Scholarships that are helping to change the world
Part five: strengthening democracy across Africa
Next in our series celebrating Oxford alumni and former scholarship-holders who are helping to build a better world, we meet a master’s graduate whose passion for participatory democracy, good governance and human rights is driving positive change — both in his home country of Nigeria and beyond.
‘My vision is of an Africa better led, better served and better governed’ — Samson Itodo
Samson is a lawyer and the founder of Yiaga Africa, a non-profit organisation committed to the promotion of democratic governance. For nearly two decades he has worked to facilitate the inclusion of young people in politics and build electoral integrity across the African continent. In 2020, with support from a Standard Bank Africa Chairman’s Scholarship, Samson moved from his base in Abuja, Nigeria to Oxford, to study for a Master of Public Policy.
I’d always wanted to be a lawyer because I’ve always wanted to defend human rights. One of the major reasons I ventured into this field was the level of egregious human rights violations that I experienced in my society and community.
When I was an undergraduate student I was arrested and detained for no reason. The police said that my friend and I were loitering at a late hour, but it was just 11pm. While I was in the cell, I came into contact with other young people who were there for reasons they weren’t aware of. When I left detention I told myself that the struggle for political freedom was going to be the struggle of my life, because I didn’t want to see any other person go through what I went through for committing no offence.
I come from a continent with huge potential, which should be the leader of the world, but due to the failure of public leadership the continent and my country has not met its full potential. When political leaders emerge out of a flawed electoral process, accountability will always be sacrificed when they get into office.
I decided to work on sanitising the leadership recruitment process so that accountable and transparent leaders could emerge, leaders that care about human rights and take decisions that advance public interest. I also made a commitment to raise the next generation of leaders that will provide accountable and transformative public leadership, so that has been my trajectory over the last 16 years.
‘I was privileged to be recognised as a rising democracy leader by the National Democratic Institute, Goalkeeper by the Gates Foundation and young person of the year by several local and international organisations. That placed a huge responsibility on me to make democracy work and to lead on it in Africa’
— Samson Itodo
The median age of the population in Africa is 18 and yet the continent is led by gerontocrats. My team and I began advocating for a reduction of age limits for running for public office in Nigeria and in 2016 we launched the Not too Young to Run campaign, which was adopted by the UN, the African Union and the Economic Community of West Africa States. The law was passed in 2018 and shortly after we had about 20 young people under the age of 30 elected to office. This was a first in Nigeria’s electoral history.
It was only then that it hit me: it’s one thing to get into office but having the capacity for good governance is equally important. How could we get young people prepared to understand public leadership and public policy? I felt it was time for me to learn.
I chose Oxford because of the vision of the Blavatnik School: a world better led, better served and better governed. I just substituted one word and said: my vision is of an Africa that is better led, better served and better governed, and this is the place for me.
Studying for my master’s degree was a remarkable experience. All my life I’ve studied law and I was making a switch into a new discipline. I was confronted with economics, politics, evidence and statistics — it was fun just learning new things. It was also hectic and stressful, but, at the end of the day, what Oxford does is take you through this fire. It helps you to build and stretch yourself, and push yourself to become a better person. You never know your bandwidth until you go through that experience.
The Blavatnik School is the United Nations of Oxford. I say this jokingly: you don’t need to travel the world to know what happens in other places, you just need to be in Oxford and you’ll have an idea of global politics. It helped me to understand why Africa is experiencing the kind of challenges it grapples with and possible solutions to fixing Africa’s leadership and governance problems. It underscored certain foundational values Africa should prioritise in her quest for sustainable development.
I could write a book about the impact that my studies have had on my work. Firstly, my capacity for managing my organisation has greatly improved. One of the things I learned about leadership is that what you say is as important as how you say it, and this is something that’s crucial when you’re working within teams. Another thing I took from Oxford is how to use data and evidence-based research for public policy — this is now an important part of the work that we do and it has been so fascinating embedding this in the design of our programmes.
One of the things we did when I got back from Oxford was to challenge a policy introduced by our electoral commission on electoral technologies. The commission was going to use a particular device for accreditation of voters in the 2023 election but that accreditation was not going to be published online. We felt that, for the purposes of transparency, it was important that it was and so we evaluated the policy, wrote papers and had meetings with the commission about it. This led to them running a mock exercise where the accreditation was transmitted and published online — an approach that was then scaled for the national elections.
I established an election manipulation risk index for Nigeria ahead of the elections, which aggregates data from all of the states and clusters them into high, medium and low risk. It was designed based on my experience from Oxford and it looks at six variables with indicators just like the University’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. It showed that 27 out of the 36 states in the federation were at high risk of election manipulation.
I have also designed projects that are structured as randomised control trials, which was something I learnt how to do during my course. I recently ran an experiment to test the effectiveness of intra-group, peer-to-peer mobilisation in increasing the number of young people registered to vote. In the ten local governments where these actions took place, more people between the ages of 18 and 25 joined the voter register than elsewhere. The success of those interventions led to the UNDP awarding us a grant of over $500,000 to run the programme on a national scale. We ended up developing what we call the 60% of us project, which aimed to get 60% of young people to register and collect their voter card.
I couldn’t have made it to Oxford without my scholarship and the support of AfOx. I’m so humbled, delighted and grateful because they enabled me to pursue not just my academic and professional development, but my personal development too.
One of the things I say is that an investment in Samson Itodo means an investment in the present and future of Africa. I think that what Standard Bank, AfOx and Oxford have done is to help secure the future of Africa by investing in my education and the education of other scholars from the continent. And it’s a worthwhile venture because those that have received their support are now helping to transform their societies.
We’re at a time when the world is experiencing democratic recession and there is a need for renewed trust in democracy. My hope for the future is a democratic Africa where the people are at the centre of policies and at the centre of governance. But to make that happen there is a need for policy makers and the state to build constructive relationships with society, and that’s about trust — the one lesson we learned from COVID was that trust is the oil that makes public governance successful.
I also hope for a peaceful and prosperous Africa where leaders are making decisions mindful of the implications they will have on unborn children as well as those alive today. I pray that we will have public leaders who care for and love their community, because without love we can’t govern effectively. If we have leaders who put Africa first and put the people first, then the development challenges we’re dealing with will disappear. That’s the future of the continent that I see and I’m doing my best to help create it.
