Nigeria Revenue Service Reform: Zacch Adedeji Urges Leadership Mindset Shift for NRS Success
- Leadership mindset is crucial for Nigeria's revenue reform success
- Institutional transformation begins with personal transformation and overcoming hidden barriers
- Reform requires integrity and transparency beyond legislation, focusing on human elements
Pascal Oparada is a journalist with Legit.ng, covering technology, energy, stocks, investment, and the economy for over a decade.
Nigeria’s sweeping revenue reform will not succeed on the strength of new policies, digital platforms or organisational charts alone.
According to the Executive Chairman of the Nigeria Revenue Service, the real test lies in the leadership mindset.
Source: Facebook
Addressing senior officials at the 2026 NRS Leadership Retreat, Zacch Adedeji argued that institutional transformation begins with personal transformation.
The creation of the NRS, he said, marks a decisive break from the past, but its future depends less on credentials and more on character.
He cautioned that résumés, long years of service and inherited systems would not guarantee success in a rapidly evolving revenue environment. Instead, leaders must be willing to question long-held assumptions and abandon habits that once delivered results but may now limit growth.
The hidden barriers to public sector reform
Drawing insights from leadership research popularised by the Harvard Business Review, Adedeji noted that leaders rarely fail due to a lack of intelligence or strategic thinking.
More often, they are constrained by deeply rooted, often invisible beliefs about authority, control and perfection.
In large public institutions, such beliefs do not always appear as open resistance to change.
They surface quietly. Leadership becomes synonymous with always having the right answers.
Tight supervision is mistaken for accountability.
Decision-making authority narrows, creating bottlenecks that slow innovation and responsiveness.
According to the NRS chairman, these patterns can gradually weaken reform efforts.
When leaders expect everyone to operate at their personal speed or replicate their standards exactly, frustration grows. The instinctive response is to increase control rather than reassess systems.
Over time, he warned, this approach erodes trust, discourages initiative and undermines institutional learning.
A Personal reflection on control and trust
In a candid moment, Adedeji reflected on how his own drive for excellence shaped his management style. A strong commitment to high performance, he admitted, sometimes translated into rigid delegation and intense oversight.
What appeared to be an uncompromising pursuit of quality occasionally masked a deeper concern about accountability and failure. That fear, he acknowledged, could fuel unnecessary mistrust and slow decision-making.
His shift in perspective came with the realisation that efficiency does not demand uniformity. Excellence, he said, does not require every team member to mirror a leader’s exact style.
True leadership, in his view, lies in creating room for others to grow. Trust is not the absence of supervision but a deliberate focus on outcomes rather than micromanaging every step.
Why leadership mindset matters for Nigeria’s economy
The stakes extend far beyond the retreat hall. Nigeria’s revenue reform is one of the country’s most consequential institutional transitions.
The credibility of the tax system, investor confidence and broader economic stability are closely tied to the NRS’s ability to operate with integrity, agility and transparency.
These qualities, Adedeji stressed, cannot be enforced by legislation alone. They must be demonstrated consistently by those at the helm.
Source: Twitter
Reform, he concluded, is not merely a technical project driven by software upgrades or regulatory frameworks.
It is fundamentally human. The future of the NRS, and by extension Nigeria’s revenue system, will depend on whether its leaders are prepared to evolve as boldly as the institution they are building.
Source: Legit.ng
