not changed much fundamentally. The governor of Lagos, Babatunde Raji Fashola, I think has done a
good job in trying to bring some order to the city. He has created BRT lanes for bus rapid transit; he
has organized traffic, is building more infrastructure; maintaining what was on ground and has
relocated squatters. He was doing a lot of work similar to what we did in Abuja to mitigate the
consequences of rapid urbanization and uncontrolled expansion.
I was humbled when upon my return to Nigeria in May 2010, I visited Governor Fashola to thank him
for sending a representative to Dubai to attend my fiftieth birthday dinner and congratulate him over
the visible improvements recorded in his administration of Lagos State. He reminded me of my work
in Abuja and the speech I gave about the compelling need to reduce the disorganization in Lagos when
I received the Silverbird Man of the Year award for 2006. He added that he was inspired by both in
the discharge of his functions as Lagos State governor. Governor Raji Fashola's courageous efforts to
make the megacity work better for more citizens deserve the commendation and support of all
Lagosians and indeed every Nigerian.
The Lessons of National Youth Service
The second time I went to Lagos was about a year later, to report for my national youth service. I was
posted to Ogun state, so I had to fly again to Lagos and then drive about two hours to Abeokuta, and
then onto Aiyetoro for camping at the famous comprehensive high school there. Some of my ABU
classmates at the NYSC camp included Aliyu Omar, Sabiu Baba and Mansur Mukhtar. Were it not for
my national youth service, I can say without a doubt that I would not have gone and spent one year in
the southwest, and I am very thankful for it because a lot of what I experienced during those 12
months have and will remain with me for the rest of my life. I picked up a bit of the Yoruba language,
but have unfortunately lost most of it by now. I learned enough to chat up girls - the most important
thing in the world to a 20 year old that I was at that time. I also got used to going to the market and
buying groceries and then improving my cooking skills – for the first time I had to live mostly on my
own and I had to learn to cook.
My streak of good luck continued when I found that on being posted to George Wimpey & Co. Ltd.,
two people appeared out of nowhere and made my life much easier. Moses Aigbogun was the
accountant and Ahmed Alhassan was the storekeeper in the company. Moses lived alone as his family
was in Jos, even though he was originally from the old Ondo State. For the whole of the youth service
year, I stayed in Mr. Moses Aigbogun's three-bedroom flat in Lafenwa, and was a regular dinner
guest in Ahmed's house in the same neighbourhood. His wife Lami was a patient and gracious hostess
all through the year. These wonderful people and bosom friends confirm the possibilities of a
diverse, yet peaceful and united Nigeria. Moses, a Christian from the south, Ahmed a Muslim from
the north married to Lami, originally a Berom Christian from Jos, doing whatever it took to make the
stay of a total stranger – a Hausa-Fulani youth serving in Abeokuta, pleasurable - and it was. I remain
grateful to them. Moses has now retired to live in his village in Ekiti State while Ahmed moved back
to Jos and remains active in construction of homes and so on. Sadly, Jos, a city that was the epitome
of religious, ethnic and cultural inclusion, has become a cauldron of xenophobia, ethnic intolerance
and religious crisis instigated by 'democratic' politics.
The most important thing I learned that year was the realization that Nigerians are pretty much the
same. I noticed that the levels of development that we had previously thought of the south – that it was
very much ahead of the north – was not really correct. A few urban centres had developed but the rest
of the country was pretty much the same, and faced the same challenges. There was no running water
in most of Abeokuta at the time, and it was a state capital. In fact, Kaduna had more coverage of
running water then than Abeokuta had. The roads were awful. Ordinary people faced the same
challenges of how to educate their children, pay for healthcare, and feed their families. It really did
not matter which part of Nigeria one came from, these were all the same bread and butter issues.
Ethnicity and religion just did not factor in their daily lives - except when politics intruded through
undeserving people seeking undue advantages - and this had a major impact on the way I increasingly
saw the world, my country and its citizens.
All through my years in secondary school and university, I thought that the southerners did not quite
like the northerners and that southerners were far more advanced in having the benefits of superior
education and social services than northerners. The southerners I came across did nothing to dispel
that view. They gave the impression that they were far more advanced and that we were the more
backward people. Spending a year in Abeokuta really helped level the playing field in my eyes and I
stopped looking at Nigeria through that lens of contrived and false division. I realized that our
common humanity, development challenges and desire for a fairer and just society ought to unite us to
pull in the same direction! That was when I realized that the national youth service really was
effective in changing the way I thought. Before then, the only interaction I had with southerners was
either in Barewa College or with the ones living in Kaduna, but they had been there forever so they
were like everyone else – I did not see them as “typical” southerners, I saw them as northern
southerners –the true Nigerians. Those in Ahmadu Bello University were no different in our eyes.
Lagos, of course, was a bit more advanced in terms of infrastructure, nevertheless, in terms of
physical progress, the country was about the same across board - the people, and their day-to-day
issues and struggles were all about the same.
As mentioned earlier, for my national youth service, I was posted to a construction company called
George Wimpey which was the largest construction company in the world at that time. Wimpey was
building a dam to supply water and electricity to Abeokuta. It was during this national service year
that I first made what to me, was serious money. In addition to what the government paid me for that
year, I was also paid an extra allowance by the company, and was doing a lot of "PP - private
practice", i.e. consulting work in my spare time. These were the oil boom days during the Iranian
crisis, when the price of oil shot up to $40-a-barrel and a lot of money was accruing to Nigeria, so
there was a lot of construction work going on and enhanced demand for the services of construction
professionals like me. When I finally went back to Kaduna after my national youth service year, I had
the equivalent of about $20,000 in the bank, a lot of money for a fresh university graduate at the time.
At Wimpey, I was assigned to the construction site of the Oyan River Dam as the assistant quantity
surveyor on-site, which meant my job was to evaluate progress both in terms of time and finances,
and then make payment claims to the client. I was working for the construction contractor, so we
applied for payments monthly to the client to pay. There was a British quantity surveyor (QS) named
Steve Parki
n who was the man in charge and I worked under him; I did all the measurements, handled
all the technical details, and he checked and signed off on it.
For my community service that year we built a bridge for a small village about ten kilometres away
from Abeokuta. We were supplied with cement and steel rods and there was a civil engineer amongst
our team, also posted to Wimpey, who designed the culvert while I calculated the quantities of cement
and steel we needed. The government purchased them all and gave to us and we provided our
professional expertise and labour free of charge. We built these culverts in about four locations in the
village and they gave us a very good send-off with a big feast when we finished, expressing their
gratitude.
The dam is still there. Unfortunately it never supplied any of the 10MW of electricity it was designed
to, but is used solely for water and irrigation in the area. Wimpey eventually wound up and left
Nigeria, but my boss there was invaluable in helping me prepare for my UK professional licensing
exams during my service that year. He got me books; the company paid the exam fees, and gave me
time off to prepare for the exams. In a typical year, between 200 to 300 people from Africa attempt
the Institute of Quantity Surveyors (IQS) and Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors' (RICS)
professional competence examinations and only two or three pass, so it was like a one percent pass
rate. The year I took it, 1981, I was actually the only person from Nigeria that passed.
That year was also the first time I visited President Obasanjo’s hometown or more accurately, his
village of Ibogun. He had at the time just retired from public office and returned to private life in
Abeokuta. His first book, My Command, which told the story of the Nigerian civil war, had just been
published. He described the role he played up to and including signing the instrument of surrender.
One thing I remember about the release of that book was that he was attacked immediately by
virtually everyone – all the guys involved in the war said he was not being truthful, that he did not
play as prominent a role as he made it appear in the book, and some of his commanders and
colleagues disowned his version of events. Reading about this furore, I naturally became curious
because General Obasanjo had moved back to Abeokuta. Obviously I did not think of going to see
him because I thought he would not see me anyway, but I decided to go to the village where he was
born, just to visit, because there was something circulating about his village and how poor he was
growing up.
His village had, I recall, some nine houses or huts – that was it, the entire size of the village. I
remember thinking that if a person born in this village and by providence, hard work and some luck
could become the president of Nigeria, well then social mobility and indeed anything was possible in
this country. I concluded that Nigeria was not a country like the UK where leaders went through a
certain or fairly predictable trajectory, either the royal family or Eton, then to Oxford, Cambridge,
LSE, but rather more like the American Horatio Alger story. When I first came to work for President
Obasanjo in 1999, I told him this story and he kept repeating it to everyone. He would say, “This
short man visited my village and this is what he said…...” and would relate the story I shared with
him and my views on social mobility in our country.
More firsts from my national youth service year – I left Nigeria for the first time, to the Republic of
Benin, with a friend of mine named Aliyu Omar; and that trip was the first and only time I ever took a
shot of whisky. We left Abeokuta, we had some money and we went to Cotonou without making any
hotel bookings. We just thought we could walk in there and get a room. So we went to the Sheraton in
Cotonou and they said they were fully booked, but recommended we try a hotel ‘around the corner,’
which turned out to be about a kilometre. While we were walking to the other hotel, it started raining
and by the time we arrived there, we were soaking wet and shivering cold. We got rooms in the hotel
and settled in, but I was still shivering, so Aliyu suggested that we should take a shot of whisky each
because it would warm us up.
“Where did you learn that?” I asked him. “Have you ever done this?”
“It is ok, have not you read James Hadley Chase novels?” he replied.
Everyone had read James Hadley Chase novels in those days. We were in a country where we could
not buy any medicine over the counter, we could not do anything and I was shivering like a leaf. So
we went down to the bar and asked for a shot of whisky each. They asked for our passports because
we looked really young. When they confirmed we were over 18, we got our shots of whisky and I
asked how to do it.
“You just, you know, take it in one gulp. One gulp – that is how it works,” he said.
We did it. The first thing I noticed was that the ceiling began to spin and something really hot was
burning through my gut. I looked over at Aliyu to complain and he, who had read about doing this in
James Hadley Chase novels, had already collapsed - down on the floor. I got really scared. I
remember thinking, what if this guy dies, what will I say to his mother? However, we eventually
recovered and somehow managed to go up to our rooms and fall asleep. When we awoke the day
after, needless to say, we had very bad headaches. That was the first and last time I ever took a sip of
whisky or any spirit for that matter.
My overall impression of Benin was that it was just another African country, but far less developed
than Nigeria. They did not have the asphalt-paved roads we had, but they did have stable electricity,
which was novel. We spent three days in Benin and never saw the electricity go off even once. But
they struck me as being like us in every way except that nobody spoke English, they spoke French and
other languages, and this made me ruminate over what colonization has done to make us believe and
behave as if we were different people.
Toward the end of my national youth service year, I was introduced to a phenomenon that has
reappeared over and over again in my professional life since then: corruption. I found that Wimpey
was slightly over-invoicing the federal government. They were slightly padding the amount of work
done and now that I am older and wiser I think that it was a whole arrangement in which everyone in
the loop was benefiting financially. The Israeli consulting engineering firm, Tahal Consultants,
needed to sign off on this, and they were one of the best firms in water engineering in the world.
Because I did all the measurements, I realized that when I did my measurements and my boss signed
off on it, the application for payment that went out was increased by a small percentage over and
above what I actually measured.
I went to my boss and told him that the quantities in the final certificates of payment were a little
higher than what we had been applying for and asked him what was going on. He brushed it off and
told me not to worry about it. But I noticed over the three or four months that I had access to their files
that this was something that was happening every month. When I added up the figures, I realized the
federal government was paying a lot of money for work not done, and it amounted to hundreds of
&nbs
p; thousands of dollars every month. I went back to my boss.
“You know, we are not supposed to be doing this, as a company,” I told him.
“Look, I do my bit and the project manager has the final say, you want to talk to anyone, go
talk to the project manager,” he said. “We are quantity surveyors, we are technicians, and we do not
get involved in management and administrative decisions.” This is similar to saying "we are
technocrats, not politicians" so it is acceptable to let the wrongdoing to stand. I was not deterred.
So I asked to see the project manager, another British guy, named M.R. Askins. When I asked what
was going on there, he was similarly dismissive.
“Well you know, there are some withholding taxes that are applicable that we have to add to the
payments,” he said. But I was not satisfied. When I reflect on this now, I realize that I have been a
troublemaker all along – I sat down, documented these things and wrote a letter to the project
manager demanding they come out and refund the money to the federal government or else I would
make it public. The management’s reaction was to write the national youth service headquarters
asking that I be withdrawn from the company.
It did not quite work. I was neither recalled nor re-posted, but since the company did not want me I
was free to do what I wanted for the weeks left of the national youth service. I moved to Lagos
whereupon I gave all this information to a friend of mine who was a member of the House of
Representatives, Honourable Bello Dauda Furo. I think he wrote Wimpey and threatened to initiate an
investigation if the company did not come clean with the alleged over-measurement and excess
payments. As it turned out, the chairman of Wimpey in Nigeria at the time was a very powerful
Nigerian, from the same part of Nigeria as my friend in the House. The issues must have been
discussed and somehow the matter was settled. Nothing came out of it, but I never went back to
The Accidental Public Servant Page 10