Introduction
A common mistake enveloping nonprofits in the Nigerian entrepreneurial ecosystem is the failure of succession. What many people don’t realize is that an organization does not die when they close; they close because they have already died. From the shores of Africa through the demesne of Europe, the net is replete with news aplenty to buttress this truth. Shockingly, the news of Chief MKO Abiola stands out. Although his statue stands tall somewhere in the heart of Abeokuta, there is really nothing to write home about his empire, especially as most of his businesses have licked the dust while others are trying to remain afloat, desperate for a messiah. At the crux of this is the paradox of outward legacy and invisible collapse that frames the tragedy of organisations that die before they officially close. The burning question then becomes: what went wrong?
Like many other big names buried in history, prior to today, MKO Abiola was undeniably the richest, “happening” founder of a conglomerate with some of his business interests— Abiola Farms, Abiola Bookshops, Radio Communications Nigeria, Wonder Bakeries, Concord Press, Banuso Fisheries, Concord Airlines, Summit Oil International Ltd, Africa Ocean Lines and Habib Bank, among others, which employed over 5,000 people in Nigeria and the West African sub-region, awarding him an undeniable fame globally. However, despite the fame and fortune his businesses accrued, there was a shoe left unworn. The result? A fragile architecture where the departure of the owner triggered systemic paralysis. In other words, the organization(s) experienced a failed succession.
Addressing the Elephant in the Room: What is Failed Succession?
Failed succession is a regular customer at the corridors of Nigerian nonprofits. This is largely owed to the fact that boards can dutifully create emergency CEO lists and groom talent pipelines, but when the moment of transition arrives, organizations still find themselves in turmoil, especially when the transition hits like a thief in the night. This gap between theory and practice owes much to power’s complex grip on leaders, leaving much room to address the elephant in the room: failed succession.
Away from the semantics of the word “succession,” one needs to understand that that word is often misunderstood in the entrepreneurial sphere. What this means is that from one quarter, it is seen as a ceremonial handover, some sort of a single, splendiferous event marked by applause and photographs. However, in reality, succession is a deliberate cultivation of future leadership embedded in the present. When absent, organizations begin to decay long before anyone notices and gradually birth the death of the organization. But with strategic, planned succession, it carefully engineers a continuity in the enterprise such that there is a dichotomy between the founder as the engine and identity of the organization.
Examples are not farfetched. Family-owned businesses across Nigeria often collapse by the second generation. (Undocumented) structures are bequeathed to heirs which they were never trained to understand. They assume positions of authority without any life “manual” on how to get things done properly, forgetting that biological inheritance cannot be equated to leadership competence. On the other end of the spectrum, the founder becomes the brand, the brain and the backbone. Decisions centralize around one person. When s/he dies, the business becomes a puzzle with missing pieces. This eventual, predictable decline also points to the technological gap evident in nonprofits’ non-ability to document a succession plan for smooth transition.
According to First Republic Bank, research suggests that nonprofits are poorly prepared for leadership transitions; fewer than three in 10 have a succession plan in place while 10,000 Baby Boomers retire each day. Another report suggests that barely half of major companies have a written succession plan, and of those that do, only 14% of leaders feel their organisations handle it well. Meanwhile, in a research by BoardSource, the National Council of Nonprofits states that only 27% of nonprofits had a written succession plan in place. This demonstrates the low priority nonprofits place on over-viewing talent succession to prepare for unexpected vacancies. Meanwhile, a simple well-thought-out and structured succession plan can avoid major problems, carve a path forward and maintain long-term sustainability for the company. But all that will be a tongue-in-cheek conversation if succession is not understood beyond replacement.
Rule of Thumb: Understanding Succession Beyond Replacement
The first rule for engagement in a transition process for nonprofits is to never mistake succession as replacement, although both work hand in glove. The difference: while replacement is reactive, succession is intentional. Replacement is what organisations do when a vacancy appears and urgency takes over. It asks a simple, often desperate question: “Who fills the gap now that the leader is gone?” Succession, however, is proactive and architectural. It asks a deeper question: “How does leadership evolve before the leader is gone?”
This distinction is also reflected in global organisational performance patterns. According to a 2023 report by Deloitte on leadership succession trends, only about 14% of organisations globally believe they have a strong succession pipeline for key leadership roles, despite over 86% acknowledging succession planning as a “critical priority.” This gap reveals a dangerous contradiction: organisations know succession matters, but few actively build systems for it. The same report notes that companies with formal succession planning frameworks are 2.2 times more likely to outperform their competitors in long-term financial stability and leadership continuity. In other words, succession is not just a human resources concern, it is a survival mechanism. Where it is absent, leadership becomes a single point of failure; and when that point collapses, the organisation does not immediately die, but it begins a slow suffocation marked by confusion, inconsistency, and strategic paralysis.
Expanding this further, research by McKinsey has shown that organisations with strong leadership continuity frameworks experience up to 30% faster recovery from executive transitions compared to those without structured succession systems. This is particularly important in emerging economies like Nigeria, where institutions are often personality-driven rather than system-driven. In many such organisations, the leader is not just a decision-maker but the repository of knowledge, relationships, and institutional direction. When that leader exits without a structured succession process, the organisation does not simply “lose a head”, it loses its memory. The result is often visible: stalled projects, internal power struggles, declining stakeholder confidence, and gradual irrelevance. Over time, what was once a thriving institution becomes a cautionary tale of how not to build continuity.
On this premise, institutions should therefore integrate succession in the work culture as a continuous process, rather than an emergency plan. Where succession is absent, leadership becomes a bottleneck, and when that bottleneck breaks, the organisation begins to suffocate, and eventually goes comatose especially as the organisation’s identity is tied to a single individual—the founder.
The Danger of a Single Story: The Dilemma of the Founder Syndrome
When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stood on the TedX stage to deliver her now-iconic talk, The Danger of a Single Story, she was not speaking about organisations, yet she might as well have been. Her warning was simple but piercing: when a single narrative dominates, it flattens complexity, erases alternatives, and ultimately distorts reality. In organisational life, this “single story” often takes the form of a single person—the founder—whose identity becomes so tightly woven into the institution that the organisation begins to lose its ability to exist beyond them. What begins as vision slowly hardens into monopoly: of voice, of power, of direction. And in that narrowing, the seeds of collapse are quietly sown.
Usually, the archetype of the founder in a nonprofit setting is a glorified figure: the visionary individual whose passion and drive births something remarkable. However, there is the dilemma of the “Founder’s Syndrome,” when the founder becomes inseparable from the organisation itself, when the story of the institution becomes indistinguishable from the story of one individual. According to The BoardRoom Africa, “Studies of outgoing chief executives found a telling split: nearly half saw the CEO role as part of who they are rather than just a position they held. Over years or decades, the boundaries between the person and the office blur: the organisation’s achievements become personal achievements, and the authority they wield day-to-day becomes a core piece of their self-worth.” While this often accelerates early growth, it produces a dangerously fragile structure, one that cannot survive beyond the founder’s active presence.
Furthermore, this phenomenon is not limited to traditional enterprises; it is equally pronounced in the startup ecosystem, particularly in emerging markets where founders are mythologized as indispensable architects of innovation. The narrative of the “visionary founder” is compelling, but it can also be corrosive when it discourages the building of scalable systems. Research from McKinsey & Company shows that between 27% and 46% of leadership transitions are considered failures within the first two years, often due to weak succession planning and overdependence on individual leaders. In such environments, decision-making bottlenecks form around the founder, innovation slows as complexity increases, and the organisation struggles to scale beyond the limits of one mind. When investors demand governance structures or when the founder eventually steps aside, the organisation often lacks the internal resilience to adapt. What follows is rarely an immediate collapse, but a gradual erosion categorized by missed opportunities, internal confusion, and eventual irrelevance.
Yet beneath these structural failures lies something more intimate and more difficult to confront: the psychology of letting go. At the heart of founder syndrome is the emotion of fear. Leaders who have poured years, sometimes decades, into building something from nothing often struggle to imagine a future in which they are no longer central to its existence. There is fear that successors may dilute the vision, fear of becoming obsolete, fear of watching one’s life’s work evolve in unfamiliar directions. This psychological resistance delays transition, discourages delegation, and weakens the very systems required for continuity.
And so the irony becomes almost tragic in its clarity: in trying to preserve their legacy, founders often endanger it. By holding too tightly to control, they create organisations that cannot breathe without them. By telling only one story—their own—they silence the many voices that could sustain and evolve the institution. True legacy, then, is not found in permanence of presence but in the durability of structure. It is not in being indispensable, but in making oneself gradually unnecessary. To build an organisation that lives beyond you is to resist the seduction of the single story and instead cultivate a chorus of leaders, of systems, of ideas, that can carry the narrative forward long after the original voice has gone silent. Hence, the need to (re)define succession in nonprofit space.
Rebuilding the Living: What Successful Succession Looks Like in Practice
Unlike the likes of the media mogul, Sumner Redstone of Viacom, whose saga famously inspired the TV drama Succession, and Uber’s Travis Kalanick who was ousted in 2017, all without a succession plan, leaving the company leaderless in a crisis, the President and CEO of Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, has left a perfect model of successful succession by publicly stepping down from the boards of key ventures, including Dangote Sugar Refinery and Dangote Cement, in 2025. At the same time, his three daughters, Mariya, Halima, and Fatima, were elevated into major leadership roles across the group, including board seats and executive positions in operations, strategy, and commercial oversight.
If organisations can die before they close, then the urgent task before leaders is not merely to sustain activity, but to engineer continuity. Succession must move from being an uncomfortable afterthought to becoming an institutional discipline. It must be deliberate and properly documented. This begins with a fundamental shift in thinking: the organisation must no longer revolve around a personality but around a system of shared vision, distributed leadership, and preserved knowledge. Without this shift, every attempt at succession becomes cosmetic, that is a change in title without a transfer of power.
The first pillar of effective succession is leadership pipeline development. Organisations must intentionally identify and groom future leaders long before they are needed. This is not mentorship in its casual form, but a structured process of exposure, responsibility, and accountability. In many Nigerian organisations, young or emerging leaders are often present but underutilized, kept at the periphery of decision-making. This creates a vacuum when leadership exits. A functional pipeline ensures that when transition comes, it is not disruptive but evolutionary.
Equally critical is the decentralization of knowledge. One of the quiet tragedies of failed organisations is that their most valuable knowledge exists only in the minds of individuals. When those individuals leave, they take the organisation’s memory with them. Hence, processes, relationships, financial structures, and operational strategies must be properly and transparently documented. This transforms the organisation from a personality-driven entity into a knowledge-driven system, one that can be learned, replicated, and sustained.
Another essential dimension is governance and accountability structures. Succession thrives where there are clear frameworks for decision-making, oversight, and conflict resolution. Boards, advisory councils, and defined leadership hierarchies are not mere formalities; they are safeguards against chaos. In their absence, succession becomes a contest of power rather than a process of continuity. Many Nigerian family businesses and ministries fail precisely because authority is inherited without structure, leaving successors with power but no guidance.
However, beyond structure lies a more difficult requirement: the psychological readiness to let go. Leaders must confront the uncomfortable truth that their greatest contribution may not be in how long they lead, but in how well they prepare others to lead after them. This demands a changed mindset, humility, foresight, and a redefinition of legacy. Legacy should be seen as stewardship; the ability to build something that not only survives your absence but thrives because of the systems you put in place.
Finally, organisations must embrace a culture of renewal. Succession is not a single transition event; it is a continuous process of adaptation. As contexts change, leadership must evolve. This requires openness to new ideas, generational inclusion, and a willingness to challenge tradition when it becomes a barrier to growth. Organisations that endure are those that reinvent themselves without losing their core identity.
Wrap Up: The Legacy Question
Ultimately, one cannot sell short the importance of a successful succession in nonprofits. However, unlike for-profit organizations, nonprofits, cloaked in the moral nobility of service and impact, sometimes assume they are exempt from this reality. In fact, the danger may be even greater within the nonprofit sector, where passion frequently substitutes for structure and charisma disguises the absence of institutional planning. Succession, therefore, must cease to be treated as a ceremonial conversation reserved for retirement speeches or funeral seasons. Nonprofits should learn to integrate succession as part of her survival strategy and not an emergency plan. And if indeed, nonprofits are truly committed to a life of impact that transcends generations, then it’s high time they began to build systems that can breathe without them. Otherwise, like many forgotten companies before them, they too will die long before the doors are officially shut.
