The Accidental Public Servant
Page 18
we concluded that we could proceed. By the time we reviewed all the evidence and arguments, it was
clear that Gaon had no legally-defensible ownership stake, was contestably allotted shares, never
paid cash for them, but claimed to have provided some ‘technical services’ in lieu that were not
lawfully registered, something Nicon Insurance’s future management and board never accepted. After
two meetings, I was advised by BPE’s lawyers and advisers to rule that (1) in our opinion as BPE,
Gaon had no claims we could sustain, (2) but if he disagreed, should feel free to pursue that in court.
(3) However, we hinted that as attorneys for the government in respect of the shares, BPE intended to
join as co-defendant in his suit and would counter-claim for the balance of the historic over-pricing
of the hotel contract - about $200 million plus accrued interest from 1985. Gaon was incensed,
mumbled his shock and surprise at the BPE having the temerity to treat him that way, and left. The
VP's guys appeared disappointed, and by the time we made a formal report of our findings, Atiku
accepted the findings and Gaon's suit in court was dismissed in the end, enabling the privatization of
the Hilton as a 100%-owned asset of the Federal Government to proceed. Many other incidents in
BPE helped clarify my attitude to some of these, but more would come my way.
Success Factors in Public Service
As I settled down in BPE, I came to realise that success in public service differs from that of the
private sector in many ways, but could even be more satisfying. Whereas a successful business
person can be judged by the size of his organization, its profitability, jobs created and shareholder
wealth amongst others, the public sector success indicators are far less visible or measurable. That is
why I think we have very bad public leaders getting away with crass incompetence, and sometimes
even the destruction of the system they were meant to develop without many citizens quite realizing
the damage done!
Over the years, it has become clear to me that to succeed in public service, one must have acquired a
certain level of anger with our failures as a society, and be willing to damn all consequences to
change things for the better. To do so, the public leader must be competent and prepared
academically, professionally, and experientially for this leadership role, that is, one must be a round
peg in a round hole. Then the person needs staff, both the core around him and support staff that are
smarter than him in many areas, younger and harder working possibly, older and more experienced in
other areas, to handle the sub-tasks needed to succeed in the leadership assignment. A lot of luck
comes into play here because in the public service one has limited room to choose every person one
works with, except for a few personal staff and aides. The third is a support structure of peers. As a
director-general, for instance, the cooperation of permanent secretaries eases dealings with ministries
and ministers. As a cabinet minister, enjoying the trust and friendship of the finance minister and the
head of the procurement office are helpful to one's success in getting funds released and implementing
capital projects. Finally is the most obvious factor - the unflinching support of the boss, which in my
case was the Vice President initially; and ultimately, the President. I was most fortunate to have all
four factors working in my favour in my eight years or so in the two terms of the Obasanjo-Atiku
administration. Anyone wishing to take the plunge into the public sector at senior levels from a non-
governmental background and experience needs to think through these 'success factors' carefully.
Otherwise, the person would go in, and fail to achieve much, thereby damaging an otherwise stellar
academic or private sector career!
The legal and institutional framework for running the privatization programme took the President out
of the decision-making loop, with the buck stopping on the desk of the Vice President and the
National Council on Privatization. Obasanjo was clearly unhappy with that arrangement and tried at
least twice to have the law amended to take the powers away from Atiku and require more
participation of his office. On our part in the BPE, we decided sometime in 2000, to prepare weekly
briefs for the VP and President and persuaded Atiku to endorse the briefs to Obasanjo for 'comments
and approvals' even though the law did not require such. We thought, wrongly it turned out, that
bridging the information asymmetry about the programme between the two offices would smoothen
the implementation path. I am sure the briefs helped somewhat, but impediments placed by ministers,
sometimes with President Obasanjo's inadvertent support, continued to confront us. We soldiered on
nevertheless.
The BPE was staffed by largely competent and professional people. My task was to deepen and
broaden the skills base, and fill any identified gaps. I was lucky to have high-calibre colleagues, staff
and assistants as confidants and co-travellers. Whether they were old TCPC/BPE hands or brought in
to strengthen the team, they shone in their roles and were recognized accordingly. Others that failed to
perform after successive warnings were sent out. It was an exciting period seeing otherwise shy
young men and women gaining confidence and developing into real technocrats. We did what we
thought were great and exciting things - building what was without any doubt the most efficient public
service institution in Nigeria at the time. On the whole, it was a great period in my life, made so by
lots of experiences – both good and bad.
Chapter Five
“You will see the meaning of power”
“Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of
democracy, as they undoubtedly are today”
– Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948
There is an old joke, sometimes featuring Winston Churchill, in which a man approaches a woman at
a cocktail party and asks her if she will sleep with him for one million pounds. “Perhaps,” she replies
coyly, adding something to the effect of, “but of course we would have to discuss the terms.” The man
then asks her if she will sleep with him for one pound, to which she replies, “Of course not! What sort
of woman do you think I am?” The man’s response: “We have already established what sort of
woman you are. All we are doing now is negotiating the price.”
Those who swear by the rule that everything has a price would have found much to contemplate
during my early years in BPE. By that point, the public service had transformed dramatically for the
worse. Back in Daudawa during my childhood, government was staffed with mostly honest people. Of
course, we realized that most of the rich people around us either worked for the government or were
contractors to the government and very early on I had an impression that public service was one route
to being comfortable – even then there were rumours of some corruption in the public service, but
generally, in the 1960s and 1970s, the civil service was perceived as clean. Indeed, civil service
work was the honest pathway for belonging to the middle class. I am sure in Lagos there were people
living comfortably who were not in the civil service, but in most of the north, other than the
traditional commercial centres of Kano, Gombe, Gusau, Maiduguri, Jos and Funtua, this was mos
tly
the case.
This began to change around the middle of the 1970s largely due to two forces. The first was the
massive forced retirement of civil servants the Murtala-Obasanjo regime undertook in 1975. The road
to hell is paved with good intentions. While a shake-up of the civil service might have been justified,
the mass retirements had one devastating and long-lasting unintended consequence: from that moment
on, the civil servants who remained got the unmistakable signal that their jobs were no longer secure.
At that point, people realized that they had to feather their nests while they still could because they
might be fired by the military governor or head of state at any time without recourse to due process,
or recompense.
The second force was that public service pay did not keep pace with increases in inflation or the
general cost of living, while economic activity in the private sector and its pay did. People were paid
much higher in private sector jobs while public service pay stagnated. When Babangida came into
office, and in the late 1980s devalued the nation’s currency, the deplorable situation only worsened.
The unsurprising result was that Nigeria’s best and brightest no longer aspired to the prestige of a
career in public service – indeed, there was no prestige anymore as far as they were concerned.
By 1999, what we had was an economic and political incentive structure that paid rents to an elite
few in whose best interest it was to perpetuate the system’s dysfunction. Anyone entering public
leadership in Africa, particularly Nigeria, beginning from that period till today, really has two
choices. The first is to join the dysfunctional and corrupt system, derive some illicit and substantial
income from it, enjoy a comfortable standard of living, retire with some assets and cash tucked away,
and hope to live happily ever after. The second choice is to want to change the system for the better in
a way that benefits the many rather than the few elites but this choice has high probability of failure
and earns for the ‘deviant’ aggravation, frustration and other retribution. Any success or failure in
Nigeria in any aspect of governance derives precisely from people making any one of these two
choices.
By the time I came to the BPE, my thoughts and life experience had already aligned in one particular
direction, which can be summarized in four points. The first was that although Nigeria had a
population then of some 120 million people (now more than 160 million), over 500 languages and
more than 300 ethnic groups, I had come to the conclusion through my experiences up to that point that
there are simply two kinds of people in Nigeria. There were good people and there were bad people,
period! Each can be found speaking every language, in every religion, every ethnic group, every
village, every town, and every city. In my private sector career, I had been helped more by people
from the south of Nigeria despite the fact that they knew me as a ‘northerner’, and I had more often
than not been let down by fellow ‘northerners’ perhaps because I grew up knowing more of them. I
therefore do not perceive my country and its population through tribal or ethnic lenses.
Secondly, I believe that human beings are generally about the same, and to a large extent, strategic
and rational in their thinking and conduct. Everyone pursues what he or she perceives to be in his or
her best interest. An effective way I have found of relating to people is to consider what I would do if
I were in their position pursuing my rational strategic interest. Any negotiation that bears that in mind
will result in a deal being made. Our common humanity suggests that people of all religions, ethnic
groups or races, are essentially all the same, which leads to my third point.
Thirdly, human beings respond to incentives and sanctions, and shape their conduct accordingly.
People like to say Nigeria is a corrupt country, but I really do not believe there is such a thing as a
corrupt country; it simply is a matter of incentives or absence of sanctions. I have seen many British,
Italian and American citizens who have come to Nigeria and were they to be judged strictly on their
corrupt tendencies and actions, one might easily then think they were born in Nigeria, which proves
that environment trumps race or ethnicity anytime. They conduct themselves simply in response to the
incentives they find, a person looking around the system and subconsciously asking, “What can I get
away with?” The reason people are more honest in one society than another is because there is a very
high chance of being caught and sanctioned somehow, for dishonesty. In Nigeria, the unfortunate
verdict seems to be that if you are dishonest, not only is there very little chance of getting caught,
there is a very high chance of being rewarded with senior appointive or elective positions in politics
or public service, honoured with chieftaincy titles, and with the praise and respect of one’s
community. As a nation, we have become unquestioning of wealth, no matter how ill-gotten, and
generally forgotten to name, shame and ostracize bad people, while failing to recognize and adore the
good - those that sacrifice and resist all temptations in order to be decent and serve the nation
honestly.
Finally, whatever worked in Nigeria and seemed to be improving every day was what was owned or
managed or under the control of the private sector. Whatever did not work, or was barely working
and mostly deteriorating over time, was owned or managed and controlled by the public sector. This
became particularly pronounced as the quality of public servants deteriorated at the time the scope of
state capitalism was deepening due to rapid build-up of oil revenues in the late seventies and
eighties. Conversely, the quality and capacity of the Nigerian private sector improved during the
period, further widening the comparative performance gap with the public service.
These four principles were wired into my brain well before I was appointed to head the BPE. They
played guiding roles in defining our hiring practices, in the pursuit of restructuring the BPE, and in the
design and aggressive implementation of the privatization and commercialization programme from
1999 to 2003. I do not think it is any coincidence that by the end of my nearly four years there, people
across the political spectrum considered the Bureau of Public Enterprises to be one of the most
respectable public institutions in the country, a big change from what it had become towards the end
of 1999 after the departure of Zayyad – a dysfunctional and low-morale institution with more deputy
directors than real staff.
There was, of course, a price to pay for this. Understanding someone else’s best interests does not
necessarily mean endorsing them. Within the public sector in Nigeria, a person is more trusted when
it is known that the person will be a team player - take bribes, bend rules here and there - because
then it means the person cannot expose anyone else doing anything wrong. When a person acquires a
reputation for not taking bribes, as I did right from our construction industry consulting days, it
arouses not only suspicion, but outright disbelief and anger.
“We are not Kaduna boys anymore”
One of the first such incidents to test ‘my price’ (if I had any) occurred just a few months into my BPE
tenure.
There was this guy I knew from Kaduna simply as Captain Abdul. He claimed to be an airline
pilot. I do not know whether he ever qualified to be a pilot, but knew him as one of those who often
hung around important people acting big and spending big, claiming to be ‘businessmen’ while doing
no visibly productive work. One day, Abdul walked into my office and I thought he was one of my
Kaduna friends and acquaintances who had come to congratulate me and wish me well in a new
assignment. Instead, he sat down and after brief pleasantries said, “Well, I am one of Atiku's (the
vice-president’s) men.”
“Good. What does that mean?”
“Well, I handle his businesses. I do stuff for him.”
“Oh well, congratulations,” I said. This is seriously how the Abduls of Nigeria speak
and operate.
“Well, I am here because we hear that you want to buy a guest house for your council members.”
“Yes, we have been thinking about it.”
We had four privatization council members (Akin Kekere-Ekun, Dr. Ejike Onyia, Alhaji Umaru
Ndanusa and Comrade Adams Oshiomhole) who travelled from outside Abuja to attend our meetings,
they would meet at least once monthly, and often more frequently when council committees met in
between, which can be few times monthly. It was costing us a bundle because they usually stayed at
the Hilton. So Ibrahim Njiddah, who as director of council affairswas in charge of managing the
expenses of the members, suggested that perhaps if we bought a guest house, and placed it under
private management with catering services, it would be easier and cheaper for us. I thought it worthy
of some consideration and just mentioned it in passing at one of our BPE management committee
meetings that we should consider buying a four bedroom house and keep these guys there, rather than
paying these huge hotel bills. A sub-committee was tasked to study the idea and report back.