Designing programmes that survive an election cycle

Lagos began building its Blue Line rail in 2009. The first stretch carried its first passengers in September 2023. Between those two dates sat three changes of administration, a commodity-price collapse, a currency crisis, and a pandemic. The line survived all of it, but the survival was narrow, and the thirteen years it took are a fair measure of how hard continuity is even when a project does eventually open.

Most reforms are less fortunate. Across the region, the more common story is the programme that arrives with a launch, a logo, and a champion, and then quietly disappears when the champion does. National development plans are a clear example of the pattern: each administration tends to retire its predecessor’s plan and announce its own, so that the country accumulates strategies faster than it accumulates results. The waste is enormous, and very little of it is technical. It is a failure of design.

The good news in that diagnosis is the same as its sting. If programmes die for structural reasons, they can be built to live for structural reasons. Durability is not luck. It is something you engineer into a programme before it launches, and it is most of what separates reform that compounds from reform that resets every four years.

Why programmes die at the transition

Before the fixes, it is worth being precise about the failure, because the instinct to blame “lack of political will” explains nothing and fixes less.

Programmes die at transitions for a handful of recurring reasons. The first is personalised ownership. When a programme is identified with one minister or one governor, the next office-holder has every incentive to let it lapse, because its success would be credited to a predecessor and often a rival. The programme was built as a person’s legacy, so it dies with the person’s tenure.

The second is the absence of an institutional home. A programme run out of a leader’s office, by a team loyal to that leader, has nowhere to live once the leader goes. There is no agency with a statutory mandate to defend it, no professional staff whose job is to keep it running regardless of who is in power.

The third is the new-plan incentive. Incoming administrations are rewarded politically for announcing, not for continuing. Cutting a ribbon on your own initiative is worth more, electorally, than finishing someone else’s. So the system over-produces launches and under-produces completions.

The fourth is the funding cliff. Many programmes are funded one budget cycle at a time, with no multi-year commitment. A transition, or simply a bad revenue year, removes the money, and a half-built programme is easy to abandon and hard to defend.

The fifth is the missing constituency. A programme with no organised group of beneficiaries who will fight for it has no political cost attached to killing it. It is, in budget terms, free to cancel.

Every durable programme is, in effect, an answer to those five failure modes. The design principles below map onto them directly.

Designing for durability

Build a constituency that outlasts the sponsor. The most powerful protection a programme can have is a group of people who will defend it because they benefit from it, and who are organised enough to make cancelling it costly. That means identifying, early, who gains from the programme and making those gains visible, concrete, and attributable to the programme rather than to a politician. Commuters who depend on a bus corridor, small businesses inside an industrial scheme, households connected to power: these are the programme’s real insurance policy. A reform that benefits a diffuse public but no organised constituency is structurally fragile, however good it is on paper.

Give it an institutional home with a real mandate. Continuity needs an owner that is not a person. The most durable programmes are housed in an agency or authority with a statutory mandate, professional staff, and a remit that survives elections. Lagos offers the clearest regional illustration. Its transport reforms, including the bus rapid transit corridor that opened in 2008 and the rail programme that followed, sit under a dedicated transport authority rather than inside a governor’s personal office. That institutional home is a large part of why the agenda has continued across successive administrations, even when individual projects slowed. The lesson generalises: if you want a programme to outlast a tenure, give it a guardian whose existence does not depend on that tenure.

Sequence visible wins before the cycle turns. A programme that will not show anything for a decade is a programme that any successor can quietly shelve, because there is nothing yet for the public to miss. Durable reforms are sequenced so that something real and defensible exists before the next election: a first phase, a pilot at scale, a benefit people can feel. The aim is not to manufacture optics. It is to create facts on the ground that raise the political cost of reversal. Once a corridor is carrying a quarter of a million people a day, cancelling it is no longer a free decision.

Fund it realistically, and ring-fence what you can. A programme financed hand-to-mouth from a single budget line is one bad year away from death. Durability improves sharply when funding is committed across multiple years, protected from in-year raids, and, where possible, drawn from a dedicated or ring-fenced source rather than competing annually with everything else. Where domestic fiscal commitment is credible, blended and development finance can extend the runway further, but external money is not a substitute for a domestic funding base. The discipline is the same one that distinguishes durable public funds elsewhere: take the spending decision out of the annual political scramble and put it on a rule.

Make it legible and measured. A programme that publishes what it is doing, what it costs, and what it is achieving builds a public record that becomes its own defence. Transparent, regular reporting does two things at once. It builds the trust that sustains political support, and it makes the programme harder to misrepresent or quietly wind down, because the evidence of its value is already in public view. Reform that works in the dark has no constituency and no defence; reform that reports its results recruits both.

Insulate the technical core from the political cycle. Political direction should change with elections; delivery capacity should not. The programmes that survive tend to protect a professional delivery unit, staffed on competence rather than patronage, that keeps operating through transitions while political principals come and go. The politics sets the destination. The institution keeps the vehicle on the road. When both jobs are done by the same politically appointed team, the programme has no continuity once that team leaves.

Design for the successor, not just the sponsor. This is the principle most often skipped, because it runs against the grain of how reforms are sold. A programme built to make one leader look good is built to be abandoned by the next. A programme designed so that a successor can credibly claim a share of its success has a chance of being adopted rather than discarded. In practice that means involving the institutions, and where possible the rival camps, that will inherit the programme, so that ownership is broad enough to survive a change of government. Cross-party and cross-administration buy-in is not naivety. It is continuity insurance.

The cost of starting over

It is worth dwelling on what discontinuity actually costs, because the price is hidden in a way that lets it continue. When a programme is abandoned at a transition, the visible loss is the unfinished asset. The larger losses are invisible. There is the sunk cost of the design, procurement, and partial build that now sit idle. There is the institutional memory that walks out of the door with the team. There is the credibility lost with private partners, lenders, and communities, who learn that commitments in this market expire with the administration that made them, and who price that lesson into every future deal as higher risk and higher cost.

The development-plan habit captures the pattern in miniature. A country produces a long-term vision, builds a planning apparatus around it, and then, at the next transition, retires it for a fresh one with a new name and a new horizon. Each cycle restarts the learning curve. The plans accumulate; the compounding does not. A country that had pursued one imperfect plan for twenty years would almost always be further ahead than one that pursued four excellent plans for five years each, because development outcomes, like infrastructure, compound only when they are left alone long enough to do so.

This is why continuity is not a bureaucratic nicety. It is one of the highest-return investments a reformer can make, precisely because so few make it. In a context where partners expect programmes to die at the next election, the programme that visibly will not die earns a premium: cheaper financing, more serious counterparties, and the patience that long-horizon results require.

When the money comes from outside

A particular version of this problem arrives with externally funded programmes. Donor and development-finance money can launch reforms that domestic budgets would never reach, which is its great value. It can also create a different kind of fragility, because the programme’s survival is tied to a funding cycle and a set of priorities decided elsewhere. When the grant ends or the funder’s strategy shifts, a programme with no domestic owner and no domestic funding base simply stops.

Designing for durability is therefore even more important, not less, when the money is external. The disciplines are specific. Build genuine country ownership from the start, so the programme is the government’s and not the funder’s, with a domestic institution accountable for it rather than a parallel project unit that dissolves when the grant closes. Plan the funding transition explicitly, with a path from concessional money to a domestic or commercial base, rather than assuming renewal. And insist that capability, not just cash, is transferred, so that when the external team leaves, the people who can run the programme remain. A reform that can only survive while the donor is in the room was never really established; it was rented.

The same logic links directly to how these programmes are financed. Blended and development finance can extend a programme’s runway and de-risk its early years, but the structures that endure are the ones designed to hand over to a domestic owner and a domestic funding base on a defined timetable. Continuity in delivery and continuity in financing are the same problem viewed from two angles.

A simple durability test

Before a programme launches, it is worth running it through a short diagnostic. The questions are blunt on purpose, because the failure modes are blunt.

• If the current leader left tomorrow, who outside their office would fight to keep this programme, and are they organised?
• Which standing institution owns this, and does that institution’s mandate survive an election?
• What real, visible benefit will exist before the next transition, and who will feel it?
• Is the funding committed beyond this budget year, and is it protected from being raided?
• Could a successor plausibly claim a share of the credit, or is the design built around one person?
• Is the delivery team professional and protected, or does it leave when the principal leaves?

A programme that answers these well is not guaranteed to succeed. Plenty of well-designed reforms still fail on execution. But a programme that answers them badly is almost guaranteed not to survive its first transition, no matter how good its launch looked.

The real point

The instinct in public reform is to pour energy into the launch: the strategy document, the announcement, the early momentum. That energy is largely wasted if the programme is not built to outlive the person who launched it. The durable reforms in the region are not always the most ambitious or the best funded. They are the ones with an organised constituency, an institutional home, an honest funding base, and a design that lets the next administration inherit them without losing face.

That is the difference between a programme and a legacy project. A legacy project is built to be remembered. A programme is built to keep working after everyone has stopped paying attention to who started it. The second is harder, less glamorous, and the only kind worth designing.

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Sources: Lagos Blue Line rail timeline and history · Work progresses on the Lagos Blue Line · Lagos transport authority (LAMATA) train services

This article is general guidance, not legal or investment advice.