Where failure is free, nations pay

By Dakuku Peterside 

There is a powerful lesson in the political fate of Keir Starmer, but it is not merely a British lesson. It is not about Westminster drama, Labour Party turbulence, or the familiar theatre of parliamentary politics. It is about a deeper principle without which no democracy can remain healthy for long: leadership only improves when failure has consequences.

That is the hard discipline of public office. Power must never be separated from responsibility. Authority must never be insulated from scrutiny. Failure must never be allowed to disappear into speeches, excuses, party loyalty or ethnic sentiment. Where consequences are credible, leaders think harder, prepare better, listen more carefully and act with greater urgency. Where consequences are weak, mediocrity becomes comfortable, impunity becomes normal, and national performance begins to decline.

Britain is not a perfect democracy. Its politics can be ruthless, hypocritical and theatrical. Its resignation culture is sometimes shaped by media pressure, party calculations and factional warfare rather than moral clarity. Yet one thing remains instructive: in Britain, public office is often treated as conditional. A minister may rise high, but a scandal, a policy failure, a breach of trust or the loss of political confidence can still end a career. The system does not always operate honourably, but it still sends the message that power is not untouchable.

That message matters.

The resignation of a prime minister or minister does not, by itself, solve national problems. It does not automatically reduce inflation, restore electricity, defeat insecurity, complete abandoned projects or end poverty. But it performs an essential democratic function: it tells citizens that leadership is answerable. It tells public officials that the office is not a permanent shelter. It tells institutions that failure must be recorded, judged and acted upon. Above all, it reminds the political class that public trust is not an ornament of power; it is the foundation on which power rests.

This is the question Nigeria must confront honestly: what consequences do public officials face when they fail?

Insecurity persists across the nation, but how many security and intelligence chiefs have resigned because citizens were not protected? Communities are attacked, families are displaced, lives are lost, and yet those entrusted with national security often remain untouched by the scale of failure under their watch. Power supply remains unreliable despite decades of promises. Minister after minister has promised a constant supply of electricity. Huge sums have been committed. Reforms have been announced. Roadmaps have been launched. Yet homes remain dark, businesses remain burdened by generators, and no one at the highest level appears to pay a personal price.

Inflation continues to erode the purchasing power of citizens. The poor are forced to make impossible choices between food, transport, rent, school fees and medicine. Yet how many economic managers have resigned for policies that deepened hardship or failed to protect ordinary people? Critical infrastructure projects are abandoned, inflated, delayed or poorly executed, but how often do ministers accept responsibility for failed delivery?

Corruption remains deeply embedded in public life, but how many officials implicated in misconduct resign before being forced out? Poverty and unemployment continue to diminish millions of citizens, especially young people, but how many public officers relinquish their positions because their programmes did not work?

These questions are not asked for drama. They go to the heart of governance. A society cannot keep rewarding failure and expect excellence. It cannot treat public office as a privilege without duty and expect public trust. It cannot normalise excuses and expect results. When leaders know that nothing serious will happen after failure, failure becomes easier to repeat.

Of course, not every policy setback should lead to resignation. Governance is complex. Ministers inherit broken systems. Security chiefs operate under difficult conditions. Economic managers face global shocks. Infrastructure delivery can be slowed by litigation, funding constraints, insecurity and procurement complications. Leadership is not magic, and public officials are not miracle workers. But the complexity of governance cannot become a permanent hiding place for incompetence. Difficulty explains some failures; it does not excuse all of them.

The real issue is not whether leaders will fail. They will. The real issue is what happens after failure. Is there a public explanation? Is there an independent investigation? Is there a parliamentary hearing with consequences? Is there dismissal where negligence is established? Is there prosecution where corruption is proven? Is there restitution where public funds are wasted? Is there resignation where credibility has collapsed? Or does every failure simply vanish into the next ceremony, the next committee, the next slogan, the next appointment?

A political system without consequences does not merely tolerate poor leadership; it manufactures it. If a minister knows that loyalty matters more than performance, loyalty will replace competence. If a security chief knows that tenure is protected by politics rather than results, urgency weakens. If public agencies know that audit reports will gather dust, waste becomes routine. If contractors know that abandoned projects will not affect future awards, abandonment becomes a business model. If citizens know that nothing follows outrage, outrage itself eventually becomes tired.
That is how nations lose trust.

Trust is not destroyed only by corruption. It is destroyed by repetition without consequence. Citizens lose faith when the same promises return under different slogans. They lose faith when the same failures survive successive administrations. They lose faith when leaders speak the language of sacrifice while living above the people’s pain. They lose faith when public officers are promoted after failure, recycled after scandal, defended after misconduct and celebrated after mediocrity.

The result is a dangerous democratic distance. The governed suffer the consequences of failure, while the governing class escapes them. Ordinary citizens endure insecurity; officials retain convoys.

Businesses collapse under power shortages; ministers attend energy conferences. Families struggle under inflation; economic managers issue optimistic forecasts. Communities watch abandoned projects decay; contractors and supervising officials move on. Young people search endlessly for work; those responsible for employment programmes produce reports, not results.

No nation can build serious public trust under such conditions.

This is why resignation matters. In the best sense, resignation is not always disgraceful. Sometimes it is an honour. It is a public acknowledgement that leadership carries responsibility beyond personal innocence. A minister does not need to have personally caused every failure in a department to accept that the department failed under his or her authority. A security chief does not need to have pulled the trigger to accept responsibility for a security architecture that failed to protect citizens.

An economic manager does not need to have created every hardship to acknowledge that policy choices have consequences.

Resignation says: the office is bigger than me. It says: public confidence matters. It says: responsibility cannot be delegated only downward. It says: leadership is not merely about occupying space; it is about carrying the burden of outcomes.
Where resignation is absent, other forms of accountability must at least be strong. There should be clear performance benchmarks for ministers and agency heads. Security institutions should undergo periodic public review. Major infrastructure projects should be tracked through transparent delivery dashboards. Audit reports should lead to enforceable sanctions. Legislative oversight should be serious, evidence-driven and independent of partisan convenience. Anti-corruption agencies should act without fear or selective enthusiasm. Public procurement should be open enough for citizens to follow the money from approval to delivery.

Above all, there must be a clear connection between failure and its consequences.

The deeper lesson from Britain is not that every resignation is pure or that every political culture should copy Westminster. The lesson is that democracies need mechanisms that make leadership answerable. In some cases, the consequence will be resignation. In others, dismissal, reprimand, salary forfeiture, prosecution, restitution, disqualification from public office or electoral defeat. What matters is that failure must not be weightless.

A nation serious about development cannot treat accountability as a foreign culture. Responsibility is not British. Integrity is not Western. Consequence is not alien to African governance traditions. Long before modern constitutions, communities understood that authority carried obligation. Chiefs, elders and leaders were judged by the welfare of the people. Leadership without responsibility was never honourable. What modern politics has too often done is separate office from shame, power from duty, and privilege from service.
That separation is dangerous.

Countries do not decline only because leaders make mistakes. They decline when mistakes become normal. They decline when incompetence has no cost. They decline when corruption is explained away. They decline when failure is defended by party loyalists, ethnic champions and paid voices. They decline when citizens stop expecting accountability because experience has taught them that the powerful rarely answer for anything.

Keir Starmer’s example should therefore be read beyond Britain. It should force us to ask whether our own political system rewards performance or merely protects power. It should make us ask why failure in public office so rarely leads to resignation. It should make us ask why officials who preside over broken systems often remain in office long after public confidence has collapsed. It should make us ask whether democracy can retain meaning when citizens vote, suffer, complain and wait, yet those responsible for repeated failure remain untouched.

No country rises above the quality of its accountability. And no leadership culture can produce excellence when failure is free.

Dr Dakuku Peterside is the author of Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface.