By Mohammed Lawal
Every year, without fail, Nigeria dons its well-worn regalia of prioritizing optics over outcomes. Hotels brim with conference goers. Branded banners litter city centers. ‘Thought leaders’ are flown in from Abuja, London, and sometimes Dubai. Glossy folders carefully collated but rarely read are handed out with an air of serious business. Hashtags multiply. Photos are taken. Buzzwords like stakeholder engagement, policy dialogue, youth inclusion, and that tired phrase national rebirth summit make their usual rounds. Then, after the last piece of jollof rice is devoured and the final applause dies down, Nigeria sinks comfortably back into the same rot the talkshop was supposedly summoned to confront.
This in Nigeria is governance, an endless carousel of committees, communiqués, and claptrap. We have elevated the conference to a state ritual, a sanctified ceremony where bold ideas are served with pepper soup and then quietly buried under bureaucratic indifference. In a country teetering on the edge of collapse, strangled by poverty, mangled by insecurity, and disfigured by institutional rot, we have found solace not in action but in amplification. We talk, therefore we pretend to do.
Between 2010 and 2023, Nigeria hosted over 2,700 official conferences, summits, and national dialogues. These ranged from the grandiloquent Presidential Summit on Education to the ever recurring National Dialogue on Restructuring and workshops on everything from police reform to digital inclusion. But in the same period, our educational system sank to the 157th position out of 193 countries on the UN Education Index. Police brutality remained unchecked, its horrors laid bare by the unhealed trauma of the EndSARS protests. Electoral integrity? That has become a nostalgic aspiration. The 2023 elections were an administrative disaster, marked by historically low turnout and shambolic logistics.
This raises a question too obvious to be rhetorical. With such a buffet of deliberations, why has nothing meaningful changed?
The answer is cynical yet simple. A robust industry now thrives on Nigeria’s conference economy. Consultants, MCs, caterers, and recycled keynote speakers have made a lucrative career out of national confusion. Government ministries pad their annual reports with “policy engagement activities.” Foreign donors are hoodwinked with the promise of capacity building. The conferences don’t aim to solve problems. They exist to simulate seriousness while dodging accountability. They are Nigeria’s version of governance cosplay.
Take the vaunted 2014 National Conference under President Goodluck Jonathan as a case study. Nearly 500 delegates were assembled. The royalty, ex governors, professors, and activists, all armed with opinions and per diems. After months of heated debates and over seven billion naira spent, the outcome was a weighty 22 volume report. It promised sweeping reforms: constitutional tweaks, state police, fiscal federalism. Today, those reports are gathering dust in some forgotten government archive. Their only legacy? Fat allowances and photo ops for elder statesmen.
Why do governments love conferences? Because they are the perfect placebo. When young people protest, announce a summit. When ASUU strikes, promise a roundtable. When insecurity spikes, convene a security dialogue. It’s a cynical game of sedating dissent with the illusion of engagement. The optics are powerful. Government officials in native attire nodding solemnly before television cameras, making vague promises about moving the nation forward. But nothing moves, except the per diem funds and the headlines.
Even worse is the illusion that consensus is a solution. In Nigeria, achieving consensus has become an end in itself, implementation be damned. But dialogue without execution is nothing more than a ceremonial farce. This country isn’t suffering from an intellectual deficit. It is crippled by a drought of political will and an epidemic of elite cowardice.
The EndSARS protests of 2020 laid this bare. Young Nigerians demanded the dismantling of a brutal police unit and systemic reforms. The government, true to form, responded with judicial panels and heartfelt speeches. Survivors poured out their trauma before cameras. Reports were drafted. Recommendations were published. And then, as if on cue, everything fizzled. Officers evaded punishment. Victims were abandoned. Promises evaporated. The entire process functioned more as a PR strategy than a justice mechanism.
If Nigeria is serious about reform, not just the theatre of it, then it must treat talkshops with the suspicion they deserve. No summit should be funded without a legal requirement to act on its outcomes within six months. Ministries must be compelled to publish quarterly updates on what they’ve implemented. And instead of throwing billions at fresh talkfests, the government should dust off the 2014 National Conference report, the Oronsaye Report, and the forgotten Police Reform Panels, and start doing.
In this new dispensation, a conference should not be an escape hatch from responsibility or a career enhancing gig for serial panelists. It should be a tool for execution. If a proposed summit doesn’t offer new insights or a concrete roadmap for reform, it should be treated for what it is, a waste of time and taxpayer money.
Nigeria’s salvation will not come from conference rooms drenched in air conditioning and platitudes. It will come from the gritty execution of good ideas and the political courage to inconvenience entrenched interests. We’ve had enough speeches. What we need now is spine.
Because the streets, the real ones, are tired of being talked at.