We the People On why the fourth tier of Government has always  quietly driven certain social care

Kemi Adeosun

There are weddings you attend for the couple, and weddings you attend for the room. Last week I attended one of the latter. The occasion was beautiful, but I confess I greeted neither bride nor groom properly, because I was cornered in the sunshine with three other women having a conversation I could not leave. We were talking about Nigeria’s social challenges. The schools that do not teach. The clinics that are there but not there. The children the system has no name for.

At some point I said the thing I always say when this topic surfaces. I call it We the People, if I were not at that phase in my life where I seek ease, I should write a PHS thesis on the subject. The argument is simple: look, globally, at the history of mass education, healthcare, care for widows, the disabled, and orphans. Much of it was pioneered not by governments, but by religious institutions, civic associations, philanthropists, and ordinary citizens who could not wait for the state to act.

The UK Pattern

Two of the most admired social institutions in Britain — the NHS and social housing — are now run by government. That is not how they began. Some of Britain’s oldest hospitals, including St Thomas’s and St Bartholomew’s, emerged from medieval religious and charitable traditions. Others were founded by philanthropists. The Royal Free was established to give the poor medical care at a time when inability to pay meant no care at all. In 1948, many voluntary and municipal hospitals were brought into the newly created National Health Service, and healthcare became far more centrally organised by the state.

George Peabody, an American banker, decided that where the poor lived required attention and endowed a fund that today manages 104,000 homes. Dr Barnardo started working with orphans from a rented room in East London. The state arrived generations later to scale what these individuals had proved possible.

Coming Home

The pattern is identical in Nigeria. I will set aside the mission schools — CMS, Methodist, Wesleyan — lest anyone attribute them to colonial intent.

Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti founded the Abeokuta Ladies Club in the 1930s. By 1940 she was running adult literacy classes for market women — among the earliest organised adult education initiatives for Nigerian women. Not inspired by the British. Not funded by the colonial administration. Built despite it

Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, Nigeria’s first indigenous Chief Justice, founded the first Cheshire disability home in Oluyole, Ibadan. He founded the Lagos home the following year. There are now five Cheshire homes across Nigeria — in Ibadan, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Orlu, and Enugu. None was built by any government. All were built by people who recognised a need and could not wait for permission. Mission hospitals tell the same story: Wesley Guild in Ilesa, Itu in Akwa Ibom — still operating, frequently more reliably than government facilities built a generation later.

The Pattern, Documented

The table below illustrates what holds across geographies and eras: civil society identifies a need, demonstrates a response, and — sometimes generations later — the state arrives to scale what has already been proved.

Domain	Who Built It First	Landmark Example	Government Response
Healthcare (UK)	Voluntary hospitals & friendly societies	Guy’s Hospital 1721; the Royal Free for the poor; friendly societies from 1700s	National Health Service, 1948
Social housing (UK)	Philanthropic trusts & model employers	Peabody Trust 1862; Cadbury’s Bournville 1893	Addison Act (council housing), 1919
Disability care (UK)	Civic individuals	Leonard Cheshire’s Le Court, Hampshire, 1948	Government disability frameworks, 1970s onward
Education (Nigeria)	Christian missions	CMS schools, 1840s; Catholic missions, 1860s; Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti’s adult literacy classes, 1940	Federal government school takeover, 1970s
Healthcare (Nigeria)	Mission hospitals	Itu Hospital, Akwa Ibom, 1905; Wesley Guild, Ilesa, 1928	Post-independence government health ministries
Disability care (Nigeria)	Civic individuals	Oluyole Cheshire Home, Ibadan, 1959 (Ademola); Lagos home, 1960; five homes across Nigeria today	Government disability frameworks, post-independence

Sources: NHS history; Peabody Trust; Leonard Cheshire archives; CMS records; Lagos Cheshire Home.

What Dash Me Taught Me

Let me leave history and come to the work I do now. When we started our charity shop journey, I was told that Nigerians would never donate used clothes for sale, and warned that orphanage operators could not be trusted. Both proved false. We are on our fifth store, have raised over ₦450 million, built four orphanages from scratch, and funded thousands of meals.

Permit that small boast only as a way of getting somewhere larger. The social fabric of this nation cannot be changed by government. No official in Abuja can understand a child left outside an orphanage clutching a piece of paper that says ‘Joshua, age 2.’ Or the violence in Plateau that created sixteen orphans overnight whose needs go far beyond physical shelter.

At the wedding, I met a woman who has taken on child protection — specifically the prevention and healing of child sexual abuse — with missionary fervour. Another is refurbishing a government arts facility, taking on every bureaucratic obstacle to make something better. They were not waiting for a ministry circular. They were already building.

The Inversion We Have Accepted

At some point, without announcement, we accepted a reordering. Government became the assumed first mover in social provision; voluntary action became the supplement. This is historically backwards and politically corrosive. When government is the assumed provider of all social goods, citizens become supplicants — waiting, resenting, petitioning rather than building. Government, meanwhile, takes credit for what philanthropy built and responsibility for what it structurally cannot deliver at speed or quality.

The condition for better government is not a better election cycle. It is a more active citizenry — one that builds first and petitions second.

The Fourth Tier

I spent over seven years in government — as Commissioner for Finance in Ogun State, and as Minister of Finance at the federal level. I have sat at the tables where the big decisions are made. I understand what government can and cannot do, and the gap between the two is wider than most reformers admit.

That is why I now think of what I do — and what the women at that wedding do — as work in the fourth tier of government. Not a metaphor. A description. Nigeria formally has three tiers: federal, state, and local government. All three govern at a distance, which is not a criticism; it is a structural reality. 

That fourth tier — civil society, philanthropy, the church clinic, the community solar grid, the charity shop, the women’s group — is where society’s heavy lifting actually happens. It operates with the one thing the other three tiers cannot manufacture: proximity. Proximity to the problem, to the family, to the child, to the need as it actually presents itself rather than as it appears in a policy document.

Nigeria’s reform programme is extracting a real cost from ordinary people. The government’s fiscal capacity to fund social provision is constrained. Into that gap, the question is not whether someone will step in — someone always does, someone always has. The question is whether we have the language to recognise it, the structures to support it, and the will to stop waiting for the wrong tier to move first.

 I would not be honest without pointing some low hanging fruit. Some  Government functions that need to revert to the fourth tier, the schools that the Alumni would happily take over and transform,  Universities that need to operate as  world class Educational Trusts  funded by the alumni who would be nothing today without them, rather than budget lines unlikely to receive any meaningful  allocation.

One of the wedding  guests put it plainly: the problem is not that Nigerians do not care. The problem is that we have been taught to redirect our caring into complaint.

Government did not pioneer the social contract.  In most cases, it inherited what the Fourth Tier built.  The fourth tier is still building.

We the People.

Kemi Adeosun is a former Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and former Commissioner for Finance of Ogun State. She is the founder of Nidacity.com and the Dash Me Foundation. She writes from Lagos.