When the Leader Dies

A leader dies. Within hours, and often before the family has finished making calls, a small number of people are in a room deciding what happens next. They are not conspirators. They are the people who were closest, who know where things are kept, who have the phone numbers, and who understand that somebody has to say something to a very large number of frightened people by the weekend.

What that room decides is provisional, informal and, in the great majority of cases, permanent. Everything that follows — the interim arrangement, the announcement, the eventual confirmation — tends to ratify the position established in the first seventy-two hours by people acting under pressure with no written authority.

This essay is about that period. Not about who ought to lead, which is a question for each tradition to answer in its own terms, but about the mechanism by which the answer is actually arrived at when nobody wrote one down in advance.

Every religious tradition has a doctrine of leadership. It says who is fit to lead, what qualifies them, what the office means and where its authority comes from. These doctrines are ancient, carefully worked out, and taken seriously by the people who hold them.

Very few bodies have a procedure. A procedure is a different kind of thing entirely: it says who identifies the successor, by what process, within what period, who confirms the identification, what happens if two candidates emerge, and what becomes of the seal, the accounts and the title deeds on the day the office changes hands.

The distinction matters because a doctrine cannot be executed. When a leader dies, the doctrine tells the community what kind of person should follow him. It does not tell anyone who that person is, or who gets to decide, or what to do on Thursday. Into that gap steps whoever has practical control of the institution's assets and communications — and the vacancy is filled by the question of custody rather than the question of fitness.

Where a body has a theology of leadership but no procedure for succession, succession is decided by whoever holds the keys.

Nothing in that sentence implies bad faith. The person holding the keys is usually the person who was trusted enough to be given them. The difficulty is that trust conferred for one purpose has silently become authority for another, and there is no document by which the community can distinguish the two.

A succession crisis is not a single event. It runs through five stages, and at each one something is settled that everyone present believes is merely temporary.

In a vacancy, three things could in principle determine who leads. They are ranked here in the order of their formal authority, which is the reverse of the order in which they usually prevail.

The constitution comes first in law. It is the body's own instrument, filed with the Commission, and it is what a court will read. Its weakness is that it is frequently a template describing an organisation that never existed, which makes it a poor guide to what should happen and an unreliable ally to whoever invokes it.

The register comes second. It records who the trustees are, and it is checkable by anyone. Its weakness is that it is a record of appointments, not of leadership, and in many bodies it has not been updated for years.

Custody comes third in law and first in practice. Whoever holds the keys, the seal, the accounts, the mailing list and the platform is in possession, and possession in an institution — as in land — shifts the burden onto everybody else.

There is a further consideration that shapes all of this. Courts in this country are, as a general matter, reluctant to determine questions that are purely doctrinal or spiritual — who is truly called, whose ordination is valid, what the tradition requires. What they will determine is property, contract and the construction of a body's constitution. The consequence is significant and widely misunderstood: a succession dispute framed as a spiritual question may find no forum at all, while the same dispute framed as a question about who may operate an account is justiciable. Disputes therefore migrate, quickly, from the language of calling into the language of assets — which is why so many succession fights that begin as questions of legitimacy end as questions about a bank mandate.

The court will not tell you who was called. It will tell you who may sign.

Nothing about this problem is novel, and no tradition represented in this country has failed to address it.

In the law of endowments, the founder may appoint the administrator and provide for the succession of administrators after him; the office does not lapse merely because its holder has died, and provision for the next holder is a normal incident of dedication rather than an afterthought.

In the common law of trusts, the power to appoint new trustees is a standard clause, exercisable on death, incapacity or retirement, vested in a named person or in the continuing trustees, precisely so that a vacancy in the office never becomes a vacancy in the holding.

In customary and traditional practice, succession to office is one of the most thoroughly worked-out areas of the entire system, with recognised kingmakers, defined eligibility, and a procedure that operates whether or not the previous holder made arrangements.

Three traditions, all of which concluded that the succession of the office holder must be provided for in advance, by name or by procedure, in the instrument that created the arrangement. What is missing in the ordinary Nigerian religious body is not doctrine, precedent or precedent-in-another-tradition. It is a clause.

Each of these is an afternoon's work and none of them is available in the week they are needed. That is the pattern this entire sub-cluster keeps returning to, and it is worth stating in its own terms: every instrument that protects a religious institution is cheap while relations are good, and unobtainable once they are not.

An institution that has not decided how it will bury its founder has decided to be divided by him.