Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Nigeria, periodically, appears to lurch toward reform, only to settle back into familiar habits. The recent dismissal of Farouk Ahmed, a senior petroleum regulator accused by Aliko Dangote of extortion, risks becoming another such moment—mistaken for progress when it is merely motion.
The backdrop matters. Mr. Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, built a $20billion oil refinery intended to end Nigeria’s dependence on fuel imports, long a source of rent-seeking and regulatory manipulation.
In most countries, this would be celebrated as industrial ambition. In Nigeria, it amounted to an institutional stress test. The refinery threatened powerful interests that have thrived in the murky space between state regulation and private profit.
What followed was unusual.
Faced with regulatory pressure, Mr. Dangote publicly accused Mr. Ahmed, then head of the petroleum regulatory commission, of demanding inducements. Rather than settle quietly—a common survival strategy among Africa’s business elite—he escalated the conflict. Political pressure mounted, and President Bola Tinubu removed Mr. Ahmed from office.
To many Nigerians, this looked like accountability. To outside observers, it might even resemble reform. Both impressions are premature.
Nigeria’s anti-corruption record suggests why. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has secured hundreds of convictions in a country synonymous with grand corruption. Yet most of those convicted are small-time fraudsters. Senior officials are rarely prosecuted unless they lose political protection. Removal from office often substitutes for legal consequence. The system sacrifices individuals to preserve itself.
In an earlier essay on this episode (“Nigeria and the Narrow Corridor”), I argued that the scandal presents an opportunity for civil society—not because Mr Dangote is necessarily right, but because the controversy can be used to challenge the state to strengthen the constraints that make institutions credible.
Acemoglu and Robinson, in The Narrow Corridor, argue that liberty and development emerge only when society is strong enough to restrain the State and its agents, yet not so strong as to replace them. Progress occurs in this narrow corridor, where institutions are compelled—continuously—to submit to public scrutiny and legal constraint. Nigeria, by contrast, remains trapped in a cycle of episodic purges without institutional follow-through.
Seen through this lens, Mr. Ahmed’s dismissal is not evidence that Nigeria has entered the narrow corridor. It may instead show the State closing ranks—absorbing pressure by ejecting a single official while leaving underlying incentives intact. If precedent holds, this affair will fade. Nigerians will soon be distracted by another shiny story. Mr. Ahmed will retreat from public view, only to re-emerge later as a political financier, officeholder or appointee. The scandal will dissolve without trial.
That would make this episode a Pyrrhic victory: a tactical win that weakens the strategic struggle for institutional accountability. Nigeria does not lack anti-corruption laws. It lacks the habit of enforcing them against the powerful.
Yet this case still matters. Mr. Ahmed’s fall did not originate in the courts or in parliament. It came from sustained public attention, amplified by social media and civil society actors who refused to let the issue disappear. This pressure forced the Tinubu presidency to act, however narrowly.
For Nigeria to move closer to the narrow corridor, that pressure must not subside. Civil society should treat the Farouk Ahmed affair as a cause célèbre—not to secure another dismissal, but to insist on prosecution under existing law. The demand should be simple and institutional: investigation, trial, and judgment. Not spectacle. Not silence.
This is where Nigeria’s reform efforts most often falter. Victories are declared at the point of removal, not at the point of accountability. Battles are won, headlines are claimed—and the war quietly resumes on unchanged terms. Until dismissals are followed by prosecutions, and scandals by sentences, Nigeria will continue to confuse motion with progress. The danger is not defeat, but the comfort of Pyrrhic victories.
— Patrick O. Okigbo III is the Founder of Nextier, a public policy 
advisory firm and think-tank, focused on improving governance and development outcomes in Africa. He was part of the team that advised on the first electronic payment processing platform in Nigeria. Patrick joined Citigroup in New York City in 2003 and left as a Vice President in 2007 to join Transcorp Plc. in Nigeria as the Chief Financial Officer. He served as a Senior Special Assistant to a former President of Nigeria, on reforming the country’s electricity industry.
Will Trump’s tariffs drive America to a strategic blunder? By Chido Nwangwu
