PART I - Reimagining the Nigerian Presidency as a Viable System: Delivering Renewed Hope with Agile Principles

In many democracies, the presidency is constrained by fixed terms, four years, with a possible extension to eight if re-elected. Given the immense complexity of national challenges, what can a president realistically achieve within such a limited window? And how should they structure the machinery of government to maximize delivery? 

This write-up explores how the Nigerian presidency, especially under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's "Renewed Hope" mandate, could be designed as a Viable System (i.e. a living, adaptive organizational form guided by the principles of Stafford Beer's Viable Systems Model (VSM)) infused with Agile principles to deliver rapid, responsive governance.

The Presidency as a Change Agent

The president is not merely a figurehead or administrator; they are the chief change agent. Elected on a manifesto, the president owes the people transformational leadership. To deliver, they must align and mobilize the state's vast resources (labour and capital) and ensure these resources are structured to achieve their declared objectives.

The "Renewed Hope" agenda sets ambitious goals: economic transformation (aiming for 7% GDP growth, $1trillion economy, and 50million + jobs), infrastructure modernization, energy security, oil sector reforms, expanding the digital economy and more. To turn these from campaign promises into deliverable outcomes, the presidency needs an organizing framework that ensures adaptability, coordination, and feedback: this is where the Viable System Model shines.

Designing the Presidency with the Viable System Model (VSM)

The VSM outlines five key systems that together make an organization viable:

1. System 1 (Operations): The operational units directly delivering services like ministries, agencies, and parastatals implementing policies.

2. System 2 (Coordination): Mechanisms to harmonize and deconflict the activities of System 1, ensuring smooth collaboration across government bodies such as cross-ministry coordination bodies, inter-agency task-forces, project management offices.

3. System 3 (Delivery): The internal governance system ensuring accountability, resource allocation, and performance monitoring.

4. System 4 (Intelligence): The strategic and environmental scanning function, ensuring government adapts to changing circumstances and anticipates future challenges.

5. System 5 (Policy and Identity): The top-level policy and identity-setting system, centred in the President's Office, defining the state's purpose, direction, and core values.

By mapping the Nigerian presidency along these lines, we can ensure that every unit knows its role, is supported by effective coordination, is held accountable, and has mechanisms for learning and adaptation.

Embedding Agile Principles in Governance

To make the VSM structure truly dynamic, the presidency should adopt Agile principles:

• Incremental Delivery: Focus on achieving quick wins, iterating on policies, and adapting based on outcomes.
• Cross-functional Teams: Assemble cross-functional task forces (pulling in ministries, agencies, private sector and civil society) around key priorities (e.g., security, infrastructure, economic transformation) that work in sprints with clear deliverables.
• Feedback Loops: Establish regular feedback from citizens, stakeholders, and the international community, integrating this into System 4 for real-time course correction.
• Transparency and Communication: Use dashboards, public reports, and open data to maintain transparency, build trust, and generate collective momentum.

The Performance and Delivery Unit and Policy Advisory Councils: Early Signals of VSM Thinking

The Tinubu administration has already shown early signs of adopting VSM principles. The creation of a Performance and Delivery Unit reporting directly to the president aligns with System 3, providing a backbone for coordinating delivery, clearing bottlenecks, and ensuring alignment across government machinery. Drawing lessons from Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Malaysia, such units must be nimble, results-focused, and empowered to hold agencies accountable.

In addition, the establishment of Policy Advisory Councils mirrors the role of System 4, providing critical intelligence, strategic thinking, and environmental scanning to help the presidency anticipate future challenges and opportunities. These advisory bodies act as the presidency's radar, ensuring that policy decisions are informed by fresh insights, expert analysis, and stakeholder input.

A Cautionary Note on Maintaining Momentum

While the Tinubu administration hit the ground running, especially in its early months, momentum has slowed, particularly following the cascading economic impact of fuel subsidy removal and FX devaluation and the public backlash that followed. It is crucial for the president to hold fast to the early structures he put in place. The Performance and Delivery Unit must remain honest, focused, and shielded from political dilution. 

Likewise, the Policy Advisory Councils should not become comatose now that some of their key members have transitioned into ministerial and official roles. Maintaining the vitality and independence of these bodies is essential to ensuring adaptive governance and the continued delivery of the "Renewed Hope" agenda. 

Without safeguarding these structures, the presidency risks reverting to reactive, short-term firefighting rather than sustained, systemic transformation, undermining the momentum needed to deliver true change.

Linking Mandate to Execution

The "Renewed Hope" manifesto must not sit as an inert document. Through a VSM-based design, the manifesto becomes the reference point for System 5 (defining identity and purpose) while Systems 3 and 4 ensure its continuous translation into adaptive policy and on-the-ground delivery. For example:

• Security reforms (System 1) are coordinated through special interagency task forces (System 2), monitored by the Delivery Unit (System 3), informed by real-time intelligence (System 4), and guided by the president’s overarching security doctrine (System 5).
• Economic goals like manufacturing growth, infrastructure rollout, and digital economy expansion are delivered via agile cross-sector teams, supported by fiscal and regulatory innovation, and iteratively adjusted based on performance data.

Conclusion: A Presidency Built for Viability

A presidency designed as a viable system, infused with agile governance, maximizes the chances of delivering transformational outcomes within the tight constraints of political time. It turns a four- or eight-year window into a period of dynamic, responsive change, where promises are not merely aspirations but operational mandates. For Nigeria under President Tinubu, embracing this systems-based, adaptive approach could be the key to making "Renewed Hope" not just an election slogan but a lived reality for millions.

Next Steps

Future posts will explore concrete examples of how each system could be structured and the metrics for tracking performance.

The Missing Piece in Nigeria's Economic Reforms - A Systems Thinking Lens

Economic policymaking in Nigeria is often framed as a series of targeted interventions: adjust the exchange rate, increase non-oil revenue, liberalize a sector, remove a subsidy. Each move is introduced with the hope that it will produce measurable gains. Yet time and again, such measures fail to deliver durable improvements, or worse, they set off new disruptions elsewhere in the system.

This is not simply a failure of execution or political will. I believe it is a failure of thinking. Most policies in Nigeria rely on a linear cause-and-effect model. But economies are complex adaptive systems characterized by feedback loops, delays, and interdependent variables.

Linear Thinking Meets System Reality

Consider the use of monetary policy to manage inflation and attract foreign portfolio investment (FPI) flows. Policymakers often raise interest rates with the expectation that tighter monetary conditions will reduce inflationary pressures and make naira-denominated assets more attractive to foreign investors, thereby bolstering foreign exchange reserves and stabilizing the currency.

However, as Wynne Godley and Marc Lavoie emphasize in Monetary Economics, the effectiveness of such measures depends on the stock-flow dynamics of the economy: the interactions between domestic credit, sectoral balances, and external capital flows.

In practice, elevated interest rates may succeed in attracting short-term FPI inflows, but they also raise the cost of domestic borrowing, depress investment, and slow economic growth. Meanwhile, reliance on volatile capital flows introduces external vulnerability, as shifts in global risk appetite or investor sentiment can trigger sudden reversals, leading to exchange rate instability, the very outcome policymakers sought to prevent.

The linear model (raise rates → stabilize prices and FX → strengthen reserves) breaks down because it ignores the system’s feedback architecture and the trade-offs between domestic growth dynamics and external stabilization efforts.

What Systems Thinking Offers

Systems thinking offers tools to address these structural blind spots. Drawing on the insights of Forrester, Beer, and Godley, systems thinking encourages policymakers to shift attention from events to structures i.e. the patterns of relationships that generate observable outcomes. Specifically, systems thinking helps identify:

• Reinforcing and balancing feedback loops: where actions amplify or dampen effects.
• Time delays: where the consequences of a policy take longer to materialize than expected.
• Compensating behaviours: where the system’s internal adjustments work against imposed change.

Without accounting for these features, even technically sound policies can fail or backfire.

The Case of Fuel Subsidy Removal

Nigeria’s struggle with fuel subsidy removal illustrates the stakes. The logic is straightforward: subsidies are a drain on public finances that the nation can no longer afford and a cesspit for corruption, so removing them should free up much needed resources for productive investment.

But the system’s compensating responses undermine the expected benefits. Subsidy removal immediately leads to hikes in the prices of transport and goods, which sparks inflation, reduces household purchasing power, and provokes public backlash. Politicians, facing pressure, often respond by increasing public sector wages or introducing cash transfers, eroding the fiscal gains they sought.

As Stafford Beer observed in his work on the Viable System Model (Brain of the Firm), complex systems often display homeostasis (a tendency to maintain internal stability even in the face of external change). Without designing reforms to account for the system’s self-regulation, interventions tend to be absorbed or neutralized.

From Policy Firefighting to System Stewardship

What Nigeria needs is not just more reforms, but a fundamentally different approach: one that treats policy as system design rather than isolated event management. This means:

• Developing models that map cross-sectoral flows and feedbacks (drawing on stock-flow consistent frameworks, such as those championed by Godley).
• Stress-testing policy under different scenarios (using system dynamics, like Forrester).
• Designing institutions that can maintain adaptability and coherence over time (using principles from Beer’s Viable System Model).

Such approaches can help Nigeria move from reactive firefighting to proactive system stewardship, managing not just outcomes, but the underlying conditions that produce them.

Conclusion

In future posts, I will explore how systems-based tools can be applied to Nigeria’s fiscal strategy, external balances, credit structures, and institutional frameworks. My aim is not to offer quick fixes, but to deepen the conversation around structural coherence because without it, no policy can endure.

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“For Nigeria to endure, its institutions must stop managing events and start managing structures.”

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