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| Prof. Odinkalu |
Government in Nigeria is a dark art into which only a select few ever get initiated.
Passage through the rites and rituals of initiation impose obligations.
One such obligation is a deliberate loss of memory, which induces a
silence not much unlike the Mafia’s Omerta. Fidelity to these
obligations attracts benefits. The doors of government revolve and the
benefits of fidelity to its unspoken rituals are a conservationist’s
delight: it is run on the principle of recycling. Its grammar is
conducted in past continuous
tense.
The consequence, rather ironically, is government by dis-continuity, a
future uninformed by memory and a present rather disembodied from
context. Few of the initiated in the dark arts of government have the
courage to break with this deliberate loss of memory. The most notable
contributions to this genre have come mostly from tenured or career
public officers.
Former Chief Justice, Atanda Fatayi Williams, titled his own
autobiography published in 1983, Faces, Cases and Places. Our
Unforgettable Years was the title of excellent recall by Chief Simeon
Adebo, pioneer lawyer and public administrator, in his autobiographical
account of the building of the peerless civil service in the old Western
Region published in 1984.
The 1995 autobiography by Chief Jerome Udoji, another lawyer who
achieved distinction in the public service, was issued under the title,
Under Three Masters.
These titles were the reminiscences of public servants looking back with
mixed feelings at the end of long and distinguished public service
careers. It is rather unusual for mid-career or active public servants
to issue memoirs in Nigeria. Similarly unusual are memoirs by political
office holders or politicians. The reasons are in plain sight: such a
memoir could also be a political suicide note or worse. In a country in
which the primary purpose of political office is subsistence and
accumulation, a faithful memoir that is worth its name even minimally
would invariably break all the unwritten rules that accompany initiation
into government in Nigeria.
It would be a fatal opt out from the benefits of political recycling.
In The Accidental Public Servant, Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai sets out to do
more than merely break the unwritten rules of ex-political office
holders in Nigeria; he utterly annihilates them. For a vocal politician
with somewhat activist credentials who only turned 50 in 2010, the
motives of his narrative will be the subject of speculation for some
time to come irrespective of whatever he says or believes are his own
reasons for putting this out. By this book, this author says in effect
that Nigeria is bigger than any one person and he cares more about
Nigeria than any temporary benefits from partisan politics.
In setting out this tale, El-Rufai manages to serve up a memoir whose
principal characters hark back to Udoji’s title; whose narrative evokes
Fatayi Williams; and whose title could also easily have been Adebo’s.
The book has three organizing themes that indeed resolve into one. It is
a story about how, in Nigeria, “governance outcomes really depend on a
series of accidents rather than any meritocratic or rigorous process.”
This is the origin of its title. There is a bigger theme, however, which
the author goes back to repeatedly in the book: in Nigeria, “we are
pretty much the same everywhere.” Indeed, it is possible to read the
title as only an illustration – for good or ill – of this larger
Nigerian condition.
In terms of its message, The Accidental Public Servant is also a
passionate advocacy for firm, equal and non-discriminatory application
of rules to everyone irrespective of status or other irrelevancies. It
makes a solid case for the normalization of processes in governance.
Although the author makes his entry into public service appear like an
accident, in reality, it was anything but. This was a case of
opportunity meeting preparation. His guardian, Mallam Yahaya Hamza, who
insisted on sending the author to “the elite” Barewa College for his
Secondary education, knew why he did so. Our author honestly admits that
his “four and a half years in Barewa remain the most significant in
shaping” his “future life, friendship, and person.”
Barewa has produced at least three Nigerian Heads of State, countless
Ministers and heads of extra-ministerial departments. The author is just
one in this production line.
In Tweet-bite The Accidental Public Servant is the story of a bright
young man who graduated in Quantity Surveying at the top of his class,
made early money and got called into public service where, under three
different masters/principals, his brief The Accidental Public Servant,
was successively to help transfer power from soldiers to civilians; undertake the sale of
government assets (privatization); and then, administer the allocation
and sale of arguably the priciest real estate in Africa (Abuja). The
book is an account of the people whom he met along the way, mostly in
the inner sanctums of Nigerian power, how they bonded, fell out,
suffered betrayals and what they learnt about one another, before he
would be hounded, first into exile and then into opposition politics.
This summary does not nearly enough do credit to the audacity of the
story or the sweep of its narrative. The book has multiple identities,
unfurled in multiple trinities, each like a little diamond – with a
pointed and racy beginning; a somewhat portly, sometimes didactic middle
section; with an equally breathless and pointed ending.
The trinities in The Accidental Public Servant are many. It is an
account of public service mostly undertaken under three institutional
acronyms: the PIMCO (Programme Implementation and Monitoring Committee);
BPE (Bureau of Public Enterprises); and FCT (Federal Capital Territory
(a.ka., Abuja). Our author unfolds in three persons – an activist
professional/technocrat, a politician, and a family man. The story is a
tale of service with three successive principals and Heads of State: a
serving General, Abdulsalami Abubakar; a former General, Olusegun
Obasanjo; the brother of a dead General, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. There are
some other significant characters, none more so, perhaps, than Atiku
Abubakar, President Obasanjo’s Vice, whose Teflon qualities are evident
in the account.
The dysfunctional chemistry – or lack of it –between the author, Atiku
and Obasanjo is indeed another of the book’s trinities. It also produced
perhaps its memorable line when President Obasanjo tells the author:
“my short friend, I have a duty to train you… to make sure you learn to
work with everyone, not just people you like.”
The book is also a story of bonds formed, betrayed and in various stages
of re-constitution in the racy cauldron of Nigeria’s messy politics.
And it is a story of the three options confronted by Nigeria in the
transition after President Obasanjo’s Third Term debacle. At the
personal level, the narrative fulsomely acknowledges the support of the
author’s three spouses in the making of an outstandingly readable tale
and career.
The story of The Accidental Public Servant is told in 17 chapters over
627 pages, including 38 pages of source notes; 90 pages of appendices
and 490 pages of the author’s own narrative. There are another 60 pages
of prefatory, introductory material, including a captivating insider
account of the drama of President Obasanjo’s Third Term project as a
prologue.
The Accidental Public Servant is both a bold story and a spirited
defence of a tenure in Nigerian public life, sometimes perceived as
controversial. Perhaps a little over half of the book is dedicated to
the author’s tenures, first as the Director-General of the BPE and then
as the Minister for the FCT. Six of the seventeen chapters are dedicated
to various aspects of the latter and the various controversies that
were to arise during that tenure.
The story has many sharp edges and the author does not leave the reader
guessing about his positions on most issues. For instance, he thinks
that Obasanjo is consistent “in putting his personal interest before
that of the nation”, complains that Atiku Abubakar “actively undermined
me and accused me of inappropriate behavior simply to get contracts for
his friends”, and found the manner of the fund-raising for the Obasanjo
Presidential Library simply “disgusting”. It is a tale told with
committed clarity.
It provides ample information as to not just decisions taken but also
the reasons behind them. The reader does not have to agree with the
conclusions. The author marshals ample material in support of his story
and, in all fairness, provides evidence to support his occasional use of
adjectives.
The Accidental Public Servant offers a forceful defence of the policies
and decisions that the author took as Minister responsible for Abuja.
Notable gaps, however, exist in the narrative; several aspects of this
narrative could be argued; and some unevenness in cadence invite close
attention. Among the omissions, three are notable. First, the author
narrates that he quit the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) in 2010
and rather laconically mentions elsewhere in the book that “as
Ministers, we were given overnight party membership cards”, without
providing details as to time, place or rationales.
If Ministers could be appointed without party affiliation, why could
they not serve out their terms without party affiliation and what were
the reasons for their being whipped into a party? Did this affect their
subsequent performance? Second, the author recalls that in the run up to
the 2007 general elections, he was “doing more or less whatever the
President usually assigned the Vice-President to oversee, like serving
as a liaison with the electoral commission….”
Given the appalling perversions committed by the electoral commission in
2007, the narrative could have provided greater information to explain
what happened or enable the reader to exculpate him from or inculpate
him in the crimes of electoral mis-management that characterized those
elections. Thirdly, with ample space devoted in the book to the defence
of the idea of Abuja, the author missed an opportunity to interrogate
the Abuja project or examine whether any aspects of it could have been
open to re-think. For instance, how proper is it to make the governance
of such a limited resource as land (in Abuja) subject to the Ministerial
caprice through the political economy of “allocation”? Should a
political appointee such as a Minister have monopoly of decision making
on such allocations? If not, how do you eliminate such an inherent
architecture of abuse? Should there be specific rules governing
conflicts of interest of the administration of various aspects of the
FCT?
Equally troubling is the story in the book of the meeting with the FCT
judiciary led by a man fondly described by the author as “my Barewa
senior”, “for their support” and the confession that following this
meeting, “the FCT judiciary supported us strongly throughout my tenure.”
In the absence of more details about what manner of support this was,
readers may ask legitimate questions as to whether this crossed the line
into compromising the independence of judicial decision making.
The role of the judiciary, after all, is not to support anyone as such
but to administer the law fairly and impartially. Many of the
commendable enforcement actions initiated by the author through the
courts in the FCT remained uncompleted at the time of publication, long
after he had left office, calling into question the institutional
wherewithal of the FCT High Court.
PSN
LEADERS
of the newly formed mega political party, the All Progressive Congress
(APC), are locked in series of meetings, in a bid to resolve outstanding
matters that relate to their union. 