The Accidental Public Servant

by El-Rufai, Nasir

  nature of how this process can unfold was Mallam Ismaila Usman, who became Abdulsalami

  Abubakar’s finance minister. The way in which he became a minister was weird, particularly for a

  ministry as important as finance. The original name that came recommended for finance minister was

  Dr. Shamsuddeen Usman. In the course of the debate over key ministries and need for balance, the

  nomination was set aside in favour of someone from South-West, and a Minister of State from the

  North-West was required instead. I suggested Ismaila Usman, a person I had met only once when he

  was an Executive Director at First Bank in the early 1980s, and whose name was not on the original

  long list, but who was well-known then in the public space. What we all knew was that he was the

  deputy governor for international operations of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) during Abacha’s

  regime. He became better known and earned respect nationally when, according to the Abuja rumour

  mill, Abacha, through Paul Ogwuma the governor, instructed him to transfer some monies in tens of

  millions of dollars, to an account abroad and he allegedly told Ogwuma and Abacha to take a hike.

  Nobody disobeyed Abacha in those days, but Ismaila Usman was reported to have said he was not

  going to sign off on the transaction, because, it was highly irregular and contrary to the law.

  Abacha allegedly suspended Ismaila Usman for his temerity and insubordination and he remained

  suspended until Abacha died. One of the first decisions that Abdulsalami took on assumption of office

  was to recall Ismaila and reinstate him to his CBN job, so suggesting his name up for the finance

  ministry seemed logical to all of us. Here is a decent guy, chartered and certified accountant, former

  CEO of banks and then deputy governor of the central bank – why not? Rasheed Gbadamosi, a one-

  time chairman of the NIDB (now Bank of Industry), who was well-known to Ibrahim Aliyu had been

  proposed as Finance Minister, with Ismaila Usman as minister of state. This was PIMCO's

  recommendation that went to the ruling junta. As it turned out, the junta’s reconfiguration had

  Gbadamosi end up as minister of national planning, and Ismaila Usman became the finance minister.

  Apart from some minor changes, a lot of what we recommended was more or less upheld. To this day

  I do not think Ismaila fully knew how he got there or may have been told other versions, and we

  finally met in his capacity as finance minister, worked very well together on many issues like

  privatisation, and he became an elder brother and guide in many ways.

  Professor Musa Yakubu, who eventually became internal affairs minister, was a similar sort of story

  – a distinguished academic appointed minister, apparently with no political godfather, no lobbying,

  nothing of any sort, but just a freak accident. The original debate that brought his name up was about

  who would be Abdulsalami’s special adviser on legal matters. The legal adviser to Abacha was

  Professor Auwalu Yadudu, who was expected to be replaced. We discussed names for this position

  and one of the names that emerged on the shortlist was Musa Yakubu, then a law professor at Ahmadu

  Bello University. I remember that he was from Adamawa state, and the name came up as a possibility

  for legal adviser to replace Yadudu. When the shortlist of cabinet nominees went to the junta, the

  reconfiguration required a cabinet nominee that was not Fulani, but from one of the smaller ethnic

  groups, and General Abdulsalami wanted it within the next hour. PIMCO chair Ibrahim Aliyu made

  one phone call to confirm that Musa Yakubu was not Fulani and then gave his name to the head of

  state. That was how Musa Yakubu became the minister of internal affairs!

  The percentage of the president’s cabinet and senior government positions that are filled in the

  manner that found Ismaila Usman and Musa Yakubu in their positions does warrant some reflection.

  To begin with, this hardly needs saying, but I will do so anyway: there is neither rarely any merit

  attached nor any selection and review process, to appointing leadership particularly under military

  regimes. Typically, various names are contributed by the political elite, collected into a long list;

  someone or a small group reviews the list, prunes some out, sending the result to some committee to

  assign them to various ministries and the head of state makes some last minute reassignment of

  portfolios. In other words, Nigeria’s governance outcomes really depend on a series of accidents

  rather than any meritocratic or rigorous process. When you have a good person in a high level job, it

  was most likely an accident – and my own story, if I am judged as any good, fits this mould as well. I

  will be the first to say that my own rise through public service was largely luck, being at the right

  place at the right time, being known by Ibrahim Aliyu as a frank, outspoken and feisty character, and

  perhaps simply being Bashir El-Rufai's geeky, studious kid brother.

  I believe that we have failed to develop any process of identifying, training and rewarding

  leadership, of putting people who are potential leaders through a crucible to determine their

  preparedness and worth. Instead, people just emerge out of nowhere. Sometimes we get lucky, like

  with Ismaila Usman, who was not on anyone’s shortlist but turned out to be a fantastic finance

  minister although the process from which he emerged at the point he did was mostly pure accident. As

  I observed earlier, Nigeria no longer has the likes of Oxford, Cambridge and LSE where the bulk of

  the British leadership is incubated, nor a Harvard, Princeton and Yale, where a large percentage of

  American’s business and political leadership is groomed. This is why every Nigerian above the age

  30 believes he or she can run for governor, senator or president. The final nails in the coffin of any

  meritocracy or track record of governance in Nigeria as basis for leadership selection were driven in

  when President Obasanjo chose Umaru Yar’Adua whose ill-health, among other challenges, was

  known already to constitute a serious impediment to the possibility of any inspired and energetic

  leadership. The view of many well-informed Nigerians is that Yar’Adua and his deputy, Goodluck

  Jonathan, emerged for no other discernible reasons than being ‘weak’ governors sympathetic to the

  ‘Third Term’ project and therefore hand-picked as payback. The subsequent electoral imposition of

  Goodluck Jonathan as president in 2011 via military occupation and rigging has been unhelpful in

  raising leadership quality. Jonathan went into a presidential contest without a campaign manifesto,

  boasting of no experience, merit and any track record of previous performance other than wearing no

  shoes to school and his "good luck"! I believe that we need to work on unwinding such scripts as the

  routes to leadership attainment in our country.

  Determining a handover date

  The other big eye opener for me was how literally a handful of people decided a date for

  Abdulsalami to hand power to the next democratically elected president. At the first meeting of

  PIMCO on the 10th of June, 1998, Abdulsalami made it clear that because the military had lost

  credibility from seemingly endless transitions, postponements and cancellations of elections, he

  wished to conclude the Abacha transition and hand over power on the first of January, 1999. Our

  initial response was that this sounded fine, but the junta still
needed to consult more widely - to find

  out what majority of Nigerians thought on that and other related matters. By that point, Abacha’s

  transition to democracy had advanced with elected state and national assembly members and we had

  the governorships and presidential elections left to hold when Abacha died. Abacha had created

  political parties which were more or less state organs all working toward endorsing him to be the

  sole candidate in the coming presidential election then scheduled for October, 1998[25].

  Once that happened, it meant we had to start the transition process nearly afresh. Abolishing all

  parties and cancelling all previously scheduled elections necessarily meant a new programme would

  have to be designed from scratch. The new parties would need some time to form, hold congresses,

  primaries and convention, followed by national elections with enough room for any potential post-

  election litigation to take its course. Only then could power be handed over by the military junta.

  Considering that based on this feedback, elections had to be postponed until February 1999,

  Abdulsalami’s wish to be out of power by the first of January was obviously off the table. The initial

  date that was fixed for handing power was in mid-April, but our chairman Ibrahim Aliyu raised the

  point that two months may not be enough time for all the post-election litigation and adjudication

  process to be done before hand-over. More time may be needed because we knew that our elections

  tended to be contentious, and politicians therefore litigated a lot – candidates always go to election

  tribunals even when they have clearly lost an election, hoping a technicality will earn a cancellation

  and re-run. I was mandated to see the then Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Mohammed Lawal Uwais,

  to get an idea of how much time in the courts would be adequate after the elections for all post-

  election litigations to run their course. The experienced jurist did a step-by-step analysis of civil

  procedures likely to be complied with, and was of the opinion that the courts would need until the end

  of April to the middle of May to dispose of all election petitions from the proposed February election

  dates. When I took that back to PIMCO, we added four weeks from mid-May and we landed on

  Saturday, the 12th of June as the hand-over date. The first lady, Justice Fati Abubakar - a senior high

  court judge herself - weighed in on Justice Uwais' recommended time-line with her husband to get his

  quick buy-in to adopt what PIMCO suggested as the hand-over date.

  Now, any student of Nigerian politics should know that the 12th of June is about as close to bad

  karma for the military regime as you can get – it was the date of the election which M.K.O. Abiola

  won and was later annulled by General Babangida. Abdulsalami recognized this date as well, so we

  moved two weeks backward to the 29th of May, which has remained our ‘Democracy Day’ and a

  national holiday ever since. Our colleague, Dr. Tunde Soleye, was not privy to this decision but had

  a different basis of objection to any handover date later than June 8. Tunde believed that any person

  that spends more than 12 months in Aso Villa goes mad literally and begins to try every scheme not to

  ever leave the office and residence of the president. He was determined to protect his friend

  Abdulsalami Abubakar from that affliction and therefore separately insisted that he must hand over

  before the anniversary of Abacha's death. Only time will prove Tunde's theory wrong because so far,

  it appears to hold true - with all occupants of the Villa from Babangida through Obasanjo to

  Yar’Adua, and even Jonathan - being rumoured (or in some cases, confirmed) to have had/have tenure

  extension plans!

  The IMF Experience

  It was not only the inner workings of the Nigerian government which opened my eyes; re-establishing

  a working relationship with the multilateral institutions and, in particular, the International Monetary

  Fund provided some unexpected insight into Nigeria’s place in the world. At that point, the

  multilaterals had virtually left Nigeria and the club of British ex-colonies,the Commonwealth, had

  suspended Nigeria from its active roster of engaged membership. In short, Nigeria had become an

  international pariah.

  PIMCO, along with Finance Minister Ismaila Usman, agreed that re-establishing ties with the IMF

  was desirable in sorting out our debts and obtaining grants-in-aid from international donors. The IMF

  team, led by Dr. Hiroyuki Hino, arrived from Washington, DC for the re-engagement negotiations. We

  debated and agreed the broad contents of key reforms that will be required to implement an IMF-Staff

  Monitored Programme (SMP), the outline for the letter of intent and the benchmarks the country

  needed to meet to earn some concessions on our external debt burden. The next day, some members of

  PIMCO went to meet with finance ministry staff to work on the letter and found an existing draft on

  the table, already written. I was impressed initially because I thought the finance ministry had drafted

  it overnight, but later found it was a 'suggestion' from the IMF. The letter of intent is supposed to be a

  letter written by the government, committing to specific reforms addressed to the Fund, but the draft

  on the table was what the IMF wanted us to write them. I do not know if the assumption was that we

  could not produce such a letter ourselves, but I have since learned that this was what they did

  everywhere at the time. This partly explained why most of the reform programmes ‘agreed with’

  African countries have failed. Frequently, it is not a cooperative process, but imposed from the

  outside. Most of the time, the people signing the dotted lines do not care to fully understand what they

  are committing to so it is hard to fulfil it. There is no sense of ownership by the officials, the

  government and the country.

  At that moment, I understood that the reason many African countries agreed to the 'conditionality',

  took this pre-fabricated letter, signed it, got the money and then refused to implement the reforms, was

  that often, they are not reforms from which any self-respecting government can legitimately derive any

  sense of ownership. I also appreciated why in the mid-1980s, a lot of the multilateral policies turned

  out to be destructive for Africa. These policies required many indebted African countries to balance

  their budgets, with the assumption being that budget deficits are bad, caused interest rates to rise,

  leading to inflation and a whole mess of other problems, so we all must first balance our budgets at

  all costs and nearly immediately. But what did it mean to balance the budget? It meant cutting

  expenditures on social services, firing teachers, reducing the numbers of health care staff, and raising

  the cost of medicines, education and other social services.

  The result, at least in the 1980s, was that many of our children dropped out of school, maternal and

  infant mortality increased because parents could not afford suddenly higher medicine prices and

  household budgets had to adjust accordingly. The so-called 'Washington Consensus' has since been

  shown to fail. Balancing the budget, cutting social sector spending, devaluing the currency – these

  actions did not necessarily lead to economic growth, and to the extent they did, that growth came at a

  steep price, often without creating jobs or reducing poverty. The policies were not totall
y negative,

  though. Forcing African nations to be prudent and balance their budgets resulted in many governments

  learning to be more fiscally efficient. Compelling countries to deregulate and privatize certain public

  enterprises resulted in concentrated growth within some sectors, reduction of waste and corruption

  and improved quality of goods and services. So some things worked, but most of the policies failed

  because they did not account for context, or cared about the well-being of the ordinary citizens of the

  developing countries.

  In the end, we made a lot of corrections, introduced some major changes to the draft the IMF

  provided and did not agree on many of the policies initially proposed. We did finalize a draft

  acceptable to the government and the IMF, and Ismaila Usman as minister of finance put his letterhead

  on it and sent it in. The IMF’s sometimes heavy-handed tactics aside, I came out of the encounter with

  two very worthy results: I gained a valuable friend in Hiroyuki Hino, who played a vital role in

  helping the BPE thrive during our early days there; and I had a hands-on frame of reference for facing

  multilaterals when some years later we negotiated a credit to support the privatization programme

  and later, the conditions precedent for the forgiveness of part of our Paris Club debt.

  The IMF no longer does business the way we experienced it in the eighties and nineties, and the

  Washington Consensus has since been revised, expanded and largely discarded. Indeed, the biggest

  joke on the Washington Consensus is being played out in Washington, DC itself. With the economic

  meltdown in the USA in 2008 and the on-going Euro crisis that began in 2010, the IMF sadly failed to

  advise these highly-indebted countries to devalue their currencies, balance their budgets and cut

  social spending! Instead, the IMF was silent while reflationary spending, huge budget deficits and

  currency appreciation measures were taken by clearly bankrupt, but ‘developed’ nations and its

  substantial shareholders. These actions are the exact opposite of the mantra preached to Less