From Policy to Practice: Strengthening Local Governments to End Open Defecation in Nigeria
Executive Summary Nigeria’s traditional authority system—long central to local governance—is becoming increasingly unstable due to weak institutional frameworks, inconsistent legal standards, and rising political interference. Across rural and peri-urban communities, traditional rulers play vital roles in dispute resolution, land management, and community mobilisation. Yet the mechanisms governing their recognition, suspension, and removal remain fragmented and unpredictable. Between 2020 and 2025, at least 30 publicly reported chieftaincy disputes across several states revealed systemic governance failures rather than isolated incidents. These disruptions are driven by gaps in local government administration, divergent state laws, prolonged judicial processes, and weakly formalised advisory systems. Executive discretion—particularly during electoral cycles—has further intensified instability, undermining procedural credibility and public trust. The consequences are immediate and material: leadership vacuums delay development projects, weaken local security coordination, and erode institutional legitimacy in already fragile settings. Despite their continued relevance, traditional institutions operate within a constitutional grey zone, lacking clear and enforceable governance standards. This brief argues that stabilisation—not expansion—of traditional authority is required. It proposes four priorities: ● Standardizing due-process safeguards, ● Accelerating judicial resolution, ● Institutionalizing structured consultation, and ● Modernizing administrative systems. Strengthening these mechanisms is essential to restoring predictability, legitimacy, and coherence in Nigeria’s subnational governance.
Closing Gendered Governance Gaps in Nigeria: Strengthening State Capacity
Executive Summary Nigeria’s gender gaps are a state capability challenge, not merely a social issue. Women participate actively in the labour force (80.7%) but are concentrated in informal, low-protection sectors, limiting productivity, pension contributions, and fiscal capacity. Political pipelines remain narrow, with women holding just 4.2% of House of Representatives seats, constraining legislative oversight. Gender-based violence is widespread—31% reporting physical violence, 9% sexual—but low conviction rates signal weak enforcement. Collateral-based credit rules and limited land ownership (88.5% of women without titled assets) restrict access to formal markets and anchor enterprises at small scale. Subnational variation is significant: Lagos and Ogun exhibit stronger enforcement, higher formal labour participation, and effective legal domestication, while northern states face higher informality, weaker enforcement, and limited access to credit. This edition of Athena Perspectives recommends key policy interventions: 1. Gender-Responsive Budgeting (GRB) – Link MDAs’ performance to gender outcomes and embed GRB in budget planning. 2. Political Representation Incentives – Require pre-primary disclosure and transparent party financing to expand women’s legislative pipelines. 3. GBV Enforcement Strengthening – Digital case-tracking systems and annual VAPP scorecards to increase reporting and convictions. 4. Women’s Access to Formal Markets – Group-guarantee credit schemes, digital financial inclusion, and public procurement support for women-owned enterprises. Implementing these pathways strengthens allocative credibility, fiscal performance, and institutional legitimacy, positioning Nigeria to harness its demographic and economic potential ahead of the 2027 elections.
The Price of Power in Nigeria’s Parties
By Dr Izuchukwu Christiantus Anyanwu
Governing Digital Engagement: Civilian Oversight and Institutional Failure in West and Central Africa
Executive Summary:
Digital connectivity has broadened political participation across West and Central Africa, yet it has coincided with a marked erosion of civilian authority. Between 2020 and 2023, the region experienced an unprecedented wave of military interventions.
This brief argues that digital mobilisation is not the cause of instability; rather, it exposes and amplifies pre-existing institutional weaknesses. Civilian institutions have failed to adapt to the scale and immediacy of digitally mediated engagement, producing a widening legitimacy gap—particularly among youth, the most active digital cohort.
Evidence shows that declining trust in legislatures, weak oversight, and limited avenues for structured participation create conditions in which military interventions encounter muted resistance. Online dissent becomes politically consequential only when institutions cannot absorb, process, or respond to citizen demands.
Financing Access And Accountability In Nigeria’s National Examination System
Introduction Standardised national examinations occupy a central position within Nigeria’s education governance architecture. They function not only as instruments for assessing learning outcomes, but also as institutional gateways that regulate […]
False Typhoid Diagnoses and The Erosion of Diagnostic Governance in Nigeria
Nigeria’s health system is increasingly shaped by a quiet but consequential distortion: the routine overdiagnosis of typhoid fever. What appears, at first glance, as a clinical convenience is, in fact, […]
Beyond Force: Poverty, Hunger and Nigeria’s Security Failure
By Oladiran Blessed
From Audit to Architecture: Fixing Nigeria’s Ghost Worker Problem
Executive Summary Nigeria’s ghost worker problem is not merely an administrative defect; it is a structural failure in public payroll governance. Periodic audits have uncovered thousands of fictitious or duplicate employees across ministries, departments and agencies, resulting in billions of naira in recoveries. Yet the recurrence of the problem reveals a deeper truth: audits detect fraud, but they do not redesign the system that permits it. The fiscal stakes are national in scale. Even conservative extrapolations from past recoveries suggest that cumulative payroll leakages over a decade likely run into hundreds of billions of naira—resources that could otherwise fund capital projects, strengthen public services and reduce borrowing pressures. In an era of constrained revenues and rising debt obligations, sustained payroll inefficiency is not a technical inconvenience; it is a macro-fiscal risk. At its core, the ghost worker phenomenon persists because Nigeria’s payroll architecture remains fragmented, weakly integrated with national identity systems, and inconsistently enforced across federal and subnational levels. The issue is institutional, not incidental. This policy brief proposes: ● Identity-linked payroll integration across all tiers of government, anchored to verified national identity databases. ● Continuous, technology-enabled verification, replacing one-off audits with automated cross-checks and real-time validation. ● Enforceable accountability mechanisms, including statutory penalties and audit traceability for authorising officers. ● A sequenced federal–state rollout, beginning with high-expenditure MDAs and expanding through conditional compliance incentives. The objective is straightforward: eliminate ghost workers not by repeated detection, but by institutional design that makes their existence structurally impossible.
Fixing Nigeria’s Foundational Learning Crisis Curriculum Reform, Institutional Alignment, and Political Feasibility
Executive Summary
Nigeria has expanded access to schooling over the past two decades, yet foundational learning outcomes remain alarmingly weak. Only 32% of Primary 3 pupils meet the national literacy benchmarks, and 28% meet the national numeracy benchmarks. In practical terms, millions of children cannot read and comprehend an age-appropriate text by age 10, which is the internationally recognised threshold for foundational learning.
In a country experiencing one of the world’s fastest rates of population growth, this trend represents significant structural risks to human capital development and long-term economic stability. Weak foundational learning constrains productivity, entrenches inequality, depresses lifetime earnings, and weakens fiscal sustainability.
Nigeria’s learning deficits reflect systemic misalignment across language policy, curriculum design, teacher incentives, assessment frameworks, and federal-state governance.
This policy brief advances a sequenced reform strategy grounded in political feasibility and institutional realism, structured as follows:
● Early-grade language alignment pilots with structured transition to English.
● Flexible curriculum frameworks that allow state-level contextual adaptation.
● Incremental assessment and teacher incentive reform aligned with learning outcomes.
Reform should begin with state-led pilots supported by robust monitoring and evaluation, before scaling nationally.
With disciplined sequencing, fiscal realism, and vertical coordination, Nigeria can move from expanding enrolment to securing foundational learning.
Kaduna’s Security Crisis: Denial, Delay and the Erosion of State Authority
By Uchenna Victor Mgbechi