive art.
Our country has suffered from an overproduction of power-seekers and an underproduction of statesmen. In Forged in Crisis, Nancy Koehn shows us how courage is cultivated in fire: how Ernest Shackleton led through Antarctic blizzards, how Lincoln governed amid civil war, and how Dietrich Bonhoeffer resisted fascism with faith and defiance. These leaders did not seek comfort or consensus; they chose clarity in chaos. Nigeria’s leaders, too often, choose convenience over courage. They rule for the moment, not for the legacy. They calculate for elections, not for generations.
Consider the contrast between Nigeria and Singapore. In From Third World to First, Lee Kuan Yew demonstrated that transformation is not a matter of resources alone but of resolve. His leadership was unapologetically pragmatic. He governed not by chasing applause, but by confronting hard truths. He demanded competence, instilled discipline, and rooted governance in data, not delusion. Nigeria, with its bloated bureaucracies and tribal patronage networks, has followed the opposite script, confusing populism for performance, ethnicity for excellence, and charisma for character.
There is sadness in seeing the brilliance of Nigerian youth funnelled into survivalism – graduates riding motorcycles to earn a living, doctors fleeing abroad for dignity, and children learning under leaking roofs. There is disappointment in the cyclical theatre of governance – each administration unveiling “vision documents” that evaporate upon contact with reality. We have plans with no priorities, slogans with no systems, and appointments made not for capacity but for loyalty. Our democracy has become transactional, a platform for negotiation, not transformation.
And yet, not all is lost. As Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum writes in My Vision, “Leaders are those who see opportunities in every difficulty.” The UAE rose from desert dust to digital prowess not by accident, but by design. Al-Maktoum combined a reverence for tradition with a bold leap into the future, always placing people at the center of policy. Nigeria must do the same. We must realize that we are not simply managing problems, we are curating the future. Every decision we make today writes the headlines of tomorrow.
Henry Kissinger, in Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, highlights how leaders like Konrad Adenauer rebuilt West Germany with humility and resolve, and how Charles de Gaulle resurrected France’s dignity through personal sacrifice and institutional renewal. What they had in common was a strategic imagination – a mind that sees both the forest and the trees. Nigeria’s leaders, by contrast, often cannot see beyond the next election cycle. They are trapped in what Isaiah Berlin would call “the hedgehog’s dilemma” – possessing one big idea, often nationalism or economic growth, but unable to adapt it to complexity.
This is where optimism stirs, however feebly. Because Nigeria is not without thinkers. It is not without reformers. It is not without those who wake each day determined to fix even one broken piece of this country. The teacher who refuses to cheat during exams. The police officer who won’t take a bribe. The startup founder who builds against all odds. These are the quiet architects of our future, unseen by the state, but not unnoticed by history.
To lead Nigeria today is to hold contradictions in tension. It is to believe in the people, even when the state fails them. It is to build institutions in a society obsessed with individuals. It is to plan for twenty years ahead in a country where even twenty weeks seems uncertain. It is to stare at the wreckage of the present and imagine, still, a future that works.
The lesson from all the thinkers we’ve drawn upon – Gaddis, Kissinger, Koehn, Lee, Al Maktoum, and even Sun Tzu – is that leadership is not event-driven; it is character-revealing. Crises don’t create leaders – they reveal them. Nigeria has seen enough crises to produce a dozen Lincolns, a hundred Yews. But instead, we have recycled small men with large appetites, fluent in deceit but bankrupt in vision.
Still, let us not forget Sun Tzu’s enduring lesson in The Art of War: “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” Nigeria’s chaos is not terminal. It is transitional, if we choose it to be. But this choice requires a new kind of leader: one who studies the past not to mimic it, but to learn from it; who builds not for applause, but for posterity; who sees leadership not as a reward, but as a burden of love and sacrifice.
What we need now is grand strategy, not as a bookish ideal, but as a living commitment to coherence. We need a leadership that understands federalism, not as political theatre, but as the engine of local accountability. We need a leadership that is obsessed with data, allergic to corruption, and faithful to truth. We need leaders who see governance not as control, but as service. Not as performance, but as transformation.
Nigeria’s future is not guaranteed. But it is not doomed either. It is waiting, for courage, for imagination, for integrity. And so, we must ask: who among us will rise? Who will read history and not merely admire its heroes, but dare to join them?
Until we find them, the silence will continue. But someday soon, that silence may be broken, not by the roar of another empty promise, but by the steady rhythm of a nation finally learning to lead itself.
And when that day comes, we will not only remember our disappointments. We will remember that we endured them. And from the ashes of all we lost, we will begin again – this time, not with empty crowns, but with true leadership in hand.
