The Accidental Public Servant

by El-Rufai, Nasir

The most immediate issue was that the FCT administration was overstaffed – about 26,000

  employees – and most of the people were doing nothing. In fact, some staff had been employed for

  one or two years and did not even have a desk. For example, in an office for five staff, there would

  only be one table and one chair, so they would each come to work one day a week. I could have

  immediately disengaged some of the staff if I wanted to, but I did not. I took my time to work with

  them and only picked on a few bad eggs. When they were ultimately fired about a year later, the bulk

  of the staff understood that it was not a case of intimidation or victimization. Among those remaining,

  many got promoted, went on career development programmes and they were also proud of what they

  were doing. More importantly none of my staff ever suffered for disagreeing with me or was punished

  for questioning me publicly or privately. I encouraged them to vigorously argue and disagree and give

  their own points of view. If their points of view were superior in logic, we accepted them and moved

  on. Whenever any of our staff over the course of doing their job got into trouble, I stood by them. Our

  staff knew that if they demolished the house of the ruling party chairman, nothing would happen to

  them because I would say I gave the order and would take full responsibility for what happened. I

  think that helped in getting staff committed to the same vision we had.

  Equally as important was that we made a point to always provide the resources for a job we needed

  to get done. We would first make sure we were all clear on how much it costs, and since we knew

  there would inevitably be a bit of padding, we would try to reduce it as much as we could and then

  authorize that the money be made available. I was not the sort to strong-arm my friends, preferred

  contractors or subcontractors into any jobs – I never, throughout my years as Minister of Abuja, asked

  any of the heads of department to award a contract to any particular person or company because we

  were more interested in results, and definitely, we were not driven by patronage. It helped that I was

  not a politician as such. I did not have any constituency of followers that I had to appease. I just

  focused on getting the results. The staff seemed to like that because it left them free to do what they

  wanted as long as they delivered the results. In the process, someone may have been skimming a little

  bit of money, but we have no evidence of that, nor did we encourage it, and in any event that is

  something that can never be completely eliminated in any system. At the end of it, we got results.

  In retrospect, there are people who seem to think I was some sort of magician, but I was far from it,

  and not alone. We had a good team, clever people and we encouraged them to express themselves,

  while holding them accountable for measurable outcomes. I was not personally interested in any

  contract or programmes, ensured resources were made available, and would take no excuses for

  failure. There were very few failures.

  One protocol I did away with, and which took people in the FCT time to get used to, was the civil

  service tradition that demanded that the most senior person in a meeting always does the talking. The

  "desk officer" - usually an entry level officer, the one who does most of the writing and researching,

  was not allowed to talk but must write down comments and questions and pass them to the most

  senior officer. I broke that tradition the first time we convened a meeting because I wanted to hear

  from the person who had the closest look at the issue at hand. There was a junior level staffer sitting

  at the end of the table quietly, so I called on him.

  “You – what is your name?”

  “Ikechukwu, sir”

  “What do you do in the department?”

  “I am the desk officer sir.”

  “Give me your views.”

  He looked at the director. I said, “Do not look at him, I want your own views. Talk to me.”

  After I did that a few more times, even the departmental directors realized that when they came to

  meetings with those young officers, I wanted to listen to their views, because I knew they were the

  ones who wrote the memos. The directors just edit, initial or sign them, and pass them upwards. The

  result was that many of the young guys became much more confident, knew they had access to the

  minister and that helped raise morale all around. The directors were unhappy about it at the

  beginning, but they got used to it because they realized that I was not trying to undermine them, I just

  wanted to get every side of the story and I encouraged people to disagree with me. In the beginning,

  the very few who were bold enough to disagree with me thought they would be redeployed or not

  have a job the next day, because that was generally what tended to happen to people who openly

  disagreed with ministers. What those dissenters soon found was that I was bringing them closer. The

  more anyone reasonably disagreed with me, the more they spoke their minds objectively and

  intelligently, even if I disagreed, the closer I brought them and supported them. When someone is in a

  leadership position, the scarcest commodity available is hearing the truth, so when someone is bold

  or confident enough to speak the truth, that person is the one I treasured, and would engage and

  encourage. I consciously and deliberately did a lot of that. Most people, not just in the Nigerian civil

  service but in general, do not have the self-confidence to tolerate disagreement or dissent by

  subordinates. This is the price the leader pays in the constant search for the truth.

  In taking charge of Abuja, our very first big move was to computerise the land registry. The land

  administration situation was really dire; we had no choice but to suspend any new land grants or

  transfers while we undertook electronic conversion. This meant nothing was going to happen on this

  front for about nine months, a measure that both the president and vice-president approved. I was still

  prepared to approve land grants for some commercial and public buildings because those must

  continue, but residential land, which constituted a majority of the land allocation, simply had to be

  reorganized, cleaned up and digitized. This was a major policy step that subsequently became a

  model for many states, and it bears spending a few moments exploring it.

  The Price of Lawlessness

  The restoration Obasanjo wanted me to focus on arose due to the physical distortions in Abuja – the

  violations of the city’s master plan. Abuja’s plan was prepared by International Planning Associates

  (IPA), a Virginia-based consortium of architects and planners. The central area of the city was

  designed by the prominent Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, a winner of the Pritzker Prize and one of

  the greatest architects of the 20th century. [53] Everything was well thought out and properly designed.

  In the process of developing the city, however, the ‘Nigerian factor’, if you like, emerged, namely,

  that rules are made to be bent, or even oftener, broken.

  Addressing these problems necessarily meant hurting people – removing illegally erected buildings

  that threatened public safety, firing people who should not have been employed to start with, though

  they had dependents and it was hardly their fault that they got jobs. Fixing these problems also meant

  coming up with cash to compensate people for mistakes ma
de that in some cases were not their fault.

  For example, there were distortions of the master plan such that a residential building was put up in a

  location meant for an office building. It is not impossible to change the land use on the title, but what

  happens when a huge residential mansion is built by a very important man – Dr Amadu Ali, the

  chairman of the ruling party, in one case – but that building sat on a main water supply line. The risk

  of that building settling and blocking the water supply to the whole Asokoro District of the city was

  real. Is it really sensible to wait and take the one in twenty-five chance that a blockage of the water

  supply happens in the next 25 years, just because a very important man illegally built a house there?

  Furthermore, what if that man did not really know he was building on a water line? What if he was

  properly allocated that land, by erring officials who should have known there was a pipeline

  underneath, and he innocently built his house? It means that the homeowner would need to be

  compensated with another plot of land and cash, if we, the FCT authorities, took his house down. All

  these costs added up and the money had to come from somewhere. The debate surrounding these

  issues and the implementation of the solutions of course caused a lot of pain and heated criticism. The

  biggest problems I had were not so much with ordinary people whose huts and houses we took down,

  but with important people who felt affronted that we had the audacity to do what we were doing. It

  did not matter that we were doing the right thing, nor did it matter to them that they could have been

  wrong. It was just disrespectful, an affront, for us to do what we did. But we had to do it. We did it,

  and in this regard, I have no regrets whatsoever.

  Now here is an especially tricky one: what if the federal government itself is violating the master plan

  and building codes? Specifically, what if the Federal Ministry of Works has a building precisely on

  the spot where, according to the master plan, the right of way of an interchange is supposed to be? Of

  course, the ministry said it would not be possible to demolish their building and that we simply

  would have to reduce the curvature or direction of the interchange. The contractor handling the

  project, Julius Berger and the FCDA engineers had even designed a compromise that would reduce

  the curvature and avoid taking the building down. The problem was that the reduced curvature would

  make the interchange gradient a little bit steeper and more dangerous to negotiate when driving. This

  is likely to cause fatalities from accidents during the life of the interchange, but the officials cared

  less about that. It was my call as minister to approve the redesign as it would amount to an

  amendment of the master plan. Of course, I disagreed with their “solution” – and insisted that the

  federal building had to go. If I ordered the demolition of a building of a private individual because

  that individual had violated the law, how could the government or any of its departments walk away

  scot-free? I believe strongly that individual citizens have more rights than government departments.

  Predictably, that minister initially resisted, and some of the officials, including one close to me, even

  stopped talking to me for some time after we removed the building.

  In the end, the minister, Adeseye Ogunlewe, saw the point and practically forced his officials to

  relocate in time for us to do what was needed. Taking down one of the buildings housing the Ministry

  of Works went a long way toward establishing our street credibility because it showed that the

  federal government was even willing to accept similar punishment meted out to citizens for any

  violations of the Abuja master plan. Obasanjo kept his promise – he gave me a lot of support to do the

  job. He wanted the job done; he knew it was difficult, he knew it was tough. All I extracted from him

  was that he backed me up 100 percent, and he did. In this respect, he never once let me down. Not

  once.

  Over the course of four years, we took down more than 900 buildings, not the thousands that the

  Senate Committee hearings falsely alleged, most of them sitting on utility lines. Situations where the

  only offence was a simple land use violation, that is, a different type of building was built there than

  was meant to be built there, we just left alone but imposed land use violation charges, payable

  annually. Of utmost importance was removing buildings that posed a threat to public safety. If a

  building was on a water line, a sewer line or under high tension electrical lines, or on the right of

  way of the future Abuja rail line, we had to take it down, and most of those affected were really

  important people because it was mostly the political and economic elite that had houses in the centre

  of Abuja.

  There were people who thought I was on a power trip of some sort, that I enjoyed what we had to do

  – in fact, quite the opposite. What ended up happening was that the poorest were the worst hit, and I

  cannot overstate the difficulty of knowing that what I was doing was the right thing to do while also

  knowing that those at the receiving end were suffering and would not understand. Furthermore, in a

  society where people are used to getting away with every violation of rules, the notion of someone

  coming along and saying, ‘you were wrong, this is why I am doing this’ was very alien.

  By law, the only way we could provide compensation to anyone losing a building was if the person

  had a clear title to the land and government-approved building plans before the building started.

  Anyone who did not have these two items got zero. The result was that we paid billions of naira in

  compensation over four years because many of the buildings we took down belonged to people who

  had proper title and approval to build, so the error was on the part of the authorities at the time. As it

  happened, though, most of the buildings in the low income areas were just illegal structures that

  resulted from someone seeing a piece of space that nobody seemed to own and essentially squatting –

  and these people, regardless of income level, were not entitled to any compensation.

  Unfortunately, while it is true that ignorance of the law is no defence, most of these people truly did

  not know they were in the wrong. In a culture of lawlessness, breaking the law had come to seem

  normal, even legal, making this part of the process particularly painful to execute. Many of the

  squatters came from rural communities where the notion of ownership of property via title is

  nonexistent – the village head just says this belongs to so-and-so now take it and build. When people

  like that see a piece of land in Abuja, they see nothing wrong in doing a deal with the local chief,

  particularly if nobody tells them not to. But Abuja is different. Every square millimetre of land in

  FCT is vested absolutely by the Constitution in the Federal Government to the exclusion of everyone

  else, so those land deals with local chiefs were all violations of the law and could not be upheld.

  Another thing that made the demolitions painful was the knowledge that the home is invariably a

  family’s biggest, and often the only, real asset, so approving the demolition of these buildings, illegal

  though they were, was a heavy burden for me. I have no regrets though. No society makes progress

  without rules, and if rules are violated, there ought to be conseq
uences. Secondly, the fact that most of

  the buildings we took down in the centre of Abuja belonged to the affluent meant that I would have to

  face retribution sometime – I knew this. But my faith in God tells me that at the end of the day, God is

  my ultimate protector and I just did what was right. I knew for a fact that many influential people tried

  to put pressure on President Obasanjo to restrain or even fire me, claiming that I was causing him

  political problems, making him unpopular, but that did not work. Others claimed I was not for real,

  that I was simply punishing those that were not my friends or enemies of Obasanjo. President

  Obasanjo asked for the evidence and he quietly got the security and law enforcement agencies to

  investigate me. I was investigated at least five times on his instructions during my nearly four years as

  Minister of Abuja. Needless to say, the reports he always got were that there was nothing personally-

  motivated, illegal or untoward on my behalf. He shared the findings with me only after the

  investigations.

  Next on the hit list were 70 mosques and about 300 churches. Mind you, many of these were not real

  buildings as such, but situations in which a Muslim or Christian cleric saw a piece of land reserved

  for, say, a park. This person assumes the piece of land is available; they put up a tent and begin a

  church service or prayers there that before long become a daily event. After a while of not being

  bothered by anyone, they then begin laying bricks around it and if still nobody speaks to them, they

  then roof it and bingo, you have an illegal structure – but a very religious one. And because in Nigeria

  we are squeamish about religion, nobody touched illegal mosques or illegal churches until I came

  along and removed all of them.

  On receipt of the list of the illegal religious buildings, I called a meeting with the religious leaders

  and shared the data with them. I informed them that, according to our records, there were many illegal