Working Inside Imperfect Institutions

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”

~ Theodore Roosevelt

I.

In the harmattan months of 2018, I received a call at half past two in the morning. It was not the first of such calls, and I already knew before I answered it what category of problem it would belong to. A citizen somewhere in Ibadan had waste that had not been collected. A private service provider had failed, again, to meet its schedule. The truck had not come, or had come and left without finishing, or had simply not been dispatched at all. My number had entered public circulation — not by accident, but because I had permitted it, understanding that in a system where official channels moved slowly and accountability was diffuse, the most direct line of communication was sometimes the most honest institutional arrangement available. I answered. I made the calls that needed to be made. By morning, the problem had been resolved, or at least managed.

That period of my life working within the waste management architecture of Oyo State, alongside WestAfricaENRG, OYOWMA and the constellation of sister agencies that constitute government in its most operational form was, in the most unromantic sense, an education in institutions. Not institutions as they appear in policy frameworks or organisational charts, but institutions as they are encountered by the people who work inside them and the citizens they are supposed to serve. Broken. Resourceful. Resistant to change and yet not entirely without capacity for it. Worth staying inside of, if you can sustain the patience and develop the discipline to distinguish between what can be moved and what, for now, cannot.

Albert Hirschman observed, in one of the more enduring contributions of twentieth-century social science, that when confronted with a deteriorating organisation, individuals face three fundamental choices: they may exit, removing themselves from the relationship; they may exercise voice, attempting to repair or improve the organisation through communication and advocacy; or they may remain in loyalty, sustaining faith that improvement is possible. What Hirschman’s framework captures, and what my years inside governmental machinery confirmed, is that the choice between these responses is never purely strategic. It is also moral. It reveals something about what a person believes institutions are for, and what they believe they owe to the people those institutions were built to serve.

II.

The waste management sector in Oyo State is a useful laboratory for understanding what institutional failure actually looks like at the level of the human body. I mean this not metaphorically but literally. Road sweepers who refused safety and protective equipment not because they were reckless but because the equipment was uncomfortable, poorly fitted, or had never been accompanied by any explanation of what it was designed to prevent. Dumpsite workers moving through environments of concentrated hazard with no health insurance, no precautionary protocols, no institutional memory of what appropriate risk management might look like. These were not the failures of individuals who had chosen irresponsibility. They were the accumulated product of institutions that had never been designed, or had long since stopped functioning, in a way that took the bodies and the dignity of their workers seriously.

I remember, with a specificity that time has not dulled, the evening the compactor crushed a worker at one of the dumpsites. And the afternoon a tyre from a moving truck came loose on the Lagos – Ibadan expressway and struck a road sweeper who died before anyone could reach her. These were not statistical abstractions. They were deaths that occurred inside a system I was part of, and the question of what I owed to that fact (to the reality that my participation in the system made me, in some sense, a party to its failures) was not one I could answer easily or quickly.

James C. Scott, in his examination of how states see and how their vision distorts, argues that high-modernist institutions consistently fail when they impose a schematic legibility on complex, locally-adapted systems. The failure is not malicious. It is epistemological. The institution genuinely cannot perceive what it has not been designed to measure, and what it cannot measure, it cannot protect. The road sweepers who would not wear protective equipment were not irrational. They were rational within a system that had never explained the equipment’s purpose, never enforced its use consistently, and never demonstrated that the institution that issued it had any real interest in the bodies it was nominally protecting. Scott would recognise the pattern immediately: the map had replaced the territory, and the territory was suffering for it.

III.

There is a particular species of difficulty that arises when the person obstructing institutional reform is not just incompetent but politically connected. I encountered this in the form of a private service provider whose contract performance was, by every measurable indicator, inadequate. Routes missed, schedules ignored, equipment poorly maintained, but whose continuation in the contract was protected by relationships that operated entirely outside the formal procurement architecture. The situation was, in the most precise sense of the word, a test.

The temptation in such situations is to treat the political protection as an impenetrable wall and to manage around it, tolerating underperformance because confrontation seems futile. This is exit by another name. Not necessarily a physical departure from the institution, but a withdrawal of accountability, a decision to protect oneself from the friction of serious engagement. I did not believe that was the right response, and I did not believe it was honest. The communities whose waste was going uncollected were not abstractions. They were real people, living in the consequences of a contract that was not being honoured.

What I did instead was construct a case through procedure. Every missed collection was documented. Every failure logged with date, location, and volume. Every communication with the PSP was recorded. The memos accumulated into something that the political protection could not easily dismiss, not because it was unwilling to try, but because the documentation had made the cost of dismissal visible and legible in institutional terms. The PSP eventually resigned the contract. There was no confrontation. There was no drama. There was only the slow, unglamorous accumulation of evidence, presented through channels that the institution itself had designated as legitimate. Max Weber, whose analysis of bureaucracy remains foundational precisely because it refuses to moralize about the structures it describes, would have recognised the approach. Bureaucracies respond to their own internal logic. Understanding that logic, and working through it rather than against it, is not a compromise with the system. It is the only form of serious engagement the system makes available.

IV.

Obafemi Awolowo’s years as Premier of the Western Region between 1952 and 1959 offer what remains, in my view, the most instructive available example of how a leader with transformative intent navigates institutions that were not built for transformation. The free primary education programme, the first in sub-Saharan Africa. The television station. The cocoa cooperatives. These were not achieved in a system that was hospitable to them. They were achieved against the resistance of colonial administrative structures, against the scepticism of a population not yet persuaded that the state could be trusted to deliver what it promised, against the political opposition of those whose interests were not served by expanding access to public goods.

What made these interventions durable was not simply their ambition but their procedural discipline. Awolowo worked through the institutions available to him, extending and reforming them rather than attempting to bypass them. He understood, with the clarity that only comes from sustained engagement with actual governance, that the legitimacy of an intervention depends in large part on the legitimacy of the process that produced it. A man who circumvents the institution to achieve a good outcome has achieved the outcome but weakened the institution. The next person who needs to use that institution will find it less capable than before.

This is the lesson that I absorbed, not from reading about Awolowo but from encountering, in the daily texture of waste management administration, the consequences of institutional erosion. Every time a process was bypassed because it was slow, it became slower because the bypass had removed the pressure that might have made it faster. Every time accountability was waived because accountability was inconvenient, it became harder to invoke accountability the next time it was genuinely needed. The broken institution is not broken because no one has tried to fix it. It is often broken because people have tried to fix it through routes that made it less fixable over time.

V.

I did not know, when I was taking 2am calls throughout the 2018 – 2019 era and making myself available to serve during the 2019 Eid-el-Kabir festival, that I was developing a philosophy. That is not how formation works. Formation happens in the accumulation of choices made before the philosophy has been articulated, and the philosophy is simply the retrospective account of what those choices, taken together, revealed about what you believed.

What I believed, I now understand, was that accountability is not bounded by job description. When citizens called my number (a number that was in circulation because I had judged transparency more important than the protection of my own convenience), they were not making a bureaucratic inquiry. They were expressing a need to a person they had been told was responsible for something that affected their lives. To answer that need as narrowly as possible, to say this is not technically my problem, would have been a kind of dishonesty about what the role meant. I was accountable for outcomes, not just for processes. That distinction shaped everything that followed.

Patience, in this context, is not a passive virtue. It is the active discipline of remaining engaged with a system that resists you, of not confusing the slowness of institutional change with the impossibility of it, of sustaining the quality of attention that a broken system requires over periods of time that exceed what enthusiasm alone can sustain. It is what Hirschman meant by loyalty and not the uncritical deference to the institution as it is, but sustained commitment to the institution as it could become. That commitment is costly. It asks for something that cannot be recovered if spent recklessly. But it is the only form of engagement that produces durable change, because it is the only form that stays in the room long enough to understand what change the system will actually permit.

VI.

There is a question that anyone who chooses voice over exit must eventually answer honestly: at what point does loyalty to an institution become complicit with its failures? It is not a comfortable question, and I do not think it has a universal answer. What I believe, on the basis of experience rather than theory, is that the line falls somewhere around the question of harm. When your continued presence inside a broken institution reduces the harm it does to the people it is supposed to serve, staying is defensible. When your presence becomes a form of legitimation that enables harm you are no longer in a position to prevent or mitigate, something more fundamental has to be reckoned with.

I was not, in those years in waste management, always certain that I was on the right side of that line. There were moments like the morning after the compactor accident, and the afternoon after the road sweeper’s death when the weight of institutional failure was not abstract. When I asked myself, with more urgency than theoretical reflection permits, whether my continued engagement was a form of contribution or a form of cover. I did not always find a satisfying answer. What I found, instead, was that the question itself was worth sustaining, that the willingness to keep asking it, rather than settling into either cynicism or naivety, was the only honest position available to someone who had chosen to stay.

A broken system does not reward impatience. It does not reward the kind of moral clarity that announces itself loudly and achieves little quietly. What it rewards, over time and incompletely and with reversals, is the person who understands its internal logic well enough to work through it, who builds credibility through procedural discipline rather than rhetorical force, who stays accountable for outcomes even when the system has given them every permission to limit their accountability to process. That person does not fix the broken system. But they narrow the distance between what it is and what it ought to be. Incrementally. Unglamorously. With a patience that looks, from the outside, like endurance, but feels, from the inside, like a form of faith.

VII.

I carry those years with me in ways that are not always visible but are always present. The habit of documentation, formed in those memos about missed collections, has become the habit of building institutional memory in every project I touch. The willingness to answer at 2am, which was really the willingness to remain accountable beyond the boundaries of convenience, has become a general disposition toward responsibility that does not shrink from difficult moments. The discipline of handling a politically connected PSP through procedure rather than confrontation has become a general understanding of how power actually moves in institutional environments. Not through moral appeal, but through the patient construction of cases that the institution’s own logic cannot easily dismiss.

These are not dramatic inheritances. They do not make for the kind of story that organises itself around decisive moments and clear victories. They are the inheritances of someone who chose a voice, who stayed, who absorbed the cost of staying and discovered that the cost, though real, had produced something worth having. Not the fixed system. The systems are not fixed. But a clearer map of how they work, and a more honest understanding of what it takes to work within them toward something better.

Weber was right that institutions respond to their internal logic rather than to moral appeals. Scott was also right that legibility imposed from above destroys the informal knowledge that makes systems actually function. I cannot but admit that Hirschman was right that the choice between exit and voice is, at bottom, a question of what you believe about the improvability of the organisations that shape people’s lives. And Awolowo was right that transformative intent without procedural discipline produces not transformation but the illusion of it.

What none of them could tell me, experience alone could teach. And it was what it would feel like to hold all of that understanding in the body, at half past two in the morning, with a phone in my hand and a citizen on the other end of the line whose waste had not been collected, and to choose, again, to answer. To stay in the arena. To do the work.

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