A leadership lesson for Nigeria from Dolly Parton, By Dakuku Peterside

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Dolly Parton has never governed a state, controlled a public budget, or commanded the machinery of government. Yet her life offers Nigeria a timely lesson: leadership is measured not by the grandeur of office, the length of a convoy or the volume of publicity, but by the durable good created for others.

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Parton built global fame through music, entertainment, and business. She could have treated success as private property. Instead, she converted influence into service — supporting literacy, medical research, disaster relief, education, hospitals, and community programmes. Her example is not an invitation for Nigerian leaders to imitate an American celebrity. It is a reminder of a universal principle: influence is stewardship.

Nigeria does not lack influential people. It has presidents, governors, ministers, legislators, regulators, traditional rulers, business leaders, religious figures, and celebrities. What it too often lacks is the disciplined conversion of influence into trusted public value.

Parton’s Imagination Library captures this distinction. Launched in 1995 as a local literacy initiative, it became an international programme that has distributed hundreds of millions of free books to children. Its significance lies not merely in generosity, but in institutional design. She did not simply give books on a celebrated occasion; she created a system capable of delivering them repeatedly.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Centre, supporting early research connected with the development of Moderna’s vaccine. The principle was straightforward: identify a public problem, commit resources, and support a practical solution.

Nigeria’s leadership deficit often begins where this sense of stewardship ends. Public office is too frequently approached as privileged access to contracts, appointments, protection, and personal accumulation. Political loyalty can outweigh competence; public resources are captured by private networks; and institutions are bent around the interests of those who temporarily control them.

The consequences are not abstract. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2023 national corruption survey found that 27 per cent of Nigerians who had contact with public officials paid a bribe during the preceding year. Although this was slightly lower than the 29 per cent recorded in 2019, cash bribes paid to public officials were estimated at approximately ₦721 billion in 2023.

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Behind that figure are millions of humiliating encounters: a motorist compelled to pay at a checkpoint, a trader charged unofficially for a permit, a patient denied attention without inducement or a jobseeker expected to purchase an opportunity. When influence becomes a private commodity, citizens pay in money, dignity, and lost opportunity.

The deeper lesson from Parton’s philanthropy is that leadership must build institutions, not merely monuments. A ceremonial donation generates applause for a day; a credible literacy programme changes lives for decades. A ribbon-cutting attracts cameras; a transparent procurement system, a reliable hospital, or a professionally managed scholarship scheme continues to serve after the officeholder has departed.

Nigeria’s governance culture remains excessively attached to visible projects and individual personalities. Administrations arrive, rename inherited programmes, abandon unfinished projects, remove experienced officials, and announce new beginnings. Continuity is sacrificed to political ownership. Public institutions become temporary estates rather than enduring national assets.

The claim that most public institutions lack effective, public-facing systems for disclosing how they use public resources is not my conjecture. The evidence is clear. The 2025 Transparency and Integrity Index (TII) found alarmingly weak transparency and accountability across Nigerian public institutions. Of the 517 MDAs assessed, only six scored above the 50% benchmark, while the vast majority fell in the “red zone.” Nine MDAs scored zero.

The message is clear: institutions entrusted with public resources are falling seriously short on disclosure, accountability, and public-facing integrity. The picture is even more disturbing at the level closest to citizens. The Nigerian Local Government Integrity Index reported that 85 per cent of the country’s 774 local governments fell within the “very high” or “critical” risk categories, reflecting opacity, weak enforcement, and poor service delivery.

For citizens, institutional failure has a physical address. It is the primary healthcare centre without medicine, the community road rendered impassable by rain, the refuse left uncollected, the market without sanitation and the local council whose budget cannot be meaningfully examined. An institution is not strengthened because a new building bears a leader’s name. It is strengthened when rules work, professionals are protected, resources are accounted for and services reach the public consistently.

Nigeria’s preference for monuments over institutions is reinforced by a political culture that rewards what can be photographed. The remodelled Abuja City Gate, presented as a symbol of renewal, identity and national pride, illustrates the attraction of ceremonial achievements. A capital city should maintain attractive landmarks. But ceremonial visibility must not be confused with institutional progress.

The meaningful questions are less glamorous: Was the project cost publicly disclosed? Was procurement transparent? Is there a credible maintenance plan? What measurable improvement did it bring to the administration of the city? A monument may embody national aspiration, but without transparency and sustainable management, its symbolism can exceed its public value.

Institution-building rarely produces immediate spectacle. Transparent planning approvals, audited asset registers, responsive complaint systems, enforceable service standards, and competitive procurement do not always offer dramatic commissioning ceremonies. Yet these are the achievements that make government dependable.

Crisis provides an even sterner test. Nigeria regularly confronts floods, insecurity, displacement, food inflation, unemployment, and public-health emergencies. The official response often follows a familiar script: visits to affected communities, sympathetic speeches, high-level committees, promises of intervention and relief that arrives late — or not at all.

The 2022 floods exposed this gap between appearance and impact. Homes, farms, and infrastructure were destroyed, communities displaced and vulnerable households pushed deeper into hardship. A subsequent recovery assessment found that 80.4 per cent of surveyed households considered external flood-response and recovery services unhelpful.

That finding should trouble every level of government. Emergency leadership is not measured by the number of officials photographed in flooded communities. It is measured by whether warnings were acted upon; whether evacuation routes and shelters were prepared; and whether food, medicine, sanitation, compensation, and reconstruction reached affected families in time. Sympathy without an effective response is public relations, not leadership.

The removal of the petrol subsidy in 2023 presented a different but equally consequential test. There were defensible fiscal arguments for reform, including the enormous cost and questionable sustainability of subsidy spending. But economic logic does not erase human pain. Transportation, food, and energy costs increased almost immediately, while credible cushioning measures remained distant from the daily experience of many citizens.

A people-centred transition would have preceded sacrifice with preparation: a clear explanation of the policy, transparent accounting of the savings, targeted income support, dependable mass transportation, wage protection, food security measures, and safeguards for vulnerable households. Good leadership does not merely take tough decisions. It equips people to withstand their consequences.

This is where proximity matters. Parton’s working-class background did not remain a convenient detail in her biography; it informed the causes she supported. Nigeria’s governing class, by contrast, often appears insulated from the conditions under which most citizens live.

A citizen who spends hours navigating a broken road struggles to make sense of the sirens and convoys of officials who have failed to repair it. A family unable to afford treatment cannot easily trust leaders who routinely seek healthcare abroad while public hospitals deteriorate. Calls for citizens to “endure,” “sacrifice,” or “be patient” sound hollow when sacrifice flows in only one direction.

This distance is also democratic. Many Nigerians have little direct contact with elected representatives outside campaign periods. Leaders who enter communities to solicit votes may become inaccessible once elected. Major taxes, subsidy reforms, infrastructure choices, and budgetary priorities are frequently announced without meaningful consultation, accessible data, or functioning feedback mechanisms. Citizens become an audience for government decisions rather than partners in governance.

Humility offers a necessary corrective. Roads, hospitals, schools, and security services are not personal gifts from officeholders. They are public obligations financed by taxes, national revenue, borrowing and the work of civil servants and contractors. A governor who commissions a school has not bestowed private generosity upon the people; the governor has performed a constitutional duty.

Yet publicly funded projects are routinely personalised through oversized portraits, self-congratulatory publicity and naming practices that portray ordinary responsibilities as exceptional acts of benevolence. Institutional credit is displaced by personal glorification. The state becomes indistinguishable from the officeholder.

Humility also requires openness to scrutiny. Nigeria’s Constitution requires public officers to declare their assets upon assuming office, periodically while serving and at the end of their tenure. Yet concerns persist about compliance and the limited accessibility of declarations. When leaders resist disclosure or treat questions from journalists, citizens, legislatures, and civil-society organisations as hostility, they undermine the accountability that gives democratic office legitimacy.

Dolly Parton’s lesson is therefore not really about celebrity or philanthropy. It is about the moral purpose of influence. Leadership should leave behind stronger institutions, better-prepared communities, more educated children, greater public trust, and citizens who feel respected rather than exploited.

Nigeria will not be transformed by speeches, monuments, or ceremonies alone. It will change when those entrusted with power treat office as service, public resources as a sacred trust, crisis as a call to practical action and achievement as an invitation to humility. The true legacy of leadership is not how prominently a leader’s name is displayed, but how well the people continue to live when that leader is gone.

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