“A culture that suppresses their best, experienced, and leading figures can ground the system.” —Ebuka Onyekwelu
In a general sense, almost everyone within the Nigerian public service system is patiently waiting for their turn. To wait for one’s turn is beyond merely waiting to assume rulership. It is a worldview that connotes something deeper. A state of ascendancy to the top of the chain, but unaffected and unbothered, with zero responsibility. The more one ascends the rungs of leadership, the more he or she is subjected to public spectacle and scrutiny, but this is largely different in Nigeria.
The higher one climbs the success rungs, the less he is held responsible for anything. Whether he works or not, he feeds off large from the system. Good or bad, his benefits are not disturbed. This big man syndrome has successfully fostered a culture of unproductivity to the extent that it has emerged as the hallmark of the aspiration of people within the public service systems in Nigeria. People just struggle to get into the small number of those who are above rules and above questions and cannot be held accountable or even held to follow mere procedures. They, by their positions, are the procedures. The level of chaos this has unreached within the society is unimaginable.
A casual observation of Nigerian higher institutions, for instance, dramatizes this crisis to a telling point. Within Nigerian higher institutions, the ultimate goal of junior staff members of the non-teaching staff community is to become senior staff members so that they can mount successfully atop the rules. At the same time, they are served or serve themselves with spurious profits off the institution, even as they add absolutely no value to the system. This is not far from the ambition of the teaching staff members. For the most part, the same reason junior lecturers have the ambition of becoming professors. They work so hard and commit everything within their reach to attain this height. Once attained, they now use it to explore opportunities that bestow political benefits to them in one way or another. Not many Nigerian professors are still actively writing, researching, and teaching. They are busy with other things because they have joined the league of Nigerian big men, and big men do not work.
Reaching the apex of the rungs remains the goal of future Nigerian big men to channel their privileges towards benefits or in pursuit of other things. In contrast, they remain realistically nearly a burden to the system. For them, reaching the apex is getting to a point of no accountability and no expectations regarding input into the system.
A culture that facilitates the redundancy of their best, experienced, and leading figures is designed to keep the country grounded. A culture where people work hard in their youth to earn their spot only to now relax and live easily at their peak is a culture that exposes deeper levels of the rentier state crisis beyond the struggle over natural resources. This is why a typical Nigerian big man only needs to get into the league symbolized by position, education, or power. They go through anything it may take to earn the spot, only to relax now and live off the system.
As far as the ultimate goal of aspiring to become a Nigerian big man remains, ascending to the peak as a means of having one’s lifestyle sponsored and fully subsidized somehow by the system, Nigerian society will keep paying. So long as the desire to occupy positions is guided by an overwhelming passion to be served and not to serve, leadership will continue to suffer. The idea that a leader is a figure who sits above the system, enjoys all kinds of personal benefits, and can afford not to bother with any work, must be discarded by the bulk of Nigerian elites in various segments of Nigerian society.
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