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Former Minister of Education Oby Ezekwesili has criticised the way Nigeria’s political system operates, arguing that it has created an environment in which people of questionable character can benefit, while those who act with integrity are often pushed aside. Ezekwesili made the remarks during an interview with Kayode Akintemi on News Central’s 60 Minutes with Mr Kay, aired on Sunday, August 23, 2026.
Speaking about how Nigeria chooses its leaders, Ezekwesili said the process has largely been shaped by people who have already held political power.
“The processes for leadership recruitment have in many ways been designed in the image of those who have held the levers of power,” she said. “When you have that kind of a distortion where bad behaviour is what your political system rewards, there will be a market for bad behaviour. And then good behaviour is punished.”
She also spoke about wealth and the role of government in its accumulation, questioning how much of the wealth held by Nigeria’s richest people can actually be linked to productive economic activity.
“Look at just bring line up all the people who are wealthy in our country today and try to trace their wealth to any productive activity. None. Maybe a few,” she said.
She argued that government has become closely associated with wealth accumulation, with some people becoming significantly wealthier after entering public office despite questions about the sources of their wealth.
According to her, the problem is exacerbated by how society responds to such wealth. Rather than scrutinising how people who pass through government accumulate their fortunes, she said, Nigerians often celebrate them.
Ezekwesili also suggested that the problem is not peculiar to Nigeria, noting that the same pattern is evident across several African countries. Her argument was not simply that people become wealthy through government, but that the political system itself can create incentives for behaviour that should ordinarily attract scrutiny or punishment. She said this distortion has consequences beyond politics because it determines the kind of people who are encouraged to seek power and the behaviour that becomes useful once they get there.
Ezekwesili said Nigerians cannot simply wait for good governance to emerge without deliberately building systems capable of producing it.
“Nothing happens that is not made to happen; to get good governance is a design. You have to design for you to then end up with good governance. If you don’t design for good governance, you will have the kind of governance that we have”
Her comments come as questions around political accountability, corruption, and the relationship between public office and wealth remain major issues in Nigeria. Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, released on February 10, 2026, gave Nigeria a score of 26 out of 100, placing the country 142nd out of 182 countries.
Ezekwesili has spent much of her public career speaking about accountability and institutional reform. She served as Nigeria’s Minister of Solid Minerals and later as Minister of Education, and previously worked on public-sector reform and transparency initiatives. Her comments continue that long-running focus, and she has placed particular emphasis on the incentives created by Nigeria’s political system: if bad behaviour is rewarded, people will have reasons to keep producing it.
