Nigeria, Aug. 17 -- The Crisis of Authority, Incentives and Capabilities

It is not in my character to write an open commentary on someone else's intellectual work, much less a work whose foreword was written by a professor I admire, albeit from afar. Yet I am increasingly troubled by the tendency among many political-economic writers to reduce almost every explanation of Nigeria's persistent failure to deliver on its promise either to its foundational architecture or to its operating manual - the Constitution.

In some of my recent articles, I have argued that one of Nigeria's central governance problems is the persistent failure to align three essential attributes: authority, incentives and capabilities. I believe this misalignment has ...