Nigeria, Dec. 30 -- December 30 would have been Professor Olikoye Ransome-Kuti's birthday were he alive. Instead, the date arrives each year as a sober reminder of a leadership vacuum Nigeria has never filled. It is not merely the absence of a man that this day underscores, but the disappearance of a standard, one that Nigeria's health sector leadership has failed, or refused, to meet for more than two decades.

Ransome-Kuti was not a ceremonial minister. He did not occupy the office of minister of health as a political ornament or a reward for loyalty. He was a working minister in the strictest sense of the term. Between 1985 and 1992, he approached public health as a core national obligation, inseparable from economic development, socia...