In the last column I argued that the five most important qualities of a public sector director are qualities that cannot be taught. Independence of mind. Curiosity. Courage. Public-interest instinct. Stamina for disagreement. These are dispositional. They are present in a candidate on the day of appointment, or they are not, and no induction programme will install them later.

Today I want to make a different argument, addressing a different question. There are technical competencies that, unlike the five qualities, can in principle be taught. Financial literacy can be learned. Strategic thinking can be developed. Sector knowledge can be acquired. But there is a practical problem with appointing directors who do not yet have these competencies on the assumption that they will acquire them in office. The institution does not have the time. The board needs to function from day one, not from month eighteen. A director who arrives without the technical readiness to engage in the boardroom contributes very little for a long stretch, and by the time they have absorbed enough to contribute meaningfully, half the term may have passed.

This is why I describe these competencies as non-negotiable. Not because they are impossible to teach, but because their absence at the moment of appointment is functionally disqualifying. The director who lacks them is not contributing to governance. They are watching it happen.

There are six such competencies. They are the technical floor below which no public sector board appointment in Nigeria should be made. Today I want to name them and to argue, in each case, why compromise is not an option.

Why the technical floor matters

Before I name the six, I want to address a question that comes up whenever this discussion is had in our public sector. The question is whether the technical floor I am about to describe is too high. Whether it would exclude many capable Nigerians who could grow into the role. Whether the country has enough candidates who meet this floor for every public sector board.

My answer is direct. The technical floor is not too high. It is the minimum. The work the boards are doing demands it. The institutions they govern are technical, complex, and consequential. A regulator overseeing financial markets cannot be governed by directors who cannot read a financial statement. A development bank cannot be governed by directors who do not understand banking. A teaching hospital cannot be governed by directors who have no engagement with healthcare delivery. These are not optional refinements. They are the basic equipment for the role.

As to whether we have enough candidates, the answer is yes. Nigeria has produced, over the last forty years, a deep cohort of accomplished professionals across every sector our public institutions operate in. Bankers who have governed across cycles. Lawyers with deep regulatory experience. Engineers with infrastructure and energy sector depth. Auditors and chartered accountants of the highest standing. Medical doctors with hospital management experience. Academics who have engaged seriously with the institutions of state. The talent exists. The country has it in abundance.

The question is whether the selection process is configured to actually find these people, or whether it is configured to find names that fit a different brief. And this is the problem, not a talent problem.

The six competencies

Competence one. Independence of judgement.

This is the first because it underpins the work of every other competence on the list. A director without independent judgement cannot use their financial literacy, their strategic comprehension, or their sector fluency to any purpose. They will defer to whoever in the room appears most confident, and the institution will be governed by that person rather than by the board.

By independence of judgement, I do not mean iconoclasm or contrarianism. I mean the capacity to look at a matter on its merits, form a view, and hold that view against social or political pressure when the view is well grounded. This is partly disposition, which I addressed in the last column. It is also competence. The director must have the analytical capability to actually form a view, not just the disposition to express one. The two work together.

How to test for it. Ask the candidate to walk you through a decision they have made in a previous role that went against the prevailing view. Ask them what the analysis was. Ask them what the cost was. A candidate who has never made such a decision, or who cannot describe the analysis behind one, is unlikely to make one in your boardroom.

Competence two. Financial literacy.

A public sector director who cannot read a financial statement cannot govern a public institution. This is not negotiable. The institution’s accounts are the most important document the board sees. The trajectory of the institution is visible in those numbers, sometimes years before it is visible elsewhere. A director who cannot follow the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow at a working level is dependent on others to interpret them, and is therefore at the mercy of whoever does the interpreting.

By financial literacy I do not mean qualification as an accountant. Most non-executive directors are not accountants and need not be. I mean the practical ability to follow a set of audited accounts, to interpret variance against budget, to read a cash flow statement, to understand what a contingent liability is, and to ask intelligent questions about going concern. This is the technical floor. Below this floor, the director cannot do the work.

The CBN and NDIC, in their fit and proper requirements for bank directors, set this floor explicitly. They have done so because they have learned, through hard institutional experience in the banking sector, that financial illiteracy on a board is not a minor weakness. It is an active risk to the institution. The same logic applies to every public sector board in Nigeria.

Competence three. Strategic comprehension.

By strategic comprehension I mean the ability to think across multiple time horizons, to hold the institution’s mandate steady against the pressure of short-term pressures, to evaluate tradeoffs between competing priorities, and to recognise when an apparently tactical decision has long term consequences that should be examined before approval is given.

This is a competence that combines analytical capacity with experience. It cannot be acquired purely through reading. It is developed through years of senior level responsibility in institutions where strategic decisions actually had to be made and lived with. A director who has not had this kind of experience will struggle to engage with the strategic agenda of the board, and will tend, by default, to focus on operational matters they can grasp more easily. This is one of the most common failure modes of public sector boards in this country.

Competence four. Sector fluency.

A board governs an institution that operates in a sector. The director must have a working fluency in that sector. They must understand its history. Its current dynamics. Its principal actors. Its regulatory environment. Its technical vocabulary. Its key risks.

A director appointed to the board of a financial regulator who has never worked in financial services and does not understand how the banking system actually functions cannot govern that regulator at the level the regulator demands. A director appointed to the board of a telecommunications regulator who has never engaged with the technical or commercial realities of the telecoms sector cannot govern at that level either. The same is true across every sectoral institution in the country.

Sector fluency does not require having been an operator in the sector for an entire career. It does require having engaged with the sector at a senior level for long enough to genuinely understand how it works. Without this, the director is reliant on management to translate the sector for them. Management will do so, but management’s translation will be management’s translation. The director will have no independent vantage point.

Competence five. Ethical spine.

Some readers will resist seeing this as a competence rather than a quality, but I include it deliberately. Ethics in the boardroom is not just disposition. It is also the capacity to recognise an ethical issue when it is present, to articulate it clearly, and to hold a position on it under pressure. These capacities are partly characterological, but they are also developed. A director who has worked in institutions where ethics has been seriously practised, where conflicts of interest have been openly managed, where governance breaches have been examined and acted on, develops a practical literacy in these matters that the director who has not had that exposure simply does not have.

When the difficult ethical moment arrives in your boardroom, and it will, you want directors who have seen this kind of moment before, who recognise the shape of it, and who know how to act. This is the competence of ethical spine. It is built, over time, by practice.

Competence six. The willingness to disagree, publicly, in the room.

I named this in the last column as one of the five non teachable qualities. I name it again as a competence, because the willingness alone is not enough. The director must also have the verbal capability to dissent constructively. To raise the difficult point in a way that opens conversation rather than closes it. To disagree without belittling. To hold a position firmly while remaining open to revision if better arguments are presented. To know when to insist and when to defer.

This is the social competence of dissent, and it is non trivial. Directors who cannot do this well tend either to fall silent (and thus accept by default whatever is being decided) or to escalate every disagreement into a personal confrontation that the Chair cannot manage. Either failure mode produces a board that cannot do its work. The competence in the middle, productive constructive challenge that the room can absorb, is the competence that makes governance possible.

What this means for selection

The six competencies above are not exotic. They are the basic technical equipment for serious board work in any institution of consequence, anywhere in the world. The institutions of corporate governance worldwide recognise something very close to this list, in various forms. What is distinctive about my argument is the insistence that no public sector board appointment in Nigeria should be made when these competencies are not present in the candidate.

The implication for appointing authorities is significant. The current selection process does not test for these competencies in any rigorous way. The competency profile of each board is rarely articulated in advance. The candidate’s preparation against the profile is rarely examined. The result is the boards we have, populated in many cases by people who do not have the technical floor the work requires.

The fix is not difficult. Articulate the competency profile of each board in advance. Test candidates against it. Refuse to appoint candidates who fall below the floor, however attractive other considerations might make them. Continue the search. Take the additional time. Do the work that selecting at this level actually requires.

I have said before that I do not believe Nigeria has a talent problem. We have a selection problem. The competencies above exist in this country, in deep supply. We are not currently configured to find them, or to insist on them, or to compose boards from them, but we could be.

The boards we build are the country we get.

Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via [email protected].