The ritual is by now so familiar that it barely requires description. The invitation lists a start time, which functions less as a commitment than as a suggestion. The conscientious arrive punctually and settle, usually from the middle rows backwards. They leave the front row, where the “Reserved” cone often sits for those who, if they truly knew their place, would not need the cones.

Then comes the waiting. The organisers pace about, performing urgency, trying not to meet the eyes of those already seated. Participants, after sitting for a while, stand to exchange business cards because sitting idle for an hour or two reminds them of their place in the pecking order. Eventually, a commotion at the door announces that the Very Important Person has arrived. He is unhurried, trailed by cameras and security, but shamelessly pauses to embrace other dignitaries who, though also late, have, as their right, taken the reserved seats.

The master of ceremonies rushes up to the podium, rustles his papers and begins the introductions. No diploma or title can be left out. The speeches that follow are often seen for the first time by the persons reading them. The applause, when it comes, is partly out of courtesy, as no one in the room, or even the presenter, truly believes the boasts. By the next morning, the news channels will lead with the photo of the dignitaries, as their presence is the measure of the conference’s worth. The reports often forget to convene the nuanced debates. They always forget to mention that the VIPs arrived late and left early. Most have learned not to acknowledge that when the dignitary left, half the room followed, hoping for an acknowledging smile, a handshake or, for the lucky, a selfie.

This is theatre, and at Nextier, it churns our stomach.

Our events begin at the advertised time. We reserve the front row until the event starts at the advertised time, and anyone can take them. If a speaker misses the allotted slot, the programme proceeds without them. We will never return to that speech, and it does not matter whether the absent speaker is the President, a minister, or the event’s largest sponsor. This is not discourtesy. It is our attempt, however insignificant, to gesture to the society we want to live in.

Look beyond the front row, however, and you see the more consequential cast. There is the director who knows which agency can carry out a reform and which will quietly suffocate it. The adviser who possesses enough access and trust to turn a governor towards a more promising path. The banker who understands why capital never reaches the small and medium-scale enterprise, which every speech tells us, holds the promise for our economic growth. Beside her sits the development professional who knew, before the development intervention began, that it would barely move the dial.

These people rarely possess final authority. They possess something probably more important. They have proximity, memory, credibility, and the practical means of converting an idea into a decision. They craft the policies and programmes. They know who is a friend or foe. They know what may work and what will definitely not.

They are not the head. They are the neck that turns it.

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Nextier Development Festival (DevFest) is built for this overlooked constituency. It is built for the arguments that become possible when its members gather with other entrepreneurs, scholars, public officials, investors, civil society actors, and practitioners who are genuinely interested in ideas and in getting things done.

At the 2026 Nextier DevFest, we are looking for two kinds of people. Doubters, who question inherited assumptions, including their own. And believers who know exactly how broken the system is yet keep searching for a way through it anyway. Every country that has solved these problems has done so with people, not miracles.

Nigeria has no shortage of confident diagnoses. Its archives groan beneath commissions, strategies, plans, and white papers. Some contain excellent ideas; others were produced with little evidence. What is consistently missing is the machinery that converts knowledge into action and prevents every generation of reformers from starting over at zero and repeating the mistakes of their forebearers.

Last year’s Nextier Development Festival asked why poverty persists despite decades of programmes intended to defeat it. We brought policymakers, development practitioners, researchers, businesses, and citizens into a common inquiry. The discussion exposed four recurring failures: poverty is too often treated merely as insufficient income; interventions remain fragmented across institutions; weak data and delivery systems undermine implementation; and political discontinuity prevents promising reforms from maturing.

That Festival produced more than speeches. It generated a shared diagnostic framework for understanding poverty through diagnosis, design, and delivery; consolidated the arguments and evidence into a festival report; and left us with an uncomfortable conclusion: managing deprivation is different from creating prosperity.

DevFest 2026 begins where that conversation ended.

This year, under the theme “Achieving Inclusive Prosperity in Nigeria,” we ask what an economy must build to produce rising incomes, productive employment, and genuine mobility at scale. The festival moves through five connected inquiries: the Prosperity Problem, the Firm Problem, the System Problem, the State Problem, and the Competitiveness Test.

We will ask why growth has not produced shared prosperity. Why Nigerian firms stay small, and what keeps them there. What kind of state can coordinate, implement, and stick with an idea until it yields the desired results. And whether Nigerian firms can survive competition beyond the shelter of the domestic market. Click on this link for the Festival details, including our sector workshops and Learning Labs.

Our objective with the Nextier Development Festival is not applause. It is diagnosis, argument, learning, commitments, and action. It is a place to challenge orthodoxy. It is a place to push the frontiers of knowledge. Think of it as a fellowship of sorts — except here we speak in ideas, not tongues, and the only spirit we fall under is pragmatism.

In the coming weeks, we will reveal more of the people and ideas shaping the 2026 Nextier DevFest. Stay tuned.

We will assemble 300 people for two days. There will be no seat-filler in the room. Everyone will arrive ready to engage and seek a way where many assume there is none. If this is your room, click this link (DevFest.TheNextier.com) and tell us about yourself. Registration is an expression of interest, not an automatic admission; we will reach out if your experience and curiosity fit.

The heads are welcome. But we are especially searching for the necks.

Patrick O. Okigbo III | Founding Partner, Nextier | August 28, 2026

Patrick O. Okigbo III in conversation with Joe Studwell.

Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2026

Time: 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. (WAT)

Zoom Link: https://bit.ly/DevDisc_HAW

Africa is often described as the continent of the future, the last great frontier of economic growth, a place whose immense natural wealth, youthful population and entrepreneurial energy promise an eventual transformation of the entire continent. Set against this optimism is an equally enduring story, one that explains Africa's developmental trajectory through an ever-expanding catalogue of deficiencies: weak institutions, corruption, colonial legacies, ethnic fragmentation, fragile states and poor governance. Perhaps the problem is not that Africa lacks explanations for its developmental challenges, but that the search for those explanations has too often focused on symptoms rather than the underlying conditions that make development possible.

Joe Studwell did not set out to challenge either of these narratives. Having spent years studying the developmental histories of East Asia, he turned his attention to Africa, expecting to discover why the continent had diverged from the path taken by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China. He immersed himself in decades of scholarship on governance, patrimonial politics, corruption and conflict, only to find that these explanations, while illuminating, never quite reached the root of the question. It was only after returning to a largely forgotten body of postwar scholarship that another possibility began to emerge. Africa's developmental trajectory, he came to believe, could not be understood without first reckoning with its demographic history, the extraordinary scale of its geography, the historically low population density that shaped its markets and states, and the political consequences of governing societies marked by extraordinary ethnic diversity.

That insight became the foundation of his book, How Africa Works, but it is only the beginning of Studwell's argument. Rather than proposing a uniquely African path to development, he finds remarkable continuity across countries that have transformed themselves. From Japan and South Korea to Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda, successful states consistently raised agricultural productivity, built competitive manufacturing sectors and directed finance towards productive investment. Their success lay not in discovering new policies, but in adapting proven ones to their own political and historical circumstances.

The more difficult question, then, is why these policies have proved so hard to sustain. In this edition of Development Discourse, Patrick O. Okigbo III and Joe Studwell will explore the following questions: Has Africa spent too long searching for new development theories while overlooking evidence that has existed for decades? What would it take for a country as politically and ethnically diverse as Nigeria to build the kind of cross ethnic developmental coalition that Studwell identifies as central to economic transformation? Can democratic politics sustain the long-term discipline that successful developmental states appear to require? And as Africa's demographic transition accelerates, what choices will determine whether population growth becomes the foundation of prosperity or another missed opportunity?

Nextier: Building the society we want to live in

Contact: info@thenextier.com

3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. (WAT)

https://bit.ly/DevDisc_HAW

Africa is often described as the continent of the future, the last great frontier of economic growth, a place whose immense natural wealth, youthful population and entrepreneurial energy promise an eventual transformation of the entire continent. Set against this optimism is an equally enduring story, one that explains Africa's developmental trajectory through an ever-expanding catalogue of deficiencies: weak institutions, corruption, colonial legacies, ethnic fragmentation, fragile states and poor governance. Perhaps the problem is not that Africa lacks explanations for its developmental challenges, but that the search for those explanations has too often focused on symptoms rather than the underlying conditions that make development possible.

Joe Studwell did not set out to challenge either of these narratives. Having spent years studying the developmental histories of East Asia, he turned his attention to Africa,expecting to discover why the continent had diverged from the path taken by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China. He immersed himself in decades of scholarship on governance, patrimonial politics, corruption and conflict, only to find that these explanations, while illuminating, never quite reached the root of the question. It was only after returning to a largely forgotten body of postwar scholarship that another possibility began to emerge. Africa's developmental trajectory, he came to believe, could not be understood without first reckoning with its demographic history, the extraordinary scale of its geography, the historically low population density that shaped its markets and states, and the political consequences of governing societies marked by extraordinary ethnic diversity.

That insight became the foundation of his book, How Africa Works, but it is only the beginning of Studwell's argument. Rather than proposing a uniquely African path to development, he finds remarkable continuity across countries that have transformed themselves. From Japan and South Korea to Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda, successful states consistently raised agricultural productivity, built competitive manufacturing sectors and directed finance towards productive investment. Their success lay not in discovering new policies, but in adapting proven ones to their own political and historical circumstances.

The more difficult question, then, is why these policies have proved so hard to sustain. In this edition of Development Discourse, Patrick O. Okigbo III and Joe Studwell will explore the following questions: Has Africa spent too long searching for new development theories while overlooking evidence that has existed for decades? What would it take for a country as politically and ethnically diverse as Nigeria to build the kind of cross ethnic developmental coalition that Studwell identifies as central to economic transformation? Can democratic politics sustain the long-term discipline that successful developmental states appear to require? And as Africa's demographic transition accelerates, what choices will determine whether population growth becomes the foundation of prosperity or another missed opportunity?

Nextier: Building the society we want to live in

Contact: info@thenextier.com

When Peter Mbah took office as governor of Enugu State, Nigeria, in May 2023, the state’s internally generated revenue stood at ₦26.8 billion ($58.3 million). By the end of 2025, his revenue service reported ₦406.7 billion ($280.5 million) at the respective prevailing dollar exchange rates. A fifteen-fold increase (in local currency terms) in thirty months, achieved without raising tax rates, is the kind of subnational result that ought to interest anyone working on state capacity in low-income settings. It has been celebrated accordingly across Nigerian media.

However, the celebration has obscured what the numbers actually say. Of that ₦406.7 billion, only ₦51.5 billion was tax revenue. The remaining ₦355 billion, more than 87 per cent of the total, came from what the state’s revenue chairman describes as the recovery and optimisation of moribund assets. The tax line did grow, from ₦16.2 billion to ₦51.5 billion, roughly a tripling. That is meaningful. But it is a different story from the one the headline numbers celebrate, and the difference matters for what we should infer.

As presented, the Enugu story leans on the fiscal-social contract relationship established by Charles Tilly and formalised by Tim Besley and Torsten Persson. It argues that states build legitimacy by converting collected taxes into visible public goods, securing the citizens’ willingness to comply. As told, Enugu achieved this feat through governance reforms. That claim may be premature, as the results may be much narrower; possibly, more useful.

Here is what we know—and they are not trivial. The government recovered moribund state assets, digitised revenue administration to plug leakages, and translated the resulting revenue into visible capital investment. These are not easy feats in a low-trust, low-capacity society. What is not settled is whether this is enough to trigger and sustain a tax compliance loop as predicted by the fiscal-social contract literature. At best, Enugu is at the start of that loop. However, its success presents an interesting case for scholars seeking models to spur economic growth.

Understanding how a Nigerian revenue service can help trigger growth demands a more robust framework. After a decade and a half of questioning why some institutions work, and most don’t, I have settled on a framework that asks five fundamental questions. Who actually holds the power to drive change, and who is shut out? What payoffs (or incentives) do those in power face, and in what direction? Do the rules police (or bind) even the powerful? What is the citizens’ perception (or belief) in what the state will do for them? How do past choices constrain what’s possible today (path dependency)? Applying this Five Ps framework to Enugu yields an account that is more sedate than the headlines suggest. However, the insights are more useful than sceptics allow.

Payoff—the second P—is the most legible force the governor faced. With a keenly contested election, he understood the need to win over the people with visible development. So, he set an audacious goal: a fivefold increase in the state’s GDP within eight years. This overly audacious goal stood in the face of declining revenue, a challenging macroeconomic environment, rising secessionist agitation, and other challenges. Sensing the opposition’s disarray, he found the window to take administrative risks. His commercial instincts as the founder of a leading oil and gas company made him comfortable in the world of fiscal reform and asset optimisation. This point is important because it explains the preconditions for those thinking of initiating similar reforms. It also explains why other governors have not followed similar pathways. Their payoffs—incentive structures—are different.

On the question of institutional durability, path dependency—the fifth P—demands a deeper review. The administrative changes in Enugu are real; however, if history holds any merit, these wins could be unwound by a successor who prefers a fragmented tax collection for the rents it generates. For instance, it is more of Mbah’s personality than institutional architecture that is driving the reforms. What happens when his tenure ends? Furthermore, the revenue from the asset recovery cannot be repeated once the moribund assets have been recovered. Hence, the 2026 target of ₦870 billion will require either further asset monetisation, which has a ceiling, or genuine growth in the tax base, which depends on outcomes which are yet to materialise. Hence, the durability question remains unsettled.

Perception—the fourth P—is where the most interesting empirical work remains to be done. The authorities claim the 72 per cent growth in tax revenue in 2025 proves that something fundamental has shifted in the citizens’ willingness to pay. This claim is curious given the lack of taxpayer survey evidence, compliance data, or a counterfactual analysis with other subnational entities. Wilson Prichard’s work across multiple African settings shows that the link between public-goods provision and tax morale is real but conditional.

Let’s return to the main question. Can subnational progress rebuild trust in the state? We can conclude on three things.

First, Enugu presents an interesting case that should not be dismissed, given that the headline numbers have not yet been fully disaggregated. That would be a mistake. Its tax-revenue trajectory alone is striking by Nigerian standards, and the administrative architecture and political will that produced it should be studied to see how well it travels across polities.

Second, the lessons that can be drawn from Enugu, while narrower than the official narrative claims, offer compelling green shoots in a place seeking success models. The case shows what a focused executive can achieve in fiscal administration under prevailing political conditions. They do not yet evidence the reconstruction of the fractured fiscal-social contract relationship. That would require more time to be fully grounded.

Third, the deepest question is institutional. While the Enugu numbers are impressive, the bigger question is whether the reforms will survive the people who initiated them. On that test, Enugu is still a hypothesis. So is much of what passes for reform across the African continent. The recipe for building the institutions is known; the political capital and tenacity required to build them are not easy to come by.

Nigeria has a significant deficit of public trust. Personality-driven progress, while important, may not be enough to plug the hole. The resolution requires the slow accumulation of institutional changes that outlast their initiators. Enugu may yet be part of that accumulation. Time will tell, especially if Peter Mbah secures a second tenure that ends in 2031 and sustains the momentum. Those two factors could bring us closer to a scalable model.

Without careful planning and even more diligent implementation, an asset can become a liability. The commentariat in South East Nigeria is vexed by this debate as governments across the region dig in for the race to build airports. Several commentators, including government spokespersons, mistake airport construction for an economic strategy. They are eager to risk scarce resources on terminals rather than on the hard work required to build an integrated aviation and logistics system that actually supports production.

Hardly do numbers guide these politically tainted debates. However, Nigeria’s aviation data seem to support the proponents of airport expansion. Nigeria’s domestic passenger traffic numbers rose by 4.3% from 12.54 million in 2024 to 13.09 million in 2025, while total passenger traffic increased by 5.9% from 16.94 million to 17.94 million. However, taken in context, these numbers signal recovery more than transformation. Nigeria’s aviation market remains shallow in a country of more than 200 million people. It is also significantly concentrated in a few cities. For instance, in 2024, Abuja handled about 35% of domestic passengers and Lagos about 33%. Port Harcourt handled roughly 8%, Enugu 3.9% and Owerri 3.3%.

These numbers do not make a compelling case for building more airports on the grounds of passenger convenience. That argument was already weak in 2019, when Anambra began construction of the Chinua Achebe Airport, despite its proximity to Asaba, Enugu, and Owerri airports. It is even weaker today for a second airport. The existing airport is well located, about 29km from Onitsha, 33km from Awka, and 31km from Nnewi. Since commencing operations in December 2021, it had recorded about 400,000 passengers and 7,000 flights by November 2024. This is a respectable performance for a new airport, but not enough to justify Governor Charles Soludo’s proposed second airport. Rather, the priority should be to make the Achebe airport more useful, not to duplicate it.

Cargo is the more serious argument. IATA estimates aviation contributed $2.5bn to Nigeria’s GDP in 2023 and supported about 217,000 jobs. Nigerian airports handled about 195,700 tonnes of air cargo that year. Air cargo serves high-value, time-sensitive goods: pharmaceuticals, machine parts, electronics, perishables, documents and e-commerce parcels, precisely the categories that matter to a commercially dense but logistically constrained region.

Guided by the above, Abia presents an interesting calculus. Its main commercial city, Aba, is one of Nigeria’s most important manufacturing clusters. A well-designed airport in Aba could reduce logistics constraints and confer strategic advantages. However, its success largely depends on whether it is embedded in a broader industrial strategy. The airport must be part of an ecosystem that includes direct integration with Aba’s factories and markets, cargo consolidation, bonded warehousing, quality certification, customs processing, and other related services. Without these, the airport becomes an expensive good-to-have or a mere political statement. With them, it could become production infrastructure.

The same test applies to the second airport Governor Soludo has proposed for Anambra State. Reports indicate that the airport will be linked to a proposed industrial park and aerotropolis. Fair point, but a second airport in Anambra is hard to justify as a passenger facility. It is defensible only as a specialised logistics asset within an industrial platform. Either way, rigorous analysis must demonstrate that the existing airport, branded as an “international cargo airport”, cannot serve the same purpose.

Some pundits have made a resilience argument for more passenger airports. In April 2025, emergency repairs at Enugu Airport forced airlines to divert flights to neighbouring airports in Anambra and Asaba. This probably makes the case for redundancy. With insecure and poorly maintained roads, aviation provides insurance for medical evacuation, emergency response, diaspora travel, business mobility and high-value freight. However, while the social value is real, it should not become a blank cheque. This point is especially pertinent given the scarcity of government revenue and increasing social demands.

Nigeria’s experience with state airports counsels caution. Ebonyi’s airport has reportedly absorbed more than ₦55bn since 2019, much of it before generating any meaningful revenue. Other state airports struggle with thin traffic, high maintenance costs and dependence on eventual federal takeover. Airports fail not because they are inherently bad investments, but because politics precedes economics.

The South East, therefore, needs an aviation compact, not an airport race. For instance, Enugu can function as the region’s principal international gateway. Anambra should serve the Onitsha-Nnewi-Awka commercial axis. Owerri should serve Imo and adjoining catchments. Port Harcourt will remain relevant to oil and gas, as well as to southern Abia. Asaba will continue to serve the Niger crossing and western Anambra. Abia’s airport is defensible only if it becomes Aba’s export and logistics platform.

The policy test should be simple. No new airport should proceed without anchor users, cargo commitments, a professional operating model, lifecycle maintenance funding, private-sector participation and a credible non-aeronautical revenue plan. Airports make money not only from landing fees but also from land, warehousing, retail, parking, hotels, fuel, logistics, maintenance, and concessions.

Indeed, the South East does not need more monuments. It needs infrastructure that raises productivity. In terms of passenger convenience, none of the proposed airports passes muster. Abia’s airport can be justified if designed around Aba’s industrial economy. A second Anambra airport cannot be justified unless its industrial city proves indispensable, and there is no way the current airport can meet its needs. Aviation should serve production, not politics. An airport should be a productive asset that triggers economic growth, not an expensive toy.

Xenophobia looks like stupidity, and it is tempting to dismiss it as such. That is a mistake. It has logical explanations, though never justifications. It rarely begins as a simple hatred of foreigners. It grows instead from economic frustration, political manipulation, fear, and a thin grasp of history. Understand those roots and the pattern becomes legible, in Johannesburg as in Essex.

South Africa's recurring hostility toward fellow Africans is the clearest contemporary example. But the malaise is neither uniquely South African nor uniquely African. It belongs to a long global history in which societies under pressure turn on the foreigner, the biblical scapegoat, and lay their frustrations on its back. The instinct is the same everywhere. What changes is the licence a society gives it.

The first and deepest cause is economic. The end of apartheid was not Uhuru on the jobs front. The structural problems remained and worsened. Expanded unemployment, which counts those who have given up looking, now stands at roughly 42 per cent. On the narrower official measure, the rate has climbed from the low twenties in the early 1990s to about a third today. A generation has come of age knowing nothing but a shrinking economic space. When the formal economy cannot absorb its young, frustration looks for an address. Bereft of ideas, politicians and local agitators supply one. The foreigner, already precarious, becomes the easy target.

This is an old trick. During the Great Depression, minorities across Europe were blamed for economic collapse and national humiliation. In the United States, Chinese workers were accused of depressing wages, leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The function is always the same. It absolves the political elite of accountability for weak governance and structural failure.

The second cause is political opportunism, and it runs through everything else. Anti-immigrant rhetoric mobilises voters, especially in moments of economic anxiety. Politicians compete to present themselves as defenders of the locals, because it wins votes, from the South African townships to Nigel Farage's Essex. The same current powers movements in France, Italy and Hungary, and in the United States, a country built on the brains and backs of immigrants. Brexit was, in large part, a response to anxieties about immigration and a loss of control. Xenophobia is therefore both a social pathology and an effective political instrument, which is precisely what makes it so hard to dislodge.

The third cause is identity. South Africa's liberation struggle forged a powerful identity around the defeat of apartheid. After 1994, the harder question remained: what does it mean to be South African? In moments of uncertainty, nations define belonging negatively. The real citizen, the son of the soil, is set against the outsider. The parallels are global. After the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, new states fought, often violently, over citizenship, language and ethnicity. Nigeria offers a smaller version of the same logic. When a new subnational state is carved out, people who share an ethnic and religious heritage quickly draw fresh dividing lines along the boundary that politics has just introduced, each group seeking advantage. When identity is insecure, people cling to whatever line promises them an edge.

These forces converge most violently at the bottom. Migrants cluster in informal trade, small shops, transport and food, the survival economy. Some work longer hours, accept thinner margins, and draw on tight family networks. Where opportunity is scarce, that creates real friction. The same resentments have surfaced against Chinese traders in nineteenth-century America, against Jews in Nazi Germany, against Asians in Idi Amin's Uganda, against Igbos in parts of Nigeria. Competition does not justify violence. It only explains why resentment becomes combustible, and why it ignites the moment a political actor decides to leverage it for advantage.

South Africa's case carries a deep historical irony. Many African states backed the anti-apartheid struggle diplomatically, financially and politically. Nigeria stood at the front of that effort, passing legislation to fund the ANC and offering its leaders a home in exile. Yet many younger South Africans do not know this history. They see African migrants not as the descendants of allies but as competitors. The amnesia corrodes Pan-African solidarity. Weak supranational identity is not unusual. The European Union has never built a European loyalty stronger than the national one, and the United States, now celebrated as a nation of immigrants, once vilified the Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Catholics and Eastern Europeans as threats to jobs, culture and order. The difference is that those societies, eventually, chose to teach a different story.

This is the deeper point the South African case makes, and it travels. Xenophobia is not, at root, about foreigners. It is what a society reaches for when the state stops delivering, and that failure is not confined to poor or collapsing states. France, Hungary, Brexit Britain and the United States are not failed states by any measure a South African would recognise. But each has a large constituency that feels the government has stopped working for it, through stagnant wages, hollowed-out public services, or a political class that no longer delivers. The foreigner is what frustration reaches for when the real source of decline is harder to name and harder to fix. That is why the same pathology appears in Clacton-on-Sea and in Hénin-Beaumont.

If the diagnosis is governance failure, the remedies follow, but in their proper order. Law enforcement can stop an attack. Immigration reform can regulate the border. Economic policy can widen opportunity, which is the only durable cure. Civic education does something none of these can. It shapes how people imagine their society. It teaches citizens the real sources of unemployment and inequality, exposes scapegoating for what it is, restores historical memory, and shows how migrants add to trade, labour, culture and enterprise. Most of all, it builds a national identity confident enough to include others.

But education raises an uncomfortable question that the well-meaning prescription usually skips. If politicians win by scapegoating, who will teach the lesson that disarms them? Not the political class that profits from the fear. The work falls to the institutions with an interest in the truth and some distance from the ballot box: schools, churches, the press, unions, community associations and popular culture. They must do it against the grain of political incentive, and they must do it continuously, because the temptation to blame the stranger never expires.

The lesson extends well beyond South Africa. Wherever poverty, weak governance, political opportunism and identity anxiety meet, xenophobia can take root, in a township or a wealthy democracy. The antidote is neither silence nor moral scolding. It is the patient, repeated work of teaching a society that the foreigner is not the cause of its decline. The real danger is the politics that trains citizens to fear their neighbours while quietly ignoring the failures that keep everyone poor.

There are many reasons I fell in love with Abuja. One of them was its trees.

After years in Lagos, where the air often felt as though it clasped its fingers around one’s windpipe, Abuja offered something altogether different. Its broad boulevards and generous sidewalks invited long morning walks. Later, when my wife and I took up cycling, those tree-lined avenues became part of our daily ritual. The freshness of the air was almost intoxicating.

The trees were more than landscaping. They gave the city identity. They softened its scale. They reminded you that Abuja had been imagined, not merely built—that someone had once tried to create a capital equal to Nigeria’s ambitions. I missed Lagos’s restaurants and bars, but Abuja’s serenity more than compensated.

Those trees are now disappearing.

Not because they have reached the end of their lives. Not because of disease. Municipal crews have been cutting them down in a methodical sweep, trunk by trunk, removing canopies that took decades to mature. I cannot say with certainty why this is happening. There is no public explanation. From what I can see, many are being sacrificed to make room for solar-powered street lights.

The loss feels larger than the trees themselves.

Abuja was conceived as a corrective to Lagos—a capital that would embody order instead of improvisation, foresight instead of congestion, aspiration instead of accumulation. Its boulevards were part of that vision. To remove mature trees without apparent hesitation suggests that somewhere along the way we have forgotten that a city’s greatest assets are not always the ones we have just built.

I do not blame the men operating the chainsaws, nor even those who signed the work orders. I doubt they act out of malice. If anything, the careful way the felled trunks are gathered suggests an appreciation of their commercial value.

The problem is deeper than bad intentions. It is a failure of imagination.

Development is not simply the accumulation of infrastructure. It is the stewardship of inheritance. Every generation receives assets it did not create and holds them in trust for those yet unborn. A mature tree is one of those assets. It cannot be replaced by a sapling any more than a century can be replaced by a promise.

Perhaps that is what saddens me most.

Within a generation, we have travelled from a society capable of imagining Abuja—a city designed to embody the future we believed Nigeria deserved—to one that no longer instinctively understands why mature trees matter. That distance cannot be measured in kilometres or years. It is measured in felled trunks.

A city is not improved every time something new is added. Sometimes progress lies in knowing what must not be removed.

This post, by itself, changes nothing. A tweet is not activism, and lament is not policy. But perhaps someone in or near my network can place this note before Minister Nyesom Wike.

I hope he receives it in the spirit in which it is is written. Many residents appreciate the investment his administration has made in Abuja’s roads, interchanges, and street lighting. Those improvements matter.

But so do the trees.

The choice was never meant to be between light and shade. A truly modern capital should know how to preserve both.

Because a hundred years from now, no one will remember who installed today’s street lights. But they will know whether we had the wisdom to leave them a city worth walking through.

Wednesday, July 1, 2026

3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. (WAT)

https://bit.ly/DevDisc_HAP

In 1987, Ghanaian author and Human Rights Activist Ama Ata Aidoo offered a provocative reflection on Africa’s relationship with Europe. In her words, “Since we met you people 500 years ago, we’ve given everything, you are still taking… vWhere would the whole Western world be without Africa?” That observation captures a history of conquest, extraction, and colonial domination that continues to shape how Africa is discussed in politics, development, and international affairs. It also points to a less-examined question: what happens when a continent is remembered primarily for what was done to it rather than for the role it played in shaping the world?

History is not merely a record of past events. It shapes assumptions about who creates wealth, who drives change, who possesses agency, and who occupies the centre of global affairs. The dominant story of modernity has long placed Europe at the centre and Africa at the margins, casting the continent as a source of labour and raw materials, a site of intervention, or a recipient of donor support.

It is in this gap between history and perception that Howard W. French’s work is situated. Across journalism, historical scholarship, documentary photography, and decades of reporting from Africa, Asia, and the United States, French has returned to a recurring question: how did a continent so deeply implicated in the making of the modern world come to be understood as peripheral to it? That inquiry began not in the archive but in the field: in A Continent for the Taking, drawing on years of frontline reporting, French contested the Western habit of casting Africa as a theatre of catastrophe rather than a place of full political life — a concern that would later send him back into deep history to explain it. From the historical recovery undertaken in Born in Blackness to the examination of Pan-African possibility in The Second Emancipation, his work traces the consequences of that erasure across history, politics, and development.

In China’s Second Continent, French offers one of the most granular accounts of Chinese engagement in Africa, moving beyond both the language of neo-imperialism and the rhetoric of strategic partnership to reveal the complex realities that shape everyday encounters between Africans and Chinese actors. In a companion study, Everything Under the Heavens, he turns from the ground level to the strategic, tracing how China’s sense of its own history and centrality shapes its ambitions and its conduct toward those at its periphery. As competition between Beijing, Washington, and other global powers intensifies, the question is no longer simply how external powers shape Africa, but how African states, institutions, and citizens exercise agency within a changing global order.

In this edition of The Nextier’s Development Discourse, Patrick O. Okigbo III and Howard W. French will explore the relationship between historical memory and contemporary development. What changes when Africa’s role in shaping the modern world is taken seriously? What remains of the Pan-African project in the twenty-first century? As competition between China, the United States, and other global powers intensifies, how can African states engage the world on terms that advance their own priorities rather than those of external actors? Can contemporary debates about Africa move beyond explanations that position the continent primarily as a victim of history toward a fuller understanding of African agency, responsibility, and possibility?

Nextier: Building the society we want to live in

Contact: info@thenextier.com

, in conversation with Professor

Wednesday, May 6, 2026

3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. (WAT)

https://bit.ly/DevDisc_WGT

What if much of what Africa has been told about development is not only incomplete but historically false?

What if today’s rich countries did not become rich by practising the policy gospel they now preach to poor countries? What if they protected infant industries, subsidised firms, directed credit, controlled foreign investment, built public enterprises, and used the state deliberately to create productive capacity? What if, having climbed the ladder, they now warn others against using the same tools?

Few scholars have forced the world to confront these questions as powerfully as Professor Ha-Joon Chang.

A South Korean-born development economist, Professor Chang spent more than three decades at the University of Cambridge before joining SOAS University of London, where he is *Research Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Centre for Sustainable Structural Transformation. His major works include The Political Economy of Industrial Policy, Kicking Away the Ladder, Bad Samaritans, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Economics: The User’s Guide, and Edible Economics.

At the centre of Chang’s work is a powerful proposition: development is not the natural outcome of free markets; it is the result of deliberate capability-building. Countries become rich by learning to produce more complex goods and services, building firms that can compete, deepening technological capacity, and using the state to coordinate investments that markets alone may not generate.

This argument matters profoundly for Africa.

For decades, many African countries were encouraged to liberalise, privatise, deregulate, open their markets, and reduce the role of the state. These reforms addressed some distortions but, in most cases, did not produce a deep structural transformation. Many economies remain dependent on primary commodities, low-productivity agriculture, informal services, imported manufactures, and fragile fiscal systems.

We have liberalised without transforming.

We have protected without always learning.

We have subsidised without always disciplining.

We have attracted capital without always building capabilities.

This Development Discourse asks a central question: How can African countries build productive economies in a global system that has narrowed the very policy space once used by today’s advanced economies?

The conversation will examine whether manufacturing-led development remains available to Africa in an age of automation, climate pressure, Chinese industrial dominance, and fragmented global value chains. It will also confront the harder domestic questions: How can states support firms without creating permanent rent-seeking? How can protection be linked to performance? How can subsidies be tied to learning? How can public power discipline private capital rather than merely enrich it?

In this conversation, Patrick O. Okigbo III and Professor Ha-Joon Chang will explore the history, theory, politics, and practice of development — and what Africa must do to move from dependence to productive transformation.

Nextier: Building the society we want to live in

info@thenextier.com

The China Teahouse, 1980

Let’s begin in a hypothetical tea house in the hills of rural China, circa 1980. The air carries the scents of charcoal and mint. The rattan chairs are worn smooth; the porcelain cups are chipped but clean.

The men gathered here have endured too much: the famine of the Great Leap Forward, the dislocations of the Cultural Revolution. A faded poster of Chairman Mao overlooks their conversation. Instinctively, they do not speak loudly. Experience has taught them to be circumspect, because what was permissible yesterday could be punished today.

And yet something is shifting. A younger man speaks of leaving the hills for the city. His companion says he would stay but notes, quietly, that he can now keep part of what he produces after meeting the state quota. The party official at the next table pretends not to hear.

One of the older men, a farmer who lost two sons to the famine, sets down his cup and asks how much the young man thinks he can make if he increases his acreage. The young man does not know. He does not trust the leaders in Beijing, but he is willing to try.

That willingness (cautious, incremental, operating within a system he did not trust )is what I want to examine. It is not a minor psychological detail. It is, I will argue, a development variable. And it is one factor Nigeria urgently needs to take seriously.

The Nigeria Meeting Room, 2026

Let’s come back to the present. This is Lagos. The room is well-appointed and connected by Zoom to London, New York, and Toronto. The conversation is informed, comparative, and unsentimental, except about Nigeria itself, which everyone in this meeting would love to see attain its rightful place in the world.

The presenter lays out the data. Poverty rates. Inflation. Exchange rate volatility. Governance failures. The arguments are sophisticated and, in most respects, correct: Nigeria is underperforming its potential. Incentives are misaligned. Reform is episodic and reversible. The theories are canvassed: prebendalism, resource curse, weak state capacity, fractured elite consensus, and the long shadow of colonial extraction. Most conclude it is a mixture of all of these things.

Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, the woman who runs a logistics firm in Apapa leans back and goes quiet. She has heard this conversation before. The data is accurate, the diagnosis familiar, but she has three containers stuck at the port, a team she cannot pay at month’s end, and this room is not giving her anything she can use.

On the Zoom screen, the man who left Lagos for London eight years ago appears more animated. He holds a well-known position that “Nigeria is failing” without bearing its daily costs. He is not wrong. But he has also quietly exited. The mental exit came first; the physical one followed. Those who can, leave. Those who cannot, pray, pay their tithe, and wait on God. Those who stay behind engage the system with deliberate caution, calibrating their exposure, hedging their bets, never fully leaning in.

Despair does not hold up a placard. It is a quiet withdrawal of agency.

This is what despair looks like in practice. It does not hold up a placard. Rather, it is a quiet withdrawal of agency: a rational, self-protective retreat from a system that has repeatedly made investment feel like folly. And it is, I will argue, actively destructive to the development Nigeria needs.

Despair as a Development Variable

The academic literature on development is rich with structural explanations for why countries like Nigeria underperform. They include, but are not limited to, Douglass North on institutions, Acemoglu and Robinson on extractive governance, Mushtaq Khan on political settlements. These frameworks are illuminating, and none of them is wrong about Nigeria’s challenges. But they share a common assumption: that once you diagnose the structural problem, the question of agency resolves itself. Change the incentives, and the actors follow.

That assumption is incomplete. Despair is not simply the rational response to a misaligned incentive structure. It is also a cause of further misalignment. When the logistics entrepreneur stops pushing back against the port system, when the reform-minded civil servant stops proposing changes she knows will be reversed, when the diaspora member converts their emotional stake into just remittances for consumption instead of investments, the system loses exactly the pressure points it needs to shift.

Despair functions like a tax on the reform dividend. It is an active force that reduces the pool of actors willing to engage, test, and build within imperfect systems. Given that development is the process of imperfect systems being stretched and gradually improved by actors who choose to engage them anyway, despair, by shrinking that pool, slows development in ways that structural analysis alone does not capture.

Despair functions like a tax on the reform dividend.

This is what I mean when I say despair is a developmental variable. Feelings do not determine outcomes. However, the aggregate willingness of enough people to act within a flawed system is one of the conditions that determines whether the system eventually improves. Change comes when people are willing to act before the system is fixed, before conditions are right, in the face of uncertainty and without guarantee.

What China Actually Looked Like

The comparison between Nigeria and China is often made and often misread. Either China’s transformation is treated as miraculous, driven by state capacity Nigeria cannot replicate, or it is dismissed as irrelevant because of its authoritarian structure. Both readings are too convenient.

Feelings do not determine outcomes. But the aggregate willingness of enough people to act within a flawed system helps determine whether the system eventually improves.

In 1980, China was significantly poorer than Nigeria on a per capita basis. Its postgraduate enrolment stood at roughly 21,000 for a population approaching one billion. Nigeria today has approximately 2.9 per cent of adults aged twenty-five and above with at least a master’s degree. In 1980, China had 0.8 physicians per 1,000 people; Nigeria today has 0.4, which is lower but not categorically different. China consumed 282 kilowatt-hours per person in 1980; Nigeria today manages 130 to 145. China’s road network was extensive but largely unpaved; by rough estimates, it had fewer paved kilometres per person than Nigeria does today. This was not a country with obvious structural advantages. It was, by most measures, in a worse position.

The harder objection is that China Communist Party provided a coherent structure that could channel experimentation without risking systemic collapse. That is a serious point, but it doesn’t provide a full picture. China entered the reform era with corruption embedded across party and state institutions, factional struggles at the top, a bureaucracy made timid by years of ideological punishment, and legitimacy damaged by the excesses of the preceding decade.

What changed China was not the prior absence of dysfunction. It was the gradual emergence of a willingness among farmers, local officials, and early entrepreneurs to test the system’s boundaries before they were formally redrawn. Party coherence was, in many respects, a consequence of that testing, not its precondition. Officials tolerated early deviation not because the system authorised it, but because the results of toleration were visible and hard to argue against.

The developmental lesson is not that Nigeria needs China’s political system. It is that transformation tends to begin at the margins with actors who engage imperfect systems rather than waiting for them to be perfected. The question is whether Nigeria has, or can generate, enough of those actors.

Pockets of the Possible

The evidence that such actors already exist in Nigeria is more substantial than a despair-informed reading of the country tends to allow.

What changed China was not the prior absence of dysfunction. It was the gradual emergence of a willingness among farmers, local officials, and early entrepreneurs to test the system’s boundaries before they were formally redrawn.

Tosin Eniolorunda’s MoniePoint used mobile phone numbers as the basis for account creation (a workaround for an identity infrastructure that did not exist) and became one of the country’s fastest-growing financial institutions. It did not wait for the Central Bank of Nigeria to redesign the payments architecture. It found the gap and moved. Kola Masha’s Babban Gona organised smallholder farmers, many of whom had long been treated as development liabilities, into value chains that deliver dignified livelihoods and commercial returns. The Abubakars at L&Z Integrated Farms did comparable work with pastoralists in the north, setting up milk collection points in some of the riskiest operating environments, thereby putting more wealth in the hands of the rural poor and creating a multi-billion-naira business. These are operating businesses, not pilot projects. They work within, and sometimes around, a dysfunctional system. They did not wait for all the kinks to be resolved. They did not wait for a perfect operating environment.

Within the state, Ifueko Omoigu-Okauru’s leadership of the Federal Inland Revenue Service demonstrated that institutional reform is possible under Nigerian conditions. She did not inherit a functioning system. She found a dysfunctional one, introduced the structures and technology that produced measurable improvements in revenue performance, and quickly built internal credibility to create a protected space before the political environment could reverse them. That is a model, not a miracle. Ernest Ndukwe’s stewardship of the telecommunications revolution that connected 200 million Nigerians in two decades is another. Professor Bart Nnaji built a power plant in Aba and fought the predatory elite for years until he found space to spread his wings. Aliko Dangote built a refinery that every sane person told him not to build. He is still fighting his battles. These people refused the counsel of despair at exactly the moment it felt most rational.

What distinguishes these cases is not that they operated in a functioning system. It is that they operated at all.

Against Despair

Let me be precise about what I am arguing, and what I am not.

I am not arguing that Nigeria’s structural challenges are overstated. About 63 per cent of Nigerians live in multidimensional poverty. Growth of 3 to 4 per cent annually is insufficient for a country whose population is expanding at twice that rate. Infrastructure deficits are real. Policies are often well-designed but weakly enforced. The incentive structure rewards short-term extraction over long-term value creation. The people in that Lagos room who describe this accurately are not wrong.

I am not arguing for optimism either. Starry-eyed nationalism that refuses to look at the data does not cure despair. It is despair’s mirror image: both avoid the discipline of engaging with reality as it is.

What I am arguing is this: despair (the systematic withdrawal of agency from an imperfect system) is not a neutral response to Nigeria’s condition. It is an active force that worsens that condition. It is a political decision. It reduces the pool of people willing to test, build, and push within the system. It turns potential reformers into spectators. It makes the hedged position seem the only rational option. And in doing so, it removes the very pressure that development requires. In a country where the deficit of engaged agency may be as binding as the deficit of infrastructure or capital, that is not a private decision. It is a public cost.

Nations do not transform when conditions become perfect. They transform when enough people decide to act before they are.

The men in that hypothetical Chinese tea house did not have better data than the people in our Lagos room. They did not possess clearer models of political economy or superior theories of institutional change. What shifted, however tentatively, was a willingness to act in the face of uncertainty. Not confidence. Not optimism. A willingness to test. To engage the system as it was rather than waiting for it to become what it should be.

Nigeria stands at a similar threshold. The question is not whether the country’s challenges are real. They are. The question is whether enough Nigerians will choose to engage the system as it is, to find and exploit its pockets of possibility, to build within its constraints rather than waiting for those constraints to be removed. Because nations do not transform when conditions become perfect. They transform when enough people decide to act before they are.

The alternative to despair is not cheerfulness. It is discipline. The quiet, persistent, pragmatic discipline of people who have read the situation accurately, carry no illusions about the difficulty of what they are doing, and choose to act anyway. Not because the odds are good. But because acting is what the situation requires.

The alternative to despair is not cheerfulness. It is discipline.

Return, one last time, to that tea house in China. What you observe is not a population confident in its future. It is a population beginning, carefully, to act within it. The scars are visible. The caution is real. But the cups are set down. The questions are being asked. The willingness—fragile, tentative, precious—is there.

That is where transformation begins. Not with certainty. With the decision to try.

Patrick O. Okigbo III

Founding Partner, Nextier • April 2026

Substack: patrickokigbo3.substack.com

YouTube: www.youtube.com/@pokigbo3

The intersection of public policy and lived experience often reveals a stark gap between data-driven indicators and human reality. In this episode of Nextier’s Development Discourse, which was held on Wednesday, April 22, 2026, and Chika Unigwe explored how fiction can serve as a doorway into the complex structures of state failure, reproductive coercion, and the political economy of survival in Nigeria. Drawing on Dr Chika’s body of work, particularly her novel Grace and earlier works including On Black Sister Street, The Middle Daughter, and Night Dancer, the conversation examined the ways in which stories are indispensable tools for humanising data and creating policies that actually serve the people.

A central theme of the discussion was the illusion of change. While researching Grace, Chika discovered that during COVID-19, abandoned babies in Enugu had become so numerous that the Ministry of Women Affairs had to secure additional space to house them. It was not an isolated crisis but a reflection of deeper pressures long in place. Set across the Abacha era and the COVID-19 period, Grace draws attention to continuity rather than change, showing how the same conditions keep producing the same outcomes. While Nigeria has seen structural shifts over the thirty years separating those two moments, including increased visibility for women in politics and the establishment of domestic violence centres, cultural and social changes remain marginal.

As Chika noted, structural fixes will fail to transfer into meaningful social progress as long as mindsets remain unchanged. This was illustrated by the story of a brilliant girl whose parents chose marriage over her ambition to become an accountant, simply because they believed marriage was as good an option as education for a daughter.

This led to a critical interrogation of agency. Chika questioned whether we overstate agency when discussing the choices made by Nigerian women. The women in her novels, whether the sex workers in On Black Sister Street or Grace running an illegal baby factory in Enugu, appear on the surface to be making decisions. But she argued that their decisions are not made from limitless options. They are made within a very narrow, prestructured field of possibility, shaped by economic exclusion, gendered expectations, and the failure of state support systems. To describe this, she drew on nego-feminism, a concept developed by scholar Obioma Nnaemeka, in which women manoeuvre and negotiate within restrictive cultural systems to gain a semblance of agency. This is not true autonomy but a form of survival intelligence.

Dr Chika distinguished this survival intelligence from exploitation. While the women in her novels work in morally ambiguous conditions, they are often the ones being exploited by a system that extracts labour from their bodies. She refused to write these characters as simple victims, insisting that they contain multitudes and must be rendered with integrity to reflect their full humanity. In this distorted landscape, she drew on Brian Stevenson’s observation that the opposite of justice is not injustice but poverty, noting that wealth frequently purchases outcomes that remain out of reach for the poor.

This systemic distortion was most visible in the baby factory at the centre of Grace, which Chika identified as a market response to institutional and cultural failure. These illegal operations proliferate because the legal adoption process in Nigeria is frustrating, bureaucratic, and riddled with corruption. At the same time, a woman’s worth remains tied to her fecundity, creating intense demand for children to secure social respectability. Grace herself believes she is doing good work, placing abandoned babies with families who want them. That belief does not erase the harm, but it explains the persistence of such systems. Dr Chika advocated for dismantling and criminalising these factories rather than regulating them, while insisting that dismantling alone is insufficient. As long as legal adoption remains inaccessible and social expectations unchanged, demand will persist.

The discourse also explored how respectability politics polices women’s bodies. A woman’s social standing is frequently tied to whether she has been pregnant respectably, a standard never applied to men. Even women who break through professionally remain constrained by a patriarchal hierarchy that treats marriage as a woman’s ultimate achievement. Successful women are often introduced by reference to their husbands, a reminder that no level of achievement places a woman outside that system. Older women are not exempt. Many act as foot soldiers of the same structures that constrained them, perpetuating unfair traditions because they are not incentivised to dismantle what grants them status.

The conversation also addressed the complicity of the elite, who bypass broken systems rather than fixing them. Whether paying bribes to clear bureaucratic hurdles or using wealth to secure outcomes unavailable to others, this bypass removes the incentive for reform. Dr Chika was candid that she is not outside this dynamic. Finding justifications for these workarounds, she argued, is precisely how the country remains broken.

Ultimately, Dr Chika viewed her role as a writer to strike at the conscience of people so that cultural change can catch up with structural reform. The discourse closed by challenging policymakers, civil servants, and citizens to consider whether, through action or silence, they have decided that the current cost of survival for Nigerian women is a price worth paying.

I arrived at the beautiful campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), in September 1990, angry. Who wouldn’t be? Nigeria had failed the generation before mine and seemed determined to do the same to mine. Even as we took in the air of the campus, there was already the sense of a gloomy future. The military had their leprous fingers on all the levers and their jackboots on our necks. Joining the Students’ Union Government was a natural choice, and I was down for whatever was required.

Those were the days when activism was practised on the streets, not from the protective cover of a phone screen. The khaki boys, with their little sense of humour, portended real risks. The students—with brains infused with Fanon’s sermons—were not in the mood for laughs. Youthful exuberance and a sense of invincibility took care of the butterflies. But what gave our wings real lift were the stories of those who had walked those same grounds.

UNN had its share of heroes. In my era, three names stood out: Olu Oguibe, Chima Ubani, and Innocent Chukwuma. They were only a few years ahead of us, but their exploits were already legendary. Their names did more than inspire. They steadied our nerves. Their stories asserted that our resistance had a rich lineage, and that even in a season of national asphyxiation, ordinary mortals could still steel their backs and strive “to restore the dignity of man.” In the mind of a 17-year-old, that mattered more than you may be able to imagine. Their myth formed a kind of protective blanket under which we could carry on the struggle, assured of victory: Aluta Continua, Victoria Ascerta.

But with age comes a clearer understanding of what makes some lives matter more than others. It was not simply that they resisted or put themselves in harm’s way for others. Many resisted. It was that the best among them found a way to convert anger into a disciplined public purpose. They moved from outrage to institution-building. They understood that protest may shake the barricades, but it is institutions that keep the doors open to all. That, to my mind, is what made Innocent Chukwuemeka Chukwuma such a consequential figure.

Earlier today, a few of us gathered at the Centre for Memories in Enugu to honour his memory at the 2026 Innocent Chukwuemeka Chukwuma Memorial Lecture. It was a fitting venue. In 2017, when a few of us came together to start the Centre, Innocent—then the West Africa Head of the Ford Foundation—gave both moral and financial support to the idea. That was typical of him. He did not merely applaud good ideas from afar; he leaned into them. He recognised that memory, like citizenship, needs institutions if it is to endure and play its role in development.

Innocent belonged to that generation of Nigerians who came of age under military rule but refused to adjust to life under oppression. He emerged from student activism into the fight for human rights. He rose to national prominence, first through the Civil Liberties Organisation, then through the CLEEN Foundation, which became one of the most respected justice-sector institutions on the continent. In a country where armchair analysts dominate, Innocent leaned into practical reforms: policing, access to justice, public safety, democratic accountability. Later, at the Ford Foundation, he widened the scope of his influence across West Africa, remaining consistent to his core. His evolution from an activist into an institution-builder is proof that indignation, properly disciplined, can become architecture.

That is why Innocent’s life deserves more than praise. It deserves study.

Nigeria has never lacked angry young people. What we have lacked are enough people who can refine anger into development craftsmanship—into ideas and organisations that are resilient enough to outlive the moment that produced them. Innocent was one of those rare persons who didn’t just bask in the righteous glow of being able to point out what’s wrong but also build what was necessary.

As the tributes came in today, my mind returned to a line from one of his daughters at his funeral: “Daddy gave his all. He left emptied.” What a tribute. What a way to live. In that one sentence lies an entire philosophy of life. To leave this earth emptied is to have spent oneself on something larger than oneself. It is to refuse the miniature ambition of merely passing through the world intact. It is to insist, instead, on leaving everything in that field. It is to arrive at the mouth of one’s grave with an empty tank.

Every tribute at the memorial lecture, in one way or another, sought that truth. Each speaker tried to capture the impact of Innocent’s life; how many people, causes, and institutions were enlarged by his presence. On my flight from Abuja to Enugu, I ran into a friend who, on hearing where I was headed, said: “Innocent was one of those human beings who planted a tree even when they knew they would not enjoy its shade.” That is the measure of the man.

We live in an age that mistakes visibility for value and “follows” for achievement. Innocent’s life points in a different direction. The worth of a life lies in the courage, structure, and hope it leaves behind for others. Some people burn brightly for a moment. Others become like the star guiding later travellers. Innocent belonged to the latter company.

For some of us, his significance is also personal. He was one of the names that floated through Nsukka like legend when I was seventeen and angry at a country that seemed determined to waste us. Decades later, one can see more clearly what one only dimly understood then: that the true heroes are not merely those who shout against the darkness, but those who build lamps, wire them into institutions, and leave them behind for others.

May the memory of Innocent Chukwuemeka Chukwuma remain evergreen. May it continue to light the path for generations yet unborn. And may more of us learn from the example of his life: to turn anger into purpose, purpose into institutions, and institutions into shelter for others. For in the end, perhaps the highest calling is not simply to have lived, but to have left—gloriously, usefully, and honourably—emptied.

It is another last Friday of the month, and the Nextier policy book club is in full session. The review is done. The moderator is raising questions and directing the discussion. The conversation has crossed that threshold from theory to applicability.

Then she takes the mic.

She’s read the scholars. She understands the arguments. But understanding has not yielded inner peace. Her emotions oscillate — from despair to something like hope, and back again. She is committed to the Nextier mantra — “building the society we want to live in” — but sometimes it feels like patching a basket that leaks faster with every threading of the reed.

I let the thought hang like smoke in a bar. Others add their doubts. The eyes watch me for a response. I take my time. Some questions deserve the respect of a pause.

When I speak, I avoid the familiar catalogue of Nigerian dysfunction. Everyone in that room lives it. Many of them measure it for our proprietary databases of development indicators. Nor do I reach for optimism; this is not a room that responds to performance. Instead, I tell a set of stories — because the most important thing I know about national transformation is that it has happened before, repeatedly, in places that gave their people every reason to stop expecting it.

Around 1980, China’s income per person was comparable to — and in some estimates lower than — Nigeria’s, before diverging dramatically over the following decades. South Korea in 1960 was poorer than Ghana. Spain spent nearly four decades under Franco before negotiating one of the twentieth century’s cleaner democratic transitions. Colombia appeared, for decades, to be losing a war against itself, then produced a peace agreement because enough people refused to accept ungovernability as permanent. Rwanda rebuilt a functioning state within a generation of genocide. Botswana made a quiet decision at independence — to treat public resources as public — and compounded that choice over the next 50 years.

The routes and development doctrines differ. Some embraced Liberalism; others Communism. Some had a moment of rupture; others evolved, gradually, over time, trying and failing with different approaches. None followed a linear progression. None offers a copy-and-paste model for Nigeria. What they share is a realisation that enough people must decide that despair is a luxury they cannot afford.

Read that word again: luxury.

The dominant mood among serious Nigerians today is not apathy. It is something more sophisticated — and more dangerous: the conviction that the system is sealed. That the political class has captured every lever of consequence. That entry points are closed. That even the most committed reformer is simply rearranging deck chairs as the Titanic takes on the sea.

This is not irrational. It is, in many respects, a reasonable reading of the evidence.

But it is also incomplete.

The mistake is in the way we imagine change. We default to rupture — a dramatic break, a single moment when the edifice cracks and something new takes over. A heroic figure appears, sword of integrity in hand, slays the dragon, and the rest of us applaud — or post about it.

That version of change exists. Mandela and post-apartheid South Africa. Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore. To an extent, Kwame Nkrumah in 1957. However, these moments are rare. And waiting for it is one of the most reliable ways to ensure it never arrives.

The more common pattern is cumulative.

Think in concentric circles: a Local Government Chairperson in Borno who fixes primary healthcare delivery; a budget advocacy group in Owerri that forces a line item into public view; a policy team in Akure whose analysis is too rigorous to ignore; an NGO in Jos that convenes community leaders month after month for difficult conversations that lead to trust. None of these actors controls the national picture. Most cannot see each other at all. But each circle expands. And where circles meet, the ground shifts.

Inflection points are rarely the work of a single hand. They are the accumulated pressure of many hands pushing, imperfectly but persistently, in roughly the same direction across time.

I am aware that this model has an adversary. If the system can capture and neutralise reform faster than it accumulates, then the concentric circles may never meet. Patronage networks can absorb the well-intentioned Chairperson. The rigorous policy paper can be filed and forgotten. The community trust built over the years can be shattered by a single election cycle of ethnic mobilisation. These are real possibilities, and anyone who says otherwise is not paying serious attention to Nigeria. What the historical record suggests, however, is that capture is never total and neutralisation is reversible. The Nigerian state is formidable at frustrating reform, but it has never been formidable enough to stop it entirely. The basket leaks. It has always leaked. But it has also, despite the challenges, continued to carry water.

Time, of course, is where the second anxiety lives.

People in pain want the pain to stop pronto. That is not a weakness; it is human. But national repair cannot be measured in electoral cycles. Decades are more like it. The refusal to accept this has broken more Nigerian political energy than any single maladministration.

We invest everything in a candidate or a reform. It disappoints — as it almost always does, because no single administration can undo what took generations to construct — and we collapse into despair, waiting for the next saviour.

That cycle is not incidental. It is part of the pathology.

We need a different relationship with time. Not passive patience, but clarity. A sharper distinction between impatience with actors and patience with outcomes.

Hold actors to account — relentlessly. But do not confuse a disappointing administration with a closed future.

Nigeria moved from the stagnation of the Abacha years to 7% growth within half a decade of his death in 1998, and sustained that trajectory for another decade. The ground that felt sealed cracked open — not through miracle, but because enough variables shifted in enough places at about the same moment, prepared by people who had kept working when the outcome was not visible or certain.

This is the argument I made that evening, and it bears repeating.

Those of us who have accepted the responsibility of thinking seriously about Nigeria’s development challenges do not have the luxury of oscillating between hope and despair. That is not a motivational claim. It is a structural one.

Despair among the analytical class is not a private emotion. It has consequences. It withdraws the people the country most needs from the spaces where they matter most.

It is, in that sense, a political act — and not a constructive one.

So, I made a practical suggestion.

Register with a political party. Not all of you in the same one — go where your convictions take you, but go. Attend ward meetings. Sit in the rooms where party members decide who should stand for them. Become part of that deliberation.

Parties do not change through Facebook posts. They change through presence.

And if the call goes further, take a sabbatical. Run for Local Government Chairperson. Your desk will be here when you return. Local government office remains one of the most powerful — and most squandered — levers in Nigeria’s constitutional order. The people best equipped to run them are often sitting in policy seminars — and policy book clubs — analysing those who do.

After the session, she walks over to me.

She is not fully persuaded — she is too careful a thinker for that. But something has shifted. Not from despair to optimism. Optimism is fragile; it shatters too easily against the next news cycle.

What I see instead is sturdier.

Resolve.

The quiet decision to stay in the fight, regardless of how long the fight takes. She may never join a political party. But a seed has been planted. It will germinate — somewhere, in some form.

That is what Nigeria needs.

Not a nation of optimists.

A nation of people too stubborn to quit.

There is an old Greek proverb that posits that a society becomes great when people plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit. It speaks to the discipline of long-term investment, the willingness to commit resources today for outcomes that may only materialise in the future. That is the ambition that impact investing claims for itself. Scholars have traced this ambition to the concept of patient capital—the deployment of finance over longer time horizons to achieve social and environmental returns alongside financial ones—a framework popularised by Jacqueline Novogratz and institutionalised through the work of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), whose annual surveys have tracked the field’s growth from a nascent cluster of pioneering funds to an estimated $1.571 trillion in assets under management.¹

On Wednesday, March 25, 2026, Etemore Glover approached that ambition from within the system, but with a more exacting lens. In conversation with Patrick O. Okigbo III on The Nextier’s Development Discourse, she examined whether the field, in practice, meets its own claims of intentionality, measurability, and real outcomes. And in a discussion that refused to stay comfortable, she found the field both closer to that ideal and further from it than the headlines suggest.

What makes this conversation different from the standard impact investing defence is who is having it. Glover is not a spokesperson for the field. She is the CEO of the Impact Investors Foundation, a founding architect of Nigeria’s National Advisory Board for Impact Investing, and someone who brought commercial banking rigour to a space that badly needed it. She has spent years inside the field’s most frustrating contradictions, watching well-designed solutions delay at the last mile, and she has chosen candour over comfort.

The field itself, Glover explains, has genuinely matured. From the thin, poorly coordinated ecosystem she entered in 2019, impact investing in Nigeria has grown into something with real instruments, clearer definitions, and a widening circle of investors who understand what they are doing and why. That progress deserves to be named. But it sits alongside a problem that progress alone cannot solve. Capital exists. Demand exists. Frameworks exist. And still, the money is not reaching the frontline enterprises that need it most. The chain is broken in three places: too few investment-ready businesses, too few local fund managers with the skill and track record to move capital, and a policy environment that has not taken the leadership role the ecosystem requires. This diagnostic mirrors what Lütge and Uhl describe as the structural gap in emerging market finance—where the aggregation of capital and the translation of that capital into productive enterprise remain disconnected by institutional and informational asymmetries.²

That last point from Glover is where the conversation finds its sharpest edge. She knows the Nigeria Wholesale Impact Investment Fund intimately. She helped commission the work. A structure built to blend catalytic government capital with pension fund money, develop local intermediaries, and push impact capital beyond the geography of Lagos and Abuja. The government was meant to lay the foundation stone. It has not. What follows in the conversation is not frustration performed for an audience. It is a serious attempt to understand why. Political will is part of the answer. But Patrick pushes further, surfacing something that development literature has not fully resolved: continuity of party, continuity of bureaucracy, but discontinuity of will or ownership of a well-designed policy between political generations. Richard Rose, in his 1990 paper, theorised that most of what any government does is inherited from prior governments. New leaders, even within the same party, spend the overwhelming majority of their time managing commitments made by predecessors without real ownership and without memory of the fights and efforts to build the coalitions, or of why certain trade-offs were made.³ This produces what Rose calls the “dead hand” of inherited commitment: technically alive, politically inert. Neither Glover nor Patrick pretends to have a clean answer. That honesty is itself instructive.

Underneath all of it runs the argument Glover returns to with the most force. Africa cannot build its future on foreign capital. Development finance institution money, she points out, is another government’s money. It can’t substitute for local ownership. Local pension funds are sitting on trillions of naira, of which close to 70 per cent flows into government instruments rather than the real sectors that create jobs and drive growth. Local institutional investors are largely absent from a market they should be leading. Until that changes, the ecosystem will continue to depend on external actors to fill gaps that only local commitment can permanently close. This concern is well-supported in the literature. Morten Jerven has argued that Africa’s development financing is structurally dependent on external flows, thereby compromising the sovereignty of economic planning.⁴ Similarly, Celestin Monga and Justin Yifu Lin have noted that the domestication of long-term capital is a precondition for structural economic transformation in low-income countries.⁵ This is not merely a technical observation. It is a moral one. Development, Glover is saying, belongs to the people it is meant to serve. And the capital that drives it should come from the same place.

The discourse closed on a vision that earns its optimism. A continent where the $331 billion financing gap facing small and medium enterprises begins to close—a figure the International Finance Corporation has documented across Sub-Saharan Africa, driven by structural exclusion from formal credit markets and the limited reach of traditional financial intermediaries.⁶ Where young people have access to economic opportunity. Where basic services—healthcare, education, financial inclusion—are funded not by aid but by local investors with a long-term stake in the outcome. Where no one is left behind because the system was designed, from the beginning, with that purpose in mind. This is precisely what Mariana Mazzucato describes as mission-oriented investing: the alignment of capital allocation with societal goals, structured not around philanthropic impulse but around the architecture of markets deliberately shaped to deliver public value.⁷

That is the tree. Ancient, patient, and worth planting. The people who need to pick up the shovel are not far away. They are in the room.

REFERENCES

1. Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). GIINsight: Sizing the Impact Investing Market 2024. New York: GIIN, 2024. See also Novogratz, Jacqueline. The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World. Rodale Books, 2009.

2. Lütge, Christoph, and Markus Uhl. Business Ethics: An Economically Informed Perspective. Oxford University Press, 2021. On structural gaps in emerging market finance, see also Claessens, Stijn, and Neeltje van Horen. ‘Foreign Banks: Trends and Impact.’ Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 46, no. S1 (2014): 295–326.

3. Rose, Richard. “Inheritance Before Choice in Public Policy.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 2, no. 3 (July 1990): 263–291. https://doi.org/10.1177/0951692890002003002. Rose opens with the axiom that “policy makers are heirs before they are choosers.” His central argument is that when a group of politicians enters office, the inherited commitments of past government must be accepted as givens, carried forward by institutional commitments grounded in laws, organisations, and budgets that are more important than the preferences of individuals. The paper is particularly relevant here because Rose shows that policy durability does not require political enthusiasm; it requires only institutional inertia. The inverse holds with equal force: policies that depend on active political ownership—rather than budgetary lock-in—are precisely those most vulnerable to succession, even when the successor shares the predecessor’s party label. The Wholesale Impact Investment Fund is a textbook case of this vulnerability: never embedded in legislation, never secured a dedicated budget line, and never granted the institutional mass that would make ignoring it politically costly. For the book-length elaboration of the same thesis, see also Rose, Richard, and Phillip L. Davies. Inheritance in Public Policy: Change Without Choice in Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

4. Jerven, Morten. Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong. Zed Books, 2015. See in particular the argument on aid dependency and institutional planning capacity in Chapters 5–7.

5. Monga, Celestin, and Justin Yifu Lin, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Volume II: Policies and Practices. Oxford University Press, 2015. On domestic resource mobilisation as a prerequisite for structural transformation, see Lin’s introductory chapter.

6. International Finance Corporation (IFC). MSME Finance Gap: Assessment of the Shortfalls and Opportunities in Financing Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises in Emerging Markets. World Bank Group, 2017. Updated estimates for Sub-Saharan Africa are cited in subsequent IFC working papers on SME finance.

7. Mazzucato, Mariana. Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. Allen Lane, 2021. On aligning capital allocation with public value, see also Mazzucato’s earlier work: The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. PublicAffairs, 2018.

Walk through the hustle and bustle of Lagos, Accra, Nairobi and most of Africa, and you will notice an abundance of ingenious ideas. Engineers improvise solutions, entrepreneurs build tools that route around broken systems, and citizens constantly adapt to hard constraints. What is harder to find is a system that turns these ideas into institutions capable of solving problems at scale. That tension between abundant creativity and fragile systems lies at the heart of the Development Discourse session held on March 4, 2026, between Patrick O. Okigbo III, Founding Partner at Nextier, and Bright Simons, one of Africa’s leading minds.

For Bright Simons, the bottleneck is not creativity. Africa has inventors in abundance. Simons draws a clear line between invention and innovation. Invention is a gifted individual producing something remarkable. Innovation is a system that can reproduce that capability consistently, at scale, when it is needed. Africa has plenty of the first. The second is what keeps failing. He frames this failure as an underbuilt architecture of intermediaries, trust and policy.

A crucial part of that architecture lies in the connective roles that enable complex systems to function. Simons calls these actors “transmediaries.” They are individuals and organisations whose task is to link the different pieces of a value chain so that layers of complexity become simple for the end user. In more mature ecosystems, these roles abound. In many African settings, they are thin or missing, forcing entrepreneurs to carry far more of the system themselves. A founder may have to design the product, educate the customer, build distribution, negotiate with regulators and hunt for capital all at once. Responsibilities that would typically be distributed across a network of specialised actors in more advanced economies are piled onto single enterprises in Africa, and even the most capable teams eventually reach their limits.

Beneath this overload lies a deeper constraint: trust.

Many African entrepreneurs learn early that institutions are rarely neutral partners. Governments can appear unpredictable or predatory. Banks are wary of ventures whose risks they struggle to judge. Investors may operate far from the realities of local markets. Instead of an ecosystem built on cooperation, founders encounter a landscape that demands constant defensive negotiation. Collaboration becomes rare, specialisation shallow, and the quiet connective work that allows systems to scale is seldom rewarded.

Seen in this light, the challenge of innovation extends beyond the behaviour of individual entrepreneurs or investors. It reflects the wider environment in which political and policy decisions are made. Simons, therefore, places the question of innovation inside a broader institutional story, arguing that the fate of new ideas mirrors the relationship between politics and policy.

Politics, he suggests, works by aggregation. To win power, politicians must compress complicated social problems into messages that large numbers of citizens can grasp and rally around. Promises about jobs, electricity or national sovereignty work in campaigns precisely because they simplify realities that are otherwise intricate.

Policy operates in the opposite direction. Once those promises move into implementation, they must be unpacked into technical decisions about pricing rules, regulatory design, procurement systems and institutional mandates. What appears in politics as a single promise quickly unfolds into a web of detailed choices.

Most citizens understandably do not follow these details closely. Public debate stays energetic, but the signal it sends to those designing policy is faint. Simons calls this condition political dysphonia, a situation in which constant political argument produces little guidance for the technical work of governing.

To clarify the consequences, he distinguishes political accountability from policy accountability. The usual contrast between democracy and authoritarianism, he argues, often hides the dynamics that matter most for institutional performance. Some countries combine strong electoral competition with strong scrutiny of policy design. Scandinavian states and South Korea illustrate this balance, in which governments face both electoral pressure and sustained scrutiny from think tanks, academic communities, and engaged citizens who interrogate implementation details.

Other systems show different combinations. China has limited electoral accountability but relatively strong policy scrutiny inside party institutions and research networks. Ministers may not answer directly to voters, yet their choices are debated intensely within policy circles.

Many African democracies are in a different position. Political accountability can be vigorous. Elections are competitive, protests sometimes reshape decisions, and the press can be outspoken. Policy accountability, however, is far thinner. Few institutions have the capacity to scrutinise electricity tariffs, mineral regimes or education reforms in depth, and detailed, sustained evaluation of policy design is rare.

In such an environment, political incentives shift. Leaders learn that electoral survival depends more on messaging than on the patient refinement of policy systems. Programmes that fail may continue simply because admitting failure carries political risk.

Simons describes the deeper rupture with a term he calls “Katanomics,” from Greek roots suggesting the shattering of laws and norms. When the connection between politics and policy weakens, the architecture of governance begins to fragment. Laws appear without the policy history that might have informed them. Policies are announced without a coherent political vision. Institutional frameworks emerge without the capabilities required to run them. Political promises, policy documents and regulatory structures sit side by side rather than reinforcing one another.

In healthier systems, policy outcomes feed back into political decision-making. When programmes fail, the evidence generated by evaluation shapes future choices. Simons calls this a national learning cycle. It requires both a policy community able to analyse results and a political environment willing to respond. In many African settings, both elements are fragile.

His own experience with MPedigree shows what is at stake. In 2010, the initiative helped Nigeria introduce one of the earliest systems that allowed consumers to verify medicines via mobile phone codes, tracing drugs from factory to patient. It was a pioneering technological and institutional innovation. Yet over time, frameworks developed elsewhere have come to dominate global standards. For Simons, this is an example of “idea hegemony.” When countries do not organise around their own innovations, they gradually lose influence over the standards that govern global systems.

The question then becomes how to change that trajectory. Simons suggests that part of the answer lies in digital public infrastructure. Not isolated apps but shared institutional platforms that reduce the cost of trust and coordination across entire sectors. Systems that digitise geological information, streamline regulatory compliance or enable universal digital services could create the connective tissue that innovators currently struggle to build on their own. By lowering the cost of coordination, such infrastructure can help ingenious ideas travel from isolated breakthroughs to institutions that work.

By the end of the conversation, one message was clear. Africa does not suffer from a shortage of ideas. It suffers from a shortage of systems that allow those ideas to grow into durable capabilities. Until the architecture of trust, policy and institutional coordination is strengthened, even the most brilliant innovations will struggle to move beyond moments of ingenuity into actual development.

Click here to watch the full discussion between Patrick O. Okigbo III and Bright Simons

Click the images below to watch prior sessions of the Development Discourse with Patrick O. Okigbo III

ABOUT BRIGHT SIMONS

As Founder and President of mPedigree, Bright Simons leads a social enterprise spanning three continents, partnering with governments, Fortune 500 companies, and grassroots groups to deploy innovative technologies. He serves as Honorary Vice President (formerly Vice President for Research) at the IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, a top African think tank, where he drives evidence-based work on governance, anti-corruption, and policy.

A prolific writer and commentator for Harvard Business Review, Quartz, BBC, Bright advises global bodies and has held roles with the World Economic Forum, Care International, and others. Recent highlights include Co-Chair of the WEF’s Global Development Council and recognition in New African Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Africans for 2025. His accolades include Skoll Awardee, World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, TED Fellow, Ashoka Fellow, Eliasson Global Leadership Prize, and Fortune’s 50 World’s Greatest Leaders.

You can engage further with Bright Simons’ works on his blog, The Scarab. Below are links to some of the ideas explored on this podcast

Simons, B. (2025) Katanomics: Why Democracy seems at odds with development in Africa and what to do about it. (Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398852827_Katanomics_Why_Democracy_seems_at_odds_with_development_in_Africa_and_what_to_do_about_it)

Simons, B. (2025). Constitutional Change as Normative Crystallisation. (Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393578779_Constitutional_Change_as_Normative_Crystallisation)

Simons, B. (2025). How Dangote Adapted to Katanomics in Nigeria. (Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399068642_How_Dangote_Adapted_to_Katanomics_in_Nigeria?channel=doi&linkId=694d560d9aa6b4649dc4a12d&showFulltext=true)

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. (WAT)

https://bit.ly/DevDisc_PEI

Africa is rarely short of ingenuity. It is often short of leverage.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Global Innovation Index places most sub-Saharan African economies in the lower ranks. That is not a verdict on the continent’s talent. It is a diagnosis of a more stubborn problem: turning bright ideas into durable systems—ones that attract capital, scale across borders, and shape markets rather than merely participate in them.

There is progress. Patients can verify medicines by phone, while end-to-end tracking systems reduce counterfeits. Mobile payments have widened financial access at scale. Agricultural data networks are beginning to connect producers and regulators across borders. Governments are rolling out biometric identity and experimenting with AI in public administration. These are not demos. They are working systems.

Yet a harder question remains: do such systems translate into lasting authority?

Between invention and influence sits a dense layer of gatekeepers—standards bodies (such as GS1), donor-shaped procurement frameworks, certification regimes, compliance requirements, and risk models. These structures determine what is recognised, financed, and scaled. A solution can work on the ground and still fail to rewrite the terms of the market. Bright Simons describes this as “ideas hegemony” in development: the tendency for dominant normative frameworks to define best practice and confer standing.

This Development Discourse reframes a familiar debate. Africa’s political economy—electoral incentives, patronage networks, coalition pressures—matters. But so do the rules: how policies are designed, how contracts are awarded, how standards are set, how compliance is enforced. Details can be destiny. They decide whether innovation outlasts its launch moment.

AI makes the point vividly. Governments are buying AI-powered platforms for health, finance and security. Adoption, however, is not control. Sovereignty depends on whether regulators can scrutinise complex systems, negotiate technical standards with confidence, protect data rights, and hold vendors to account—while having a voice in the global forums where the rules of technology are written. Without that foundation, a country can modernise quickly and remain dependent on terms set elsewhere.

In this conversation, we will examine why innovation in Africa so often struggles to become institution. We will ask what is missing in the continent’s “trust infrastructure”; how standards and certification have become instruments of geopolitical power; and what it would take for Africa to move from rule-taking to rule-making. We will draw on institutional and political-economy lenses associated with scholars such as Douglass North, Acemoglu & Robinson, and Ha-Joon Chang—without losing sight of what practitioners confront in the real world.

About the guest

Bright Simons is a leading voice at the intersection of economic governance, accountability and social innovation. He is an Honorary Vice President at IMANI Africa and a Visiting Senior Fellow at ODI Global, and serves as President of mPedigree, a social enterprise working across three continents to improve critical supply chains. His work has informed high-level global advisory roles spanning philanthropic, corporate and multilateral platforms, and has earned recognition, including the Tällberg–Eliasson Prize, a Bellagio residency, and Fortune’s list of the world’s greatest leaders (2016).

Host

Patrick O. Okigbo III is the Founding Partner of Nextier, a multi-competency advisory firm committed to shaping sustainable development solutions. He was a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Nextier: Building the society we want to live in

Contact: info@thenextier.com

“Until the lion tells his own story, the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Chinua Achebe’s words were about literature, but they describe something precise about Nigerian governance. For decades, the state has told the story of public money on its own terms, in formats too dense to read, released too late to act on, summarised just enough to satisfy the appearance of openness without the substance of it. BudgIT was founded on the belief that citizens deserve to tell their own version of that story. In the Development Discourse held on Wednesday, February 25, 2026, and traced fifteen years of that effort in a conversation about why information alone has never been enough to move the Nigerian state.

The conversation opened with a single clarifying word: legibility. Drawing from James C. Scott, who argued that legibility is power, Patrick asked what it means in practice for the Nigerian state to be illegible to its own citizens. Seun’s answer was not technical. People in government, he argued, do not think of themselves as servants. Rooted in paternalistic cultural traditions that treat authority as a form of royalty, citizens and officials alike have internalised a hierarchy that makes accountability an unnatural occurrence. Citizens grovel when they should stand firm. The phrase “number one citizen,” he observed, tells you everything about how power has been framed. Nobody wrote that rule. Everyone accepted it.

From that foundation, the story of BudgIT begins to make sense. When Seun founded the organisation in the early years of the Jonathan administration, the theory was elegant: break down dense fiscal information into language that people at every literacy level could understand, and citizens would make informed choices and demand accountability. Those early years carried the electricity of a movement, the same optimism, Seun noted, that today surrounds artificial intelligence and climate activism. Information would be the lever. An informed public would be the force. But economic pressure grinds people down. A sense of helplessness has spread quietly through the society, and citizens have come to silently condone the continuous assertion of state power in ways that would draw sharper resistance elsewhere. Voter turnout in some elections has collapsed to single digits. The gap between what citizens know and what they will do about it has proven far wider than early optimism anticipated.

And yet the data kept accumulating. Organisations like the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, particularly under ’s leadership, brought genuine scholarship to oil sector transparency. BudgIT’s GovSpend platform made every published government expenditure searchable in one place. Budget implementation reports are now publicly available from 34 of 36 states. Transparency is achievable. What remains stubbornly elusive is consequence. Seun identified the two missing ingredients as incentives and institutions. Without political consequences that genuinely threaten a public official’s seat, transparency becomes almost impossible. He pointed to the Nigerian National Petroleum Company’s years of undeclared revenue from Nigeria LNG, billions of dollars unaccounted for, and significant gaps between declared and actual production figures, for which the political consequences were essentially nothing. The problem is not that the data was hidden. It is that nobody paid a price for ignoring it.

Transparency as theatre has its own symptoms, and Seun named them plainly. The NNPC dashboard, which once published detailed data, now produces what he called a propaganda-style summary. A governor publishes a four-page performance report and calls it transparency. Katsina records 140% health budget performance, with no breakdown of how the funds were spent. Enugu’s internally generated revenue jumps to figures Lagos has never approached, with no quarterly report to explain it. His four-way test for genuine transparency is that data must be accurate, timely, comprehensive, and actionable. When any of those are missing, the publication is performance, not accountability.

Patrick raised one of the conversation’s sharpest questions: given that 63% of Nigerians live in multidimensional poverty, is it realistic to keep betting on mass civic engagement? He proposed focusing energy instead on equipping opposition politicians with data to hold incumbents to account. Seun found the logic persuasive and noted it was already happening informally, presidential hopefuls picking up BudgIT analysis and writing long theses on it, politicians like Lagos opposition figure Funso Doherty breaking down the state budget and profiling alternatives. But Seun’s caveat was firm: Doherty cannot do it alone. A single voice in the political maelstorm is like being thrown to the wolves. What is needed is a cluster, an organised ideological grouping with shared purpose, the way socialist movements of the 1960s built coherent platforms around figures like Mallam Aminu Kano.

This opened into a frank discussion about 2027. Seun argued it may be the most consequential election in a long time, not because of who wins, but because of what losing might clear away. He sees Abubakar Atiku and Peter Obi as making their last throws of the dice, neither being a day-by-day politician in his view. If they exit, a vacuum opens in opposition politics, and that vacuum is where he places some of his hope for a new generation of grounded, proximate political leadership.

On what actually moves citizens, Seun was clear. Abstract budget comparisons generate retweets. Community-level tracking generates action. When BudgIT’s Tracka brought citizens face to face with specific projects listed for their streets and wards, the shock of discovering something was budgeted for them and not delivered produced a personal stake that national statistics never could. On independence, his principle is non-negotiable: BudgIT does not take money from the government. No contracts, no project funding, no hotel stays. It has caused friction, but it is the clearest safeguard against co-optation, which has quietly reshaped much of civil society as funders pressure toward collaboration limits what gets said in public.

When asked what gives him hope, Seun posited that the hope lies with young Nigerians, with one condition: they must move from criticism to proximity, to communities, to the unglamorous work of being present. New ideas must be embedded in institutions so they outlast the individuals who plant them. John F. Kennedy did not live to see the moon landing. The mission survived him. The discourse ended where it began: with the stubborn distance between what citizens know and what they can compel. That distance will not close by itself. It will take a generation willing to do that work, and a political class that finally learns to fear an informed public.

Several years ago—when I was still at Emory—I was selected as part of a six-member team to advise the North West Development Agency in the United Kingdom on how to attract biotechnology investment to the region. Our mandate felt familiar: help a place that was not Boston or Cambridge compete for a slice of the global innovation economy. It was the sort of assignment that fills strategy reports and development plans across the world, including in Africa’s emerging urban centres.

Like many such efforts, we began with the hard infrastructure of competitiveness. We mapped universities, counted graduates, assessed research strengths, and noted the presence (or absence) of venture capital and lab facilities. These were the standard ingredients of a biotech cluster, the same ones held up in countless policy documents and investment pitches. Yet a quiet question hovered in the background: if so many places are building similar hardware, why do only a few emerge as true magnets for talent and capital?

The answer surfaced in an unexpected way. During fieldwork in the UK, we interviewed a senior professor who had recently moved from Boston. When we asked why he relocated, he replied with disarming simplicity: “My wife.”

He was candid. After two marriages sacrificed on the altar of an ambitious academic career, his third time around he chose differently. His new wife, younger and financially unconstrained, was not evaluating his move in terms of tenure prospects or lab budgets. She was asking: Is this somewhere I want to live? Does it offer culture, community, and access to the world? The region’s proximity to an international airport, its social life, and its sense of possibility for her—not just for him—tipped the scales.

That conversation reshaped how I think about development strategy. It revealed that investment decisions often emerge from a quiet, household-level calculus: the unmodelled preferences of spouses and children, the subtle pull of schools and streets, the search for a life rather than just a job.

The Human Algorithm of Place

Across contexts, similar patterns appear. Young families often choose cities not primarily for salaries but for proximity to good schools, reasonable commute times, and a sense of safety. A firm might offer a generous package, but if the nearest quality school is forty minutes away, or if spouses see no community for themselves, relocation becomes a much harder sell. These are not marginal details; they are central variables in the human algorithm of place.

Global success stories bear this out. Austin’s rise cannot be explained by tax incentives alone; its cultural energy, creative scene, and evolving identity aligned with the aspirations of the tech workers and entrepreneurs it sought to attract. Singapore has combined world-class logistics and infrastructure with deliberate investments in safety, predictability, education, and public space, positioning itself as liveable not only for executives but for their families. In each case, policy did not stop at enabling transactions; it extended to curating a way of life.

By contrast, many development strategies—especially in the Global South—remain preoccupied with visible hardware: special economic zones, industrial parks, free trade enclaves, and signature infrastructure. These projects often look impressive on paper and in political speeches. Yet too many of them struggle to fill their office parks, keep their factories operating, or retain the talent they initially attract. The missing piece is frequently soft infrastructure: the web of schools, clinics, neighbourhoods, cultural venues, and social networks that turn a location into a place people will fight to remain in.

Africa’s Urban Moment and the Soft Infrastructure Gap

Nowhere is this tension more critical than in Africa’s rapidly urbanising landscape. Over the next decades, African cities will absorb millions of new residents while also competing for investment and skilled professionals. Governments and development partners are rightly focused on upgrading physical infrastructure and deepening regional integration, but the question of how it feels to live in these cities is often relegated to the margins.

Yet, for Africa to realize transformative and inclusive growth, economic opportunity must be matched with liveability. When a city’s schools are failing, its transport systems are chaotic, and its public spaces feel unsafe or exclusionary, high-profile projects cannot compensate for daily exhaustion. Skilled workers and entrepreneurs—especially those with options—quietly opt out. They may stay physically while planning an exit for their children, or they may never come in the first place.

Conversely, cities that pay attention to soft infrastructure can punch above their weight. Investments in education, health, safety, and inclusive public spaces are not just social policy; they are core components of a credible economic strategy. They create the conditions under which people can imagine a future, not merely endure a present.

From Transactions to Attachments

The deeper challenge is conceptual. Traditional development planning tends to treat people as factors of production—labour, skills, human capital. But people understand themselves as members of families and communities, with emotional, cultural, and social needs that resist easy quantification. When strategy frameworks ignore these dimensions, they misread what drives location decisions.

A more grounded approach would begin not with the question, “What can we build?” but with “What would make people choose to build a life here?” That shift forces policymakers, investors, and planners to engage with the lived experience of the households they hope to attract. It means asking: where will their children go to school? How safe will they feel on the streets? What forms of culture, worship, and leisure will be available? How easy is it to maintain ties—with home regions, diasporas, and global networks?

In short, effective development strategy must operate on two planes simultaneously. On one plane, it must deliver the classic economic fundamentals: infrastructure, governance, macroeconomic stability, and access to markets. On the other, it must cultivate belonging: the sense that a city or region is not just a site of extraction or temporary opportunity, but a place worth committing to.

Designing for Belonging

When I think back to that professor in northern England, what stays with me is not just his punchline—“my wife”—but what it represents. Behind every investment decision that appears in a government communiqué, or a corporate press release lies a quiet series of conversations around kitchen tables and on late-night walks. Partners ask one another: Can we imagine ourselves there? Will our children thrive? Will they be happy? Will we be happy?

Regions that can answer those questions convincingly will win more than projects—they will win people. And in the long run, it is people, not buildings, that make development durable.

For Africa—and indeed for any region seeking to move from fragility to flourishing—the next frontier of development thinking must be to design not only for growth, but for belonging.

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Every Nigerian who has sat through civic education can recite democracy’s most famous marketing line: government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The phrase is repeated so faithfully that it begins to sound less like a description than a promissory note—one that keeps being renewed, but rarely redeemed. Nigeria runs on democracy’s artefacts: elections, inaugurations, constitutional incantations. Yet to many citizens, the state does not feel like a shared project. It feels like a machine that extracts from the many and services a tightly networked few.

That gap—between democratic form and expected function—was the point of departure for a “Development Discourse” conversation held on Wednesday, February 11, 2026, between Patrick O. Okigbo III and Matthew T. Page. Patrick declined the comforting storyline that democracy has “returned” to West Africa, as though the region merely misplaced it and has now found it behind the sofa. Instead he asked a harder question: why do so many citizens experience democratic government as predatory? If ballots are cast and constitutions are in force, why do coups retain a faint, dangerous glamour? Why is the region once again speaking cautiously about soldiers—as if they were a seasonal weather pattern rather than a constitutional aberration?

Mr Page’s answer is unsentimental: what looks like democratic failure is often a system working as designed. Page—an associate fellow at Chatham House, co-author of “Nigeria: What Everyone Needs to Know”, and for 14 years the American intelligence community’s lead Nigeria analyst—arrived at his view by the slow method academics tend to prefer: watching reality refuse to fit the tidy categories. Early in his career he told a Ghanaian friend he planned to focus on Nigeria. The friend laughed and pronounced the country “crazy.” Nigeria, as if eager to defend its reputation, piled crisis upon crisis—security, inflation, legitimacy, governance—until the overlap itself began to look like a governing style. Over time, Page argues, the disorder revealed a shape. The chaos had a logic.

Corruption as operating system, not headline scandal

Page’s central claim is that corruption in Nigeria should not be treated only as scandal, or as a periodic moral collapse. It is better understood as an “operating system”: a dense web of elite bargains, informal transactions and unwritten rules that can absorb democratic institutions without yielding democratic outcomes. Courts sit, agencies exist, elections are held; the deeper logic remains intact. In that logic, private gain repeatedly outranks public purpose. The state’s performance may be democratic, but its incentives are not.

To explain how this “operating system” hardened, Page pushed back against a common historical simplification. Nigeria is often narrated as a clean alternation: civilian rule, then military interruption, then civilian restoration—like seasons. The reality, he argued, was always messier. Military rulers relied on civilians behind the curtain: financiers, fixers, brokers, bureaucrats who learned how to thrive under the gaze of the uniformed ones. Civilian networks, for their part, adapted to military power rather than being extinguished by it. In Page’s telling, civilian and military politics are not separate chapters; they are overlapping scenes from the same play. That continuity helps explain why the Fourth Republic, inaugurated in 1999, did not sever itself from older habits. It changed the costume, not the script.

Patrick carried this logic into the security sector, where Nigeria’s democratic opacity becomes almost theatrical. “Security votes”—large discretionary funds with minimal scrutiny—are the most infamous example. Page agreed, describing a culture of military exceptionalism that survived the transition to civilian rule. Oversight that was nonexistent under military regimes became merely weak under democracy. Governance, he suggested, is often driven less by policy or ideology than by spending decisions, bargaining and access: who gets what, through which channel, with whose blessing.

The elite is less tribal than its rhetoric

Nigeria’s politics is frequently explained through ethnicity and religion—the country’s most visible fault lines, and its most readily marketed narratives. Page complicated that picture. At the apex, he argued, sits a largely “detribalised” elite: people from different regions and faiths who share schools, business interests, social circuits, international assets, and the system for privatising the country’s common wealth. Their ties to the communities they claim to represent can be thinner than their ties to one another.

He illustrated this with research on Nigerian elite property ownership in Dubai. There, ownership patterns do not neatly cluster by region or religion. Northern and southern, Christian and Muslim, appear side by side—neighbours in glass towers, investors in the same portfolio logic, and resources drawn from the same poisoned well. Within Nigeria, however, the old fault lines are sharpened and weaponised for political advantage. Patrick put the implication plainly: unity is easy when the money is being shared; when political campagins begin, identity becomes an instrument. Page agreed. The divides are real—but they are also amplified, curated and deployed.

The state as performance: Potemkin governance

Another metaphor threaded through the conversation: governance as theatre. Nigeria is crowded with the rituals of rule—commissions, reforms, new agencies with impressive acronyms, speeches with solemn pledges—while hospitals remain short-staffed, schools decay and roads collapse into seasonal archaeology. Page invoked the image of Potemkin villages: structures built to look like governance, erected to impress visiting inspectors, while the underlying service delivery remains inconsistent or absent.

The performance matters because elites still desire legitimacy. They want acceptance as well as wealth. And the staging is not only domestic. Since 1999 Nigeria has operated under an international gaze that prizes democratic form. Elections, transitions and institutional architecture signal membership in a global club—even when local citizens experience the club’s benefits as private, not public.

If the theatre is widely recognised, why is it so hard to end the show? Page’s answer was bleakly practical. Most people are busy surviving: paying school fees, feeding family, navigating insecurity, improvising around infrastructure that works intermittently at best. Sustained collective action is costly; in an environment of economic stress and political risk, it is rational to retreat into private coping mechanisms. Many Nigerians respond by building lives that minimise reliance on the state: private schools, boreholes, generators, informal healthcare, private security. Page described Nigeria as “pre post-apocalyptic”—a place where citizens behave as if core state functions have already failed, and have developed workarounds with weary competence.

Where pressure for change might come from

Yet Page did not present fatalism as policy. He outlined a plausible route to a different politics. As more Nigerians move beyond subsistence and accumulate modest assets—a small business, a home, a stable income—their tolerance for arbitrary disorder shrinks. They may not suddenly become romantics about the state. But they become less willing to accept a state that is unpredictably destructive: one that taxes informally, regulates selectively, and distributes risk downwards while distributing rents upwards.

A deeper shift could come from the political economy itself. Oil rents—centralised, opaque and easily captured—encourage politics as distribution among elites. Taxation, by contrast, creates a sharper bargain: citizens begin to ask, with more insistence, what exactly they are buying. A move away from rents toward revenue could therefore harden demands for accountability, not out of idealism, but out of arithmetic.

Patrick returned, near the end, to the most sobering conclusion of the session. Nigeria’s system is not “broken” in the random sense. It is highly functional—for those it serves. That is precisely why it resists superficial reform. If institutions fail in patterned ways, then outrage is not enough. Reform cannot rely solely on sermons about ethics. It requires redesign: changing what is rewarded, what is punished, what can no longer be hidden, and which bargains become impossible to sustain.

For anyone who suspects that West Africa’s democratic troubles are not simply a matter of bad leaders or unlucky elections, the conversation offered something more useful than indignation: a guided tour of the code beneath the screen.

Rose Anya-Okorie, Analyst, Nextier

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Innocent Chukwuma spent much of his life insisting that policemen should not terrorise those they are paid to protect. It sounds obvious; in Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s, it was not. In one Lagos case in Oko-Oba, officers burst into a home in search of a robber and left two parents and six children dead. As a young activist at the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), Innocent helped pursue the case until the state agreed to pay $1.9m—an unusual concession that uniforms and guns did not confer the right to murder.

I came to understand his stubbornness later, when our paths crossed in Abuja in the early 2010s, around election reforms. He was never one for performance; even his impatience was well-behaved, betrayed only by the intensity of his stare, often from above the rim of his glasses. But he had a way of bringing a sprawling national argument down to one non-negotiable detail. Electoral reform, he insisted, had to include electronic transmission of results from the polling unit—otherwise “power to the people” remained a slogan, vulnerable to the familiar commerce of collation centres. The same instinct for first principles ran through his work on policing, politics and, later, the place of culture in national rebirth.

He came to this work early. As a student of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, he drifted toward the Marxist Youth Movement, where radical lecturers spent weekends explaining the fine print of structural adjustment and imperialism. The talk was earnest—an apprenticeship. Inspired by the oratory of Chima Ubani at Zik Flats, he plunged into student politics, becoming Speaker of the UNN Students’ Union House of Representatives, then Senate President of the National Association of Nigerian Students.

There was much to fight for in those days. In 1988 and 1989, the regime of Ibrahim Babangida embraced the World Bank and IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programme and passed the pain downwards. Prices rose, jobs vanished; families learned to keep old cars alive far beyond their intended lives. Innocent helped knit scattered campus resentments into organised national resistance, a wave of protest that turned lecture halls into barricades and made the country, as the generals complained, almost “ungovernable.” For this, he and eight others were expelled, charged with unlawful assembly and breach of the peace before a Special Military Tribunal.

Fortunately, Chief Gani Fawehinmi—known as “the conscience of the masses” and the country’s most industrious human-rights lawyer—along with the CLO, fought the case. Innocent and the other students were reinstated, and the charges quietly dropped. The lesson stuck: determined citizens, properly organised, could force even gun-toting soldiers to retreat. For those of us who arrived on campus just after him, his name—and those of other leaders such as Chima Ubani and Olu Oguibe—became part of the moral folklore we used to stay steady as the military tightened its grip.

What he did with that legend was to move it out of campus folklore and into the infrastructure of a modern rights movement. At the CLO, he rose from assistant programme officer to acting executive director in six brisk years, trading the headiness of protest for the grind of case files, donor reports and police-station visits. He specialised, unfashionably, in the behaviour of the police: how they patrolled, whom they arrested, where the bribes went. From this unglamorous niche, he built a life’s work.

In 1996, he received the Reebok International Human Rights Award, a $25,000 prize that many would have used to exit the struggle. He announced instead that he would found a new outfit dedicated to law enforcement reform. Two years later, CLEEN—the Centre for Law Enforcement Education in Nigeria—was born. It would grow into the country’s most influential voice on policing, become the first African NGO to win the MacArthur Foundation Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, and serve as a reference point for governments that suddenly discovered a taste for “community policing” and needed someone to explain what it might mean in practice.

From CLEEN, his reach widened. He worked with the new civilian administration of Olusegun Obasanjo to rework the Police Service Commission Act, nudging into law the idea that policemen, too, could be overseen by civilians. He helped to found the African Policing Civilian Oversight Forum, dragging the argument for accountability across borders. When, in 2020, Nigeria sought a trusted organisation to monitor the use of repatriated corruption funds, it turned—almost by reflex—to CLEEN.

In 2013, the Ford Foundation chose him, after a wide-ranging international search, as its regional director for West Africa. The language of philanthropy is soft and soothing; he used it to do harder things. Under his watch, Ford’s money found its way to improbable places: small arts organisations, custodians of uncomfortable political memory, and early experiments in impact investing. He seemed as interested in how societies remembered their coups and pogroms as in how they voted in the next election.

That interest was not abstract. Born on February 6th 1966, as Nigeria stumbled towards civil war, he became a refugee at two, carried along bush paths as his family fled anti-Igbo violence in the north. Later, he helped seed the Centre for Memories in Enugu—founded in 2017 by younger enthusiasts to preserve Igbo history—and backed its projects, including a documentary on the Biafra war, as if tidying loose threads from his own childhood.

Teaching appealed to him, too. He lectured at Harvard’s Kennedy School on managing NGOs in the global South and planned, after leaving Ford in January 2021, to decamp to Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government to write his memoirs and teach some more. He founded the Oluaka Institute of Technology, a vocational hub in Imo State, to give young people somewhere other than party offices—or the lure of 419—to take their ambitions.

Instead, in April that year, came a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukaemia and, within days, his death, aged 55. The shock has not lifted. He death provided no opportunity for friends and associates to gather around a sickbed and ensure he understood what he meant to them. The abruptness felt, to many, almost indecent. At his wake and funeral, in Mbaise and online, one could see it plainly: people who were usually composed reduced to the stunned pain of loss. I still regret that, in the several engagements we had, I never told him how his sacrifices and courage strengthened our own voices.

Yet for all the finality of the grave, Innocent is hard to consign to the past. Too many Nigerian activists carry his fingerprints on their careers; too many institutions bear his quiet imprint. In a country where power is often measured in motorcades and sirens, his was a different sort: the ability to convene, to analyse, to insist that policemen account for their bullets and politicians for their promises. Long after posters fade and slogans date, that habit of asking awkward questions—and expecting answers—will outlive him. Generations to come will find their own muses, but they will be standing on ground made firmer by the efforts Innocent (and his co-travellers) brought to bear.