The long game: What will Tinubu leave behind?

A leader’s true test, the article argues, is not only what he does with power but what remains after he leaves: institutions that can survive him, people who can outperform him, systems that do not need his intervention and a political culture that does not confuse loyalty with competence.

That question shaped Adeola Akinremi’s view of President Bola Tinubu after encountering him as a case study while studying public policy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in 2018. The case, titled “Remaking a Neglected Megacity: A Civic Transformation in Lagos State, 1999-2012,” examined Lagos and the leader at the center of its transformation. Students at Harvard, Princeton, Cornell and other universities also studied it.

Akinremi writes that the experience offered a different way to consider a Nigerian politician, beyond newspaper portrayals, campaign slogans and partisan arguments. The case did not suggest that everything Tinubu did was perfect. Instead, it raised a more lasting question: what happens when a leader thinks beyond the next election?

The article also revisits an interview Tinubu gave to Princeton University in 2009, two years after leaving the Lagos State Government House. Tinubu described his governing philosophy as “thinking for change.” Before roads, tax reforms, transportation changes, digitisation and government restructuring, he said, came a process of understanding the problem, breaking it down, building a team, reforming the system and making the reform survive its creator.

When Tinubu became Lagos governor in 1999, he described the state as suffering from decaying infrastructure, chaotic traffic, mountains of refuse, an outdated accounting system, an oversized bureaucracy, weak revenue collection and a government dependent on overdrafts. He said Lagos was close to bankruptcy. Akinremi, who lived and grew up in the city, says Tinubu presented that condition not as an excuse but as the starting point for a longer governing project.

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thinking for change