“Strategy or Spectacle? Davola and Others on Why CEOs Miss the Mark”

Michael Adesina

Why are so many of Nigeria’s corporate leaders struggling to get strategy right? In boardrooms across Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt, CEOs confidently speak of growth, disruption, innovation, and scalability. Yet beneath the gleaming rhetoric of mission statements and borrowed buzzwords, cracks are showing. A quiet reckoning is underway: too many Nigerian executives are building on shaky strategic foundations.

Business analysts and industry veterans are beginning to sound the alarm. Among the most vocal is Mr. Damilare Davola, a seasoned investment banking and business analyst whose work spans multiple sectors in Nigeria and West Africa. Renowned for his sharp, evidence-based insights, Davola argues that the issue isn’t intelligence but intent. “Nigerian CEOs don’t lack smarts,” he says pointedly. “What they lack is strategic focus.”
“Nigerian CEOs don’t lack smarts,” Davola opines, “they lack strategic focus. Too many chase headlines and flashy numbers instead of tackling the tough questions: Who do we serve? What does scaling cost? What sets us apart? When will we see returns on our investment?”

Davola sees talent loss as one of the worst results of weak strategy. “When teams can’t grasp the direction or when the plan changes every few months based on trends, good staff quit. And when they go, they take your company’s future with them.”

He also criticizes the excessive use of foreign case studies and the lack of value placed on local data. “We don’t look enough into our own markets. We use frameworks without understanding the context. A CEO in the Nigerian energy sector quotes Harvard Business Review when they haven’t even ordered a proper study on energy usage in Abia or Ondo.”

Davola is assisting companies in recalibrating in his consulting practice by adopting what he refers to as micro-strategies—small, evidence-backed, strategic changes tested and scaled only after they show worth. He says, the era of 5-year imaginary plans is past. Modern Nigeria calls for quick, well-informed judgments. But first, CEOs need set up systems for listening to workers, customers, the government, and the streets.

Dr. Nkem Adesina, a strategy management lecturer at Lagos Business School, considers that a lot of Nigerian corporate strategy has become performative. “CEOs are rewarded for sounding smart, not for thinking deep,” she observes. “There is an almost unhealthy fixation with sounding global, yet very little attention is paid to localizing the strategies in their grounding-local behavior of customers, infrastructure constraints, regulatory environment, and talent dynamics.”

She cited examples of companies that mimicked Western business models-and especially in technology-which collapsed because they failed to localize. “You can’t copy-paste Silicon Valley into Surulere,” she comments.

Tobi Oyelade, a corporate transformation consultant with more than twelve years of experience working with midsized African companies, comments on the leadership-execution gap: “The most frequent problem I come across while auditing Nigerian firms is what I call ‘strategic drift.’ The CEO says one thing, but everyone else is behaving rather differently.”

Poor strategic communication and topdown isolation are blamed by Oyelade. “Strategy is about aligning your people, resources, systems, and incentives toward that goal, not just announcing one. Too frequently, the plan lives in the CEO’s head or even worse in a PowerPoint deck that no one reviews after the board retreat,” he explains.

He cites recent reorganizations in fields including e-commerce and logistics, where businesses have lost money chasing the wrong customer group or rotated too swiftly without evidence. “Sometimes the issue is pride; leaders believe they know more than the market. Other times it’s dread—the drive to appear like you’re innovating even when your basics are poor.”
For Nigerian CEOs, the message is clear: the time has come to move beyond optics and buzzwords into the disciplined craft of strategy. In an economy tested by inflation, global competition, and regulatory pressures, leadership will require more than clever slogans. What will define the next era of Nigerian business is not who speaks the loudest about innovation, but who quietly does the hard work of aligning vision with execution. To regain public trust and unlock long-term value, corporate leaders must return to the fundamentals—clarity of purpose, disciplined planning, and accountable leadership. Only then can Nigeria’s boardrooms truly deliver on their promises of transformation.