The Accidental Public Servant

by El-Rufai, Nasir

  there was a fighting chance that the party's orientation may be improved by the collective injection to

  make Nuhu's aspiration more plausible. Unfortunately, because of the way he handled his entry,

  without consulting us - much like Ngozi's unilateral resignation in 2006, we all chose not to go with

  him.

  One thing the economic team could have done to avoid breaking up would have been for the key

  players to understand each other better. We did not. We knew each other barely, but trusted each

  other absolutely. We were too busy to understand the tell-tale signs of personal weakness and human

  failings that needed remedy rather than trust. It was both good and bad. If we knew that chairing the

  economic team was so important to Ngozi, maybe it could have been structured differently. When a

  team works closely enough to feel bonded together, in which everyone grows to respect and love one

  another the way we did, each member’s flaws aren’t always so noticeable. If they were noticeable,

  steps could have been taken to remedy them in good time. In our situation, I was in a position to go to

  Obasanjo before it went out of whack to suggest institutionalizing the team and rearranging everything

  appropriately, but I did not get that it was that important to Ngozi with enough time on the clock. If I

  did, I am not sure if Ngozi's feeling of entitlement to be finance minister had any solution once

  Obasanjo decided, quite appropriately in my estimation, that her talents and contacts were better

  deployed to fixing our broken and dysfunctional foreign relations, once the Paris Club debt relief deal

  was done.

  I also did not realize that Ngozi’s understanding of our pact was that it did not apply to her. Obasanjo

  is capable of the same attitude – I am your leader so the rules apply to you, not to me and I saw this

  often. I do not know whether there is any remedy for it, really, because in teams these issues will

  come up in different ways but I thought that if we had stepped back and really understood the flaws in

  each of us – and I am sure that Ngozi, Nuhu and Oby could speak very well to my many flaws –

  maybe we could have worked harder at remedying the flaws and plugging in the gaps, but we did not.

  It took a lot of pain to fully realize how each person truly was - months and years after we left office.

  The team’s foundation is still there. Oby is very passionate about Nigeria. She was planning not to

  extend her term in at the World Bank in 2010 because she wanted to come back to Nigeria and I asked

  her, “To do what?” As long as there was nothing concrete to do, she may as well go ahead and get a

  couple of years’ extension. Ngozi was always willing to come back to Nigeria if there is something

  significant to do, like being finance minister again and again, so, I think if we have another

  opportunity to regroup as we did in Pastor Bakare's residence in July 2010, to fight the bigger evils

  destroying our nation, it will bring us back together. Only Nuhu thought he could go it alone - he had

  not realized then that we needed each other, but I hope he has learnt some lessons after the political

  baptism of the 2011 presidential bid.

  It is yet another illustration of one of the core lessons of my experience: to those aspiring to a career

  in public service, be ready for heartbreaks. If you understand those you work with and understand that

  they are human, they have weaknesses and you take pre-emptive steps to remedy those weaknesses or

  plug in the gaps, the heartbreaks can be minimized, but will never be completely eliminated.

  This is life. Putting group interests above personal interests is the ultimate challenge. Nowhere was

  this more prominently on display than it was during Obasanjo’s second term.

  Chapter Eight

  Abuja - the Economic Reform Laboratory

  Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three

  universally recognized moral qualities of men.

  - Confucius

  Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack

  of courage.

  - Confucius

  Getting appointed to high office in our country is often entirely based on caprice, as I have indicated

  earlier. In Obasanjo's second term however, an attempt was made to at least formalise the process.

  Each ministerial nominee, prior to Senate confirmation, first had to submit to a job interview with the

  president, the vice-president and the chairman of the ruling party.The first question they asked me

  was, "What is your favourite city in the world and why?" I said I had two favourite cities: Paris and

  Singapore. Paris, to me, is unparalleled for sheer beauty, and as a romantic getaway. Singapore

  addresses what I suspected the interviewing panel was really after: I like Singapore because it runs

  efficiently, is green and it appeals to my sense of order. I did not know then that Obasanjo considered

  Lee Kuan Yew to be one of his role models. Audu Ogbeh, the party chairman at the time, then asked

  me how much time I would need if asked to turn Abuja into Singapore, if appointed the Minister of

  FCT.

  “Well, Singapore took about 30 years to happen,” I said. “But I think that if we have two

  years in Abuja, we can begin to show a difference.”

  “Well, you know that for you to do that, you will have to demolish many buildings,” Obasanjo

  interjected. “Would you be able to do that?”

  “Mr. President, that question is for you,” I said. “Would you be able to do that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Most of the buildings were erected and are owned by retired generals and big men. They would

  run to you once the restoration starts. Would you be able to stand the pressure?”

  “What about customs officers and politicians?” Obasanjo asked.

  Mind you, he was sitting next to Atiku, an ex-customs official, and Audu Ogbeh, the best-ever

  chairman of the PDP in my opinion, and a politician of some thirty years’ standing.

  “Yes, there are a few of those too but most of the problems will come from your colleagues, the

  retired generals,” I responded.

  Obasanjo looked at Audu Ogbeh and said:

  “You see, I told you, he is mad. He has started abusing me already.” He then turned back to me.

  “Well as long as you treat the retired generals as you do the customs officers and the retired

  politicians, I will back you up.”

  That was the whole interview. At that point I knew for sure that I was going to be in charge of the

  FCT. A few days later, our names were read on the floor of the Senate by the Senate President

  Adolphus Wabara. We had already been quietly investigated by several security agencies and been

  given a clean bill of health. No medical examinations were required of ministerial nominees so we

  submitted to none. Of course I went through my backroom drama with Mantu and Zwingina, the

  attempted shakedown and the eventual poisoning of my relationship with the National Assembly.

  The interview was only the first of a number of things that made minister-level public service

  different from anything I had done previously, and it began virtually the moment I was sworn in. As I

  came out of the Executive Council Chambers that evening on July 16, 2003, two men approached me.

  One was in a black suit and introduced himself as Widi Liman, my chief security officer. The other, in

  flowing agbada, said he was Sagir Hamidu and in charge of protocol. They showed me my convoy of

  four
vehicles - my official car and Isa the driver, accompanied by a police outrider on a motorbike,

  plus two other vehicles, one with a flashing siren, and the other full of bodyguards. This caught me

  completely off guard. This was when I first decided something had to be written about this ministerial

  experience some day. I had met other former ministers who said they wished someone would have

  warned them about what to expect. Every new minister gets to meet three people within the first day

  of his appointment, his security officer from SSS, his police orderly and the protocol officer. The

  minister of FCT has the biggest contingent because of his special position as ‘governor’ of Abuja. I

  did not know any of that.

  How I met the FCT

  I made a point my very first day at the FCT to signal what sort of workplace I expected. I arrived at

  seven o’clock in the morning to a completely empty building. Everyone else arrived at around nine or

  so. Those first couple of weeks, and this is the case for any cabinet level minister, I spent most of the

  time just listening to various briefings from all the different departments – who spent how much

  money last year, what the problems were, how many staff each department had, these sorts of things.

  In between briefings, I was going on so-called ‘familiarization tours’ to get a sense of the workplace

  and key projects.

  The biggest lesson I took away from those first weeks was to read the briefing books - "Handing-

  Over Notes" in Nigerian public service parlance, before being briefed and have my questions ready

  when everybody else arrived. To those of you reading this expecting to serve as cabinet ministers, let

  me repeat that: READ THOROUGHLY, FIRST , and watch out mostly for what is omitted that ought to

  be there.

  The second big lesson from that initiation period was to insist on physical evidence. For example, if I

  was being briefed on a road construction project on which I had questions, I would suspend the

  briefing for an hour so that I could go and see the project in the flesh. For the most part, the item in

  question was indeed what my staff claimed it was. But I can tell you that the moment I started doing

  that, word got out very quickly that I was not going to be the sort of minister who just sits in the office

  all day. Furthermore, I was fortunate that the FCT was a ministry whose geographical scope is

  limited to not more than three hours’ drive to any location. The federal ministry of works, to take one

  example, has projects underway all over the country, so a similar insistence on physical evidence of

  every ongoing project is not always feasible.

  Regardless of what lengths I went to set an immediate tone, however, certain games that civil servants

  played during those initial days, I am convinced, are just part of the fabric of the office. The very first

  thing they tried to scare me with was an apparently large looking number that represents the FCT

  ministry’s ‘liabilities’. All this is a sum of monies owed for projects over the entire lifetimes of each

  project. So for example, a 150 billion naira project that is meant to be paid in installments of 15

  billion naira over each of 10 years is counted as "commitment" - the full, current liability of 150

  billion naira - even though not everyone in the FCT will be on hand to see the project through to

  completion and even though our four-year administration would be only accountable for 50 billion

  naira out of it, if at all. The reason for presenting it this way is to scare the new minister into not

  looking at the details, and to conclude that it was hopeless to even try solving all these problems. The

  subliminal message - just take care of yourself with what is available and let life continue!

  After listening to the initial briefings with my personal staff, I decided to visit former FCT ministers

  who I thought did well in office, mainly to ask what they wished they had done but could not, or what

  they would have done differently. In addition, I requested the president’s permission to set up an

  honorary ministerial advisory committee. This committee met every two or three months to look at

  our policy directions, brainstorm new initiatives, and advise us accordingly. I did not attend their

  meetings but my chief of staff was the secretary and briefed me regularly. Periodic town hall meetings

  and frequent dinners with business leaders and FCT staff[52] from various sectors and departments

  respectively also helped inform our priorities and planning.

  This is not to say that I did not already have some semblance of a plan before arriving at the FCT,

  quite the contrary. My point is simply that anyone expecting to step into a ministerial role should be

  prepared to be flexible, always question everything and make sure there are people in very close

  proximity who are not afraid to speak the truth to him. Anyone who steps into the role that truly does

  not care will find a system that will make it easy to perpetuate an environment of zero achievement.

  The system is designed to keep the minister desk-bound: there are more than 100 visitors and 200

  phone calls a day, in addition to four to five daily meetings with various departments, summons to the

  presidential villa, seeing other ministers and what not. The whole week would be filled with routine

  activities with little time to think or plan and in any event one will be told that this should be what

  civil servants take care of. There are lots of memos for anything and everything, and unless one puts

  in the hours and figures out a management system, the likelihood of remaining desk-bound, achieving

  very little, approving travel and petty cash advances becomes very high. It is a completely

  debilitating structure and a minister can quite easily pass four years doing nothing more than going to

  banquets and dinners in the evenings and sitting all day for 7 days weekly, at a desk reading files, and

  approving a thousand requests for expenditures of N50,000. You would think you are busy working,

  but doing nothing really productive!

  ‘Protocol issues’ can also hamper one’s effectiveness. One of my first decisions was to visit the

  Chief Judge of the FCT, Justice Lawal Hassan Gummi, also a Barewa old boy, to brief him and the

  FCT judiciary on our planned reforms. My goal was to ensure that the judiciary was fully on-board

  with our reform directions, guide us on the limits of our actions from time to time and hopefully

  minimize situations in which ex parte injunctions would be issued by FCT judges to slow down the

  needed restoration of the Abuja master plan. My staff agreed on the need for the briefing, but

  suggested that protocol demanded that the CJ and his team should be invited for the briefing. I

  considered the recommendation in my mind and decided to over-rule them on several grounds, but

  announced only one – the CJ was by far my Barewa senior, and our old boys’ protocol trumped all

  others they may have in the FCT. So I visited Justice Gummi, met with his team of senior judges, laid

  out our reform programme and prayed for their support. The FCT judiciary supported us strongly

  throughout my tenure. We also decided to budget an annual grant to support our judiciary to procure

  court recording and automation equipment. We encouraged land disputants in FCT to utilize the Abuja

  alternative dispute resolution courthouse, the Multi-Door Court House, which was initiated by the CJ

  with the support of the Chief Justice of Nigeria
, Mohammed Lawal Uwais.

  To manage an inevitably heavy schedule, I asked my personal assistant, Peter Akagu-Jones, two

  special assistants Abdu Mukhtar and Aishetu Kolo, as well as my confidential secretary, Hadiza

  Cole, to file incoming memos into three different categories-- routine, ambiguous but required

  reading, and serious. The routine items, things that simply required my signature, such as signing

  certificates of occupancy or minuting to another department head for advice or action - constituted

  about 60-70 percent of all the correspondence I received. I very quickly got into the habit of carrying

  with me everywhere I went the memos and documents dealing with such routine matters. As long as I

  could get those out quickly, I would have more time for the other more important issues. Once that

  system was in place, things went pretty much like clockwork. We had weekly Monday night meetings

  in my house with aides to go through a constantly evolving task list to keep all focused on what was

  really important.

  Establishing the working environment of the FCT

  Getting down to the nuts and bolts of FCT issues, a number of matters required attention as we got our

  administration up and going. Some of them were relatively quick fixes that were simply a matter of

  everyone rolling up their sleeves and getting to work. Others were deeper and more structural in

  nature, requiring significantly more groundwork to be done. I came into the job with some kind of

  unpredictable 'mad man' reputation, which gave me a rather large space within which to manoeuvre.

  Also in my favour was that I think everyone, including FCT staff, understood that I could get the

  president to support anything I wanted to do in the course of getting the job done.