The Accidental Public Servant

by El-Rufai, Nasir

  he was doing and got me doing part time work in several committees of the agency. He asked me to

  join Mouftah Baba-Ahmed to be his second Special Assistant in 1992, but I was unable to accept due

  to my disdain for full-time public service. Nevertheless, my eventual appointment to head the BPE

  probably would not have happened – either from the perspective of my qualifications or knowledge –

  had it not been for Hamza Zayyad’s mentorship. When he died in 2001, I thought it only appropriate to

  have the BPE building named after him, not only because he began the nation’s privatization journey,

  helped mentor me and several others in so many ways, but more importantly, from a public service

  standpoint, he had an awesome capacity to build strong public institutions almost from scratch. The

  NNDC was one such example – he built it up to be at one point, the largest conglomerate in Nigeria.

  He also built the BPE from scratch to be one of the best run public institutions in Nigeria. By the time

  I took it over from Bernard Verr less than a year after Zayyad’s exit, it was the solid foundations that

  we inherited that made the job easier. However, before I was to take the reins of the BPE, there were

  still more lessons I had to learn in the private sector first.

  El-Rufai & Partners

  Without a doubt one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made in my professional life came

  with the restructuring of the ownership of El-Rufai & Partners in 1989, when I was faced with the

  prospect of giving up something I contributed to creating and in the process lost one of my best

  friends. Though I was first to be professionally licensed and I started the practice full-time, we all

  agreed to be equal partners with the tacit understanding that they would come on board when the

  workload expanded beyond what one or two professionals could handle. The partners were Abba

  Bello Ingawa, myself, Husaini Dikko and Sani Maikudi. All of us met and became friends in Barewa

  College. Sani was our senior, graduating in 1978, Husaini and I in 1980 and Abba in 1981.

  Abba Bello Ingawa was my closest friend from our Barewa College days. I used to spend some of my

  holidays in his home town of Katsina, and he would spend some holidays with me in Kaduna. We

  were so close, we were more than just friends we were, simply put, brothers. In 1988, we landed a

  huge construction consulting job to provide QS services that would entail building six hundred and

  fifty political party offices covering every part of the country. We were about to be a national brand

  and we were going to get into a lot more money than we ever dreamt of. One day, without any hints at

  all, Abba shocked us all by giving us notice to wind up our firm. When I asked him what the problem

  was, his response was simply, “You are the problem.”

  Our firm had grown to be the largest quantity surveying and construction management consulting firm

  in Nigeria, a speedy ascent from its founding by one full-time person in 1982. We achieved such fast

  success, in my opinion, because we had a good mix of skills among the four of us. In fact, it was more

  than just a good mix; I thought we had a perfect partnership. Abba was calm and reserved, sometimes

  spoke with a stutter when excited, and initially, was reluctant to approach clients and to do the

  presentational and marketing ends of the business, with which the rest of us were more comfortable.

  He was at his best in the office running things - a sound operations and meticulous financial manager

  who organized internal resources and kept the accounts and books in balance. Husaini Dikko was

  street smart and very patient, excellent at following up on jobs and payments, getting new work and

  he did not get upset easily. Husaini could go to an office and wait from morning until night for a lowly

  clerk to sign a paper so that we could get paid. Abba and I did not have the patience to do that. The

  fourth, Sani Maikudi was older, more mature and better-connected, particularly in government circles

  where the people you know are often more important than mere technical competence. This mix of

  strengths enabled us to go from a start-up to being the largest quantity surveying firm in Nigeria in

  less than eight years.

  There generally were very few disagreements about strategy and decision making until Abba shocked

  us that fateful morning in 1989 and decided things were not to his liking. The heart of the problem, we

  later realized, lay in the firm’s name: El-Rufai &Partners. As noted, the reason for the name was

  historical - that I was the first to pass the professional licensing exams and then stepped out of paid

  employment to establish the consulting firm. As the other partners joined in a full-time capacity and

  we grew more successful, people began to call it ‘El-Rufai’s firm’ instead of what it truly was - El-

  Rufai and three equal partners. Just my name was becoming better known and over time, this

  apparently may have grated on Abba without the rest of us being aware of it.

  On top of it all, at that point I was planning to leave the firm on a career sabbatical and had been

  offered a job with AT&T Network Systems International BV in the Netherlands. We called a

  partnership meeting to discuss my offer to withdraw from the firm instead of considering Abba’s

  request to dissolve the partnership. I offered to resign, which everybody initially accepted. My

  partners then proposed we asked our statutory auditors, Dala Akpati & Co., to value the firm and that

  I should be paid one quarter of it in cash and kind, effectively liquidating my stake. My stance was

  that our friendships were too close for me to take money out of the firm, so I thought it better if they

  just kept my part and continued the business as three equal partners while I went and did something

  else with my life. I had developed an interest in telecommunications and management consulting and

  was willing to move on anyway, I added. What was the point in taking money out of the firm? We

  were like blood brothers. I said if they wanted to continue using my name on the notepaper and the

  firm’s curriculum vitae, it was fine by me because I had no plans to practice quantity surveying

  anywhere else in the world so would never be a competitor. I suggested that if they chose to remove

  my name, that was fine too – I gave them every option but did not want any money or share of the

  business. This became a deal-breaker for Abba, who perhaps took my offer as an insult. In the end,

  the three of us paid off Abba in cash and some assets, and he left to start his own firm with some of

  our staff who elected to go with him.

  This became the painful interruption of what had been a very long friendship and one of the toughest

  personal challenges I have ever had to confront. I named my second son Mohammed Bello, after

  Abba's deceased father – we were that close. To this day, thinking about the incident and aftermath

  still causes me some pain. We have seen each other from time to time since then, but never really got

  back to what we used to be. Among the many things I learned from that experience, was that a

  business partnership is not easy to sustain, especially with friends. In fact, being friends makes it even

  more difficult to manage. Equally as significant, I learned what can happen when ego and interests are

  not appropriately understood and managed. This lesson in particular was to recur several times in my

  public service experiences.

&nb
sp; This same lesson was to influence my subsequent public and private sector career – the need for

  clear, de-personalized rules of engagement in any official relationship, regular and open

  communication, and consciously minimizing the frequency of business dealings with close friends and

  family members. El-Rufai & Partners continued to thrive in spite of this setback and I moved on to

  other engagements in telecommunications consulting sporadically over the next nine years. What

  never occurred to me at any point while I was acquiring exposure in areas as diverse as privatization

  and telecommunications was that the experiences would lead me to a memorable nine years in the

  public service of the government of the federation.

  Introduction/Chapter Title

  Chapter Three

  From Abacha to Obasanjo – a series of accidents

  “The punishment we suffer, if we refuse to take an interest in matters of

  government, is to live under the government of worse men.”

  – Plato, 3000 BCE

  I still remember where I was the day General Sani Abacha died in 1998. I had relocated from Lagos

  back to Kaduna in February of that year and was trying to figure out how El-Rufai & Partners would

  remain afloat amidst spending cuts in public works with crude oil prices barely above $10 a barrel. I

  am not usually an early riser, but for some strange reason I was up at five that morning – the 8th of

  June, 1998 – and was in the office by six. I had taken my first cup of coffee when I got a call from a

  friend in Abuja informing me that General Abacha was rumoured to be dead.

  The death of Abacha was quite critical an event in the history of Nigeria’s democracy. For fifteen

  years between 1984 and 1998, Nigeria had been ruled by a series of increasingly malevolent military

  dictatorships, and the Abacha regime, which came into being in November of 1993, was considered

  among the worst by many commentators. Rumours of his ill-health and regular need for steroid

  injections were quite commonplace in those days, but he had such a larger-than-life persona that

  nobody quite thought the man could die anytime soon. His control of the political space was so firm

  that all five officially recognized political parties in Nigeria had adopted him as their presidential

  candidate for the October 1998 elections even though he was still in military uniform. That Abacha

  was mortal and could die simply never occurred to many Nigerians like the foreign minister in the

  Yar’Adua regime, Ojo Maduekwe, who suggested in March 1998during the infamous ‘million-man-

  march to draft Abacha’ that unless Abacha continued to rule the country, Nigeria would cease to exist

  as an entity. Yet he died soon after and here we are!

  By nine o’clock that morning, we had firm confirmation that Abacha had indeed died from a sudden

  heart attack. The uncertainty surrounding his succession ended some fifteen hours later when Major-

  General Abdulsalami Abubakar was sworn in as Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the

  Nigerian Armed Forces. By the following morning, Mallam Ibrahim Aliyu, then Chairman of

  Intercellular Nigeria Ltd., had called me on behalf of the new president to come to Abuja ‘for two

  weeks’ to help think through and design a social, economic and political transition programme for the

  Abdulsalami Administration. I went to Abuja on the 10th of June 1998, and unknown to me, was to

  remain there more or less permanently in various public service positions until about ten years later

  in June 2008. [24]

  Intercellular Nigeria Limited was the fixed wireless telephone services company my brother Bashir

  and some of his colleagues and friends established in 1996 after being compulsorily retired by

  Abacha from Nitel, the defunct monopoly of the Nigerian telecommunications industry. Bashir invited

  Ibrahim Aliyu to be the chairman of the board because as an intelligent and well-respected

  technocrat, and former permanent secretary of the ministry of communications, he knew the

  telecommunications business, was wealthy and well-connected. Personally, I consider Ibrahim Aliyu

  to be one of the wisest and most capable persons I have had the pleasure to work with and learn from.

  General Abubakar happened to be an in-law of Ibrahim and requested him to put together a small

  team of trusted, apolitical experts to advise him on political and economic transition. Ibrahim

  suggested a six-person advisory committee, consisting of three northerners and three southerners. This

  was what came to be known as General Abubakar’s personal think-tank - the Programme

  Implementation and Monitoring Committee, generally referred to as PIMCO. Alhaji Yesufu, an

  experienced permanent secretary represented the secretary to the government of the federation,

  Gidado Idris, on the committee.

  I subsequently learnt from a mutual friend that Abubakar had remembered me because I had met him a

  couple of times in the course of my quantity surveying career and may have debated the role of the

  military in politics and governance. My guess is the new Head of State thought he needed some

  contrarian views to enrich his policy decisions, so he had two such people. Abdulsalami’s bosom

  friend, Dr. Tunde Soleye - an intelligent, cynical and feisty medical doctor - would be my southern

  counterpart, and we went on to become very close friends. The other members of PIMCO were

  Ibrahim Aliyu (chairman), Brigadier-General Anthony Ukpo, Abubakar Gimba, Amah Iwuagwu, Dr.

  Ajuji Ahmed (a civil servant) was the secretary, Dantala Mohammed was our absentee protocol

  officer, and my assistant, Peter Akagu-Jones, was the assistant secretary who did most of the

  secretarial work. PIMCO at my urging brought Dr. Mansur Mukhtar from the World Bank to be our

  ‘Chief Economist’. As an ad-hoc committee, we had no offices or staff as such. Our de facto

  secretariat was my suite at the Hilton Hotel - room 132 where I lived for nearly 11 months.

  Our task at PIMCO was multifarious. In no particular order of importance, PIMCO ultimately had

  responsibility for drawing up an economic and political transition programme for the new

  administration; designing a plan to re-engage with the International Monetary Fund and other

  multilaterals; outlining the broad policy thrust of the 1999 federal budget; supervising the

  constitutional review and consultation process; drafting pieces of key legislation that eventually laid

  the foundations for Nigeria’s Fourth Republic; supervising the planning and organization of the

  elections and the handover of power to a democratically elected government; and advising General

  Abubakar on whom to appoint as ministers and the like.

  Amah Iwuagwu and I worked and focused mostly on the economic programmes, leading the IMF

  negotiations, drafting the letter of intent, redesigning the privatization programme and crafting the

  enabling legislation, doing some speech-writing, and vetting INEC's election budget, among other

  assignments. Abubakar Gimba was the lead presidential speechwriter. The one speech that I recall

  writing almost single-handedly was for the swearing-in of the thirty six state governors - or military

  administrators as they were called at the time. We all learnt a lot about how the federal government

  functioned under the military, and I was personally intrigued and educated throughout the period of

  being a presidential counsellor.

  How people get appointed into senior positions in government<
br />
  Among these many tasks, there were two major eye openers for me. One was learning how people get

  appointed to senior positions in government. Shortly after we were constituted as PIMCO, General

  Abdulsalami sent us a sheaf of papers with a list of people by name, ministry and state, with some

  names already assigned to ministries. He was assembling his cabinet and needed us to plug the names

  into the appropriate positions and all we had was a list of names, no curriculum vitae, no

  biographical profiles, nothing. We also had to identify which were the key ministries to ensure that

  each geopolitical zone had a minister in each of these key areas. We concluded that the key ministries

  were finance, works, petroleum, agriculture, education and defence. Interestingly foreign affairs,

  FCT, Transport and Power were considered ‘second-tier’! What made a ministry ‘key’ I came to

  learn, was largely determined by history, politics and having a big enough budget such that were

  anyone in charge so inclined, he or she would find no shortage of patronage to take care of our rent-

  seeking elite!

  In addition to the few names Abdulsalami personally wanted to appoint as ministers, he must have

  called his armed services heads – the chiefs of army staff, air staff, navy, chief of defence staff and

  the inspector-general of police and asked them for nominations for ministerial appointments. He then

  must have contacted all living former presidents, and such prominent Nigerians, informing them that

  he was forming his cabinet and asked them for 'recommendations'. Of course, in addition to all these

  ‘influencers,’ any other person who might have the president’s ear - like his wife, close friends and

  associates may also have contributed names. By the time the list and accompanying information came

  to us in PIMCO, it was a rather long list and we were supposed to trim, choose, and make sense of it

  all.

  One of the more memorable people whose emergence I thought was indicative of the accidental