How The Headies Mirrors Nigeria’s Dysfunctional Society

The 17th edition of The Headies was held on Sunday night and it came complete with the standard fare of problems. The production was characteristically abysmal. The broadcast feed could as well have been from the 1980s. Tardiness was a problem, as usual. It’s almost like the entire concept of time was lost on the organizers. But the organizational problems of this year’s edition extended beyond a lack of punctuality. The event felt as though the organizers had whiled away the entire year they had to prepare for the awards nights, and hastily put the event together at the last minute. Consider the case of Shallipopi, who won the Best Rap Song category for his collaboration with Odumodublvck “Cast.” He had mounted the stage, dressed in a slick all-black ensemble, and delivered his reception speech, before he realized that he would not be receiving a plaque—apparently, they had run out of plaques. The joke writes itself. That would be like if you had a year to plan a dinner for six, but ended up catering to just four, leaving the other two bemused, disoriented, and hungry, due to your lack of organizational skills. 

Shallipopi did not take too well to the ignominy and has expressed his displeasure through a spate of tweets, including one that reads “The next one, if una see me make I bend.” How does one even nominate artists, select winners, and then forget to make plaques for some winners? The biggest shocker arrived as the event came to a close: a slew of major categories were yet to have been announced. As of Monday evening, winners were still being announced on social media. The Headies is infamous for ineptitude but this year the award hit a new low. They could as well have scrapped the show altogether and announced the winners on social media. At least we’d have foregone a year of moaning about the show’s shoddiness. 

In a sense, The Headies reflects everything that is wrong with Nigeria. In 2012, two eminent economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who jointly received the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics, published Why Nations Fail: The Origins of a Power, Prosperity and Poverty. The book became an instant classic. Government officials and corporate heads embraced it as gospel and fervently touted its insights. However, for all its acclaim, the insights contained within its pages are hardly novel. What’s groundbreaking about the book is how it presents its ideas with clinical precision, drawing from real-world examples and scientific research to prove existing axioms. 

The book opens with a striking contrast between two cities: Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora. The two cities are physically adjacent—they’re technically one city split by the U.S.—Mexico border. The people on both sides share a single culture and live in identical geographical and climatic conditions. Yet the lives they lead couldn’t be more different. While people on the American side enjoy relatively high incomes, good public services like education and healthcare, law and order, and a high life expectancy; for those across the fence, on the Mexican side, life is much harder. Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico, is mired in insecurity, unemployment, and the turbulence of living in a politically fraught society. The disparity between these adjacent cities forms the premise of the book: that progress in any society owes itself to good systems—not just good leaders—as opposed to an abundance of resources or the ingenuity of a few mavericks.  

For a nation or an organization to thrive, it needs to be incubated in an environment that fosters organization and progress. It’s not hard to see why Nigeria has, forever, been plagued by foundational problems such as epileptic power supply and terrible road networks. The country is in the thrall of extractive institutions, systems that are designed to promote malfeasance. It’s not just that our leaders are terrible, the rot has eaten into almost every institution in the country. Lecturers lack the slightest moral compunction against collecting bribes. The police are similarly beholden to whoever has the most cash to toss around. The nation is a diseased body overrun by the virus of ineptitude. 

The Headies are in a similar bind. Highlighting the problems with the award show is almost like screaming into the void; the issues are evident to everyone. Every year we recite them like a litany and the next year, the same issues persist (when they don’t worsen). Confirming the premise of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of a Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, the show moved to America in 2022, but the problems persisted. The reason nothing changed is that even though the show shifted its location, it maintained the same culture, the same systems, the same people, and the same ideas. Of course, nothing would change, it was never about the physical location. 

This diagnosis implies that things will only get better when a culture shift takes place in the company. This would probably require a purge of some key ranks. Turning to the words of Jesus: “Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out, and the wineskins will be ruined.” Clear-cut moves to transform the culture at The Headies are the only hope for salvation. But that seems highly unlikely. What’s likely is that we’ll be back next year moaning about the same set of complaints.