6 Nigerian Job Titles That Guarantee You'll Never Be Blamed for Anything

1. "Special Adviser." His entire job is to advise. He is never, under any circumstances, the one who acted on that advice, which means every failed decision can be traced back to "the person who was advised," a category with no name and no accountability attached.

2. "Consultant to the Committee." He was consulted. The committee, separately and independently, made the final decision. In the resulting scandal, nobody can quite establish who decided what, which is, of course, the entire architectural point of the title.

3. "Chairman, Implementation Task Force." He chairs meetings about implementation, a distinctly different activity from actually implementing anything, a distinction Nigerian bureaucracy has elevated into an entire employment category.

4. "Technical Assistant to the Technical Adviser." Two full layers of "technical" now separate any actual decision from any actual consequence, a structural buffer so effective it should be studied by risk management departments worldwide.

5. "Coordinator, Interim Transition Committee." The transition in question has been "interim" since 2016, which raises the philosophical question of whether something can still be called transitional after nearly a decade of not transitioning anywhere.

6. "Ag. Director (Acting)." He has been "acting" in this role for six consecutive years, a performance of temporary authority so committed and sustained it deserves an award nobody in government will ever think to give him.

Somewhere in Abuja, there is an org chart with forty boxes and zero arrows pointing toward accountability.