1.So who is Senator Nnamdi Eriobuna? Apparently Sen. Eriobuna demanded for $5million 'kickback' from the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) to facilitate the passage of the Power Sector Reform Bill in 2003.

2."In the end, a couple of years after I left BPE, the company (African Petroleum) was re-nationalised, and the govt directed BPE to refund Sadiq Petroleum (suspected to be owned by Atiku) the original proceeds of sale. AP was then re-privatised a fews years after that, this time sold to Jimoh Ibrahim, someone alleged to be close Olusegun Obasanjo, and similar speculations began, except that this time it was Obasanjo that became the ' suspected owner'

3." Mike Adenuga had no intention of complying with transitional provisions regarding board reconstitution and job security to enable proper governance audit. He stormed the HQ of the company with a detachment of mobile policeman like a cowboy, and asked the company Managing Director, Mr Ojo, to vacate the office immediately and leave the building and also demanded that respected former head of state, General Yakubu Gowon should step down as Chairman of the board with prior knowledge of the board and approval of the National Privatisation Council"

4."Once the Attorney -General (Late Bola Ige) realised who (Mike Adenuga) was behind the scene pulling the strings and sending 'thank-you cash', his resolve to prosecute considerably weakened, contrary to the desire of the National Privatisation Council at large"

5."I just think it has gotten to the point, particularly over the last few years, that only the fool does not do it (corruption)"- Nasir el-Rufai

I just learnt something new whilst reading Mallam El-Rufai's book. Do you know that in any country, any foreign airline that earns more revenue than the host country pays a fraction of its 'excess revenue' to its host country. In 1999 alone, Nigeria earned $35million from Lufthansa, KLM and British Airways, and these monies are NEVER declared to the Ministry of Finance. So for doing absolute nothing, Ministry of Aviation officials collect money from foreign airlines, and just spend it, without any form of accountability. Chei! Anyway God dey!

"..........that Ericsson had offered some financial contribution to Atiku ($3million) for the ruling party (PDP) as party war-chest for the 2003 elections......." - Former US Ambassador to UN and very close friend of President Obasanjo


".......but I (Obasanjo) am lucky, God gave me not-so-clever face. People think I am stupid. So you can't look at me and know what is going on in my brain. But in your own case, you do not have that luck. You know what I do, I behave like a bushman. See what that as done to me. I am here but people far smarter than me are out there. There's nothing you can do to your face but you can reduce your enemies by avoiding the problem of being too clever" - Obasanjo advising Mallam El-Rufai


"I (Obasanjo) do not like you (El-Rufai). You seem to have no respect for elders, you argue too much, you think you know everything. But there's a job I want you to do for me in my second term and I think you are the only one who can do it. I have struggled inside to find someone, but, much as I dislike you, I think you are the only one who can do it" - Obasanjo

#SenatorialScreening #HouseOfSenathieves " You know there are 109 senators, if you give us N54million that will be N1million for each of 54 senators. On the urging of the president (Obasanjo) and the VP (Atiku) both Jonathan zwingina and I will vote for you, so you don't have to give us anything" - Sen. Ibrahim Mantu, former Deputy Senate President

"In 2003 and thereafter, Aliko Dangote became very prominent in government circles, because, on the sugegestion of Late Waziri Mohammed, Aliko Dangote financed Obasanjo 2003 re-election, nearly single handedly without any strings attached to it. He did it because his friend Waziri said Obasajo needed help and that was all it took.

........apparently, Obasanjo never met Nuhu Ribadu before he was appointed EFCC Chairman. Nuhu Ribadu was allegedly nominated by Kanu Agabi......what an 'accident'. Meaning a James Ibori nominee could have ended up in the position.

"You (el-Rufai) have been very helpful to me. You know why th Inspector General of Police (Tafa Balogun) was against my appointment (as EfCC Chairman)? Because he is corrupt. He is very corrupt person and he is scared that if I am in this job, I will go after his corruptio and money laundering activities. I was not planning to do so, but now I am going after him. I am going to put in jail in the next two years" - Nuhu Ribadu

#Obasanjo Removes Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as Head of Economic Management Team! "Nasir, look, she (NOI) can't do what she has been doing, acting as if there is no Finance Minister. We all agreed that chairing the economic team will be for a short period. What she has been doing is not fair to the finance minister (Nnenadi Usman). She should have handled it better. They work well together as Minister of state and that is why i thought was a good idea to elevate Nenadi. Why can't they work out a way to work togethe. Why is Ngozi behaving as if she is both the minister of international finance anc foreign affairs" - Obasanjo

#Okonjo-Iweala falls out with Charles Soludo, quits Economic Team!
"Look, are you telling me to do all this work and just hand it over to Ngozi to summarise into four or five sound bites and nobody knows all those that did the work? It is easy for you to support this Nasir. You are the Minister for FCT, and doing all these demolitions. Everyone knows you in Nigeria. Oby, it is easy for you, you are in charge of due process, no contract gets awarded unless you sign it off - you are Madam Due Process. Ngozi is the finance minister, does she have to be the sole public face of all these economic reforms? Why can't be acknowledged and publicly recognised? What does that take from Ngozi or any of you. Must t here be only one voice for the team?" - Charles Soludo (Economic Adviser)

For now he (Nuhu Ribadu) has gone his own way politically by running for the president without carrying us (Elrufai, Oby &Ngozi) along and joining the Jonathan administration in a role that may have adverse effect on his public image. On reflection, these decisions are consistent with Nuhu' character though, that in a way dining with the devil if necessary in this way is justifiable - to got power, no matter the cost and when one geta te power it could then be used to fix things"

ElRufai Faces Job Interview Panel (Members, OBJ, Atiku & Audu Ogbeh)

Audu Ogbeh : 'How much time will you need to turn Abuja into Singapore if you are appointed FCT Minister?'

Elrufai: 'Singapore took 30years to happen but I think if we have two years in Abuja, we can begin to make a difference'

OBJ: 'Well you know that for you to do that, you will have to demolish many buildings. Would you be able to do that?'

Elrufai: 'Mr President, that question is for you'

OBJ: 'I said will you be able to do that?'

Elrufai: 'Most of the buildings are owned by retired generals. They will run to you when the restoration starts. Would you be able to stand the pressure?'

OBJ: 'What about customs officers and politicians?'

Elrufai: 'Yes there are some of those too, but most of the problems will come from your colleagues, retired generals'

OBJ: (talking to Audu Ogbeh) ' You see, he is mad. He has started abusing me already. Well, as long as you treat the retired generals like you do the customs officers and politicians, I will back you up'

#Atiku (retired customs officer) #Audu Ogbeh ( Politician) OBJ (retired army genera)

Life As A Minister
" There are lots of memo for everything and anything, and unless one puts in the hours and figures out a management system, the likelihood of remaning deskbound, achieving very little, approving travel and petty cash advances becomes very high.......a Minister can easily pass four years doing nothing more than going to banquets and dinners in the evening and sitting all day for 7 days at the desk approving thousands of expenditure of N50,000 ( $350)"

Leadership 101 According to Mallam El-rufai
"When someone is in a leadership position, the scarcest commodity available is hearing the truth, so when someone is confident or bold enough to speak the truth, that person is the one I treasured, and would engage and encourage"

#Operation Clean Abuja
".........but what happens when a huge residential mansion is built a very important man - Dr Ahmadu Ali, Chairman of the ruling party- satbut the building sat on a main water supply line. The risk of that building settling and blocking the water supply to the whole of Asokoro district was real. Is it really sensible to wait and take a one in twenty-five chance that a blockage in water happens in the next 25years, just because a very important man illegally built a house there?"

Operation Demolish Illegal Church and Mosque Buildings

Elrufai: ' Please be informe that the FCTA will be demolishing illegal Churches and Mosques

Religious Leaders: 'wht do you mean by 'illegal church or mosque'?'

Elrufai: ' illegal means not FCT agency gave the occupant the land, nobody granted approval to build. These two omissions makes the building 'illegal''

Religious Leaders: 'But these are God's building'

Elrufai: ' No, they are not! Anyone can make a claim on His behalf. God put me in charge to make the city work for everyone- that there should be rules and orderliness. So please do not mention God as a justification for violating rules and regulations..........Go and tell your members to remove these buildings within four weeks or we will remove them without further notice!

Faith Scams

"Most of these illegal Churches were not put up by orthodox demominations. We found no Catholic, Anglican, Baptist or Methodist churches operated in this fashion, but rather it is the new generation of 'Pentecostal' churches that in many opinions of Nigerians are 'faith scams'; basically business enterprise selling salvation on this earth without paying taxes, that were very prevalent in perpetrating illegalities. Many ofthe affected churches 'prayed' that el-Rufai will lose his job, el-Rufai will go down, el-Rufai will die in Jesus name. I was there for nearly four years and we removed all of them'

and just in case you don't know, the monthly 'security vote' of the Minister for the Federal Capital Territory is N600million 'only'. And according to the Mallam, the security vote is used to facilitate the work of the SSS agents and pay off 'informants' - commercial sex workers, bartenders, hotel receptionists and the like.

I just got to the half way mark of Mallam Nasir El-Rufai 600-page 'epistle' to the people of Nigeria. Very interesting I must say.........oro po ninu iwe kobo. But jokes aside, one thing that struck me is that so far, I haven't for once come across the name of Mr Femi Fani-Kayode. You need not to be a PDP member to know the 'influential' figures during OBJ regime, from Mallam's book. I often hear FFK boasting that he was part of OBJ 'kitchen cabinet'. Does that mean that Bros Femi, wasn't has influential as he likes to make others believe? Or did Mallam intentionally leave his name out? Or is it a suggestion that there is no love lost between these two gentlemen? Anyway,I keep on reading

Can u pls post the link for people to be able to view the write up.

gbola h: Can u pls post the link for people to be able to view the write up.

.

I am only bringing out the areas which I cconsider which I consider pertiinent from the hard copy of the book.

gbola h: Can u pls post the link for people to be able to view the write up.

Link?? Please it is a book. You can buy it in bookshops both online and offline as well as on Amazon.com

Why I left PDP - Mallam El-rufai
"I left the PDP in 2010 because the party had evolved within four years into a totally different party, more toxic, more self-centred and controlled by a tiny clique of morally-flexible people. Is it possible in PDP of 2010, I always ask, for any minister of FCT to take down a building owned by the chairman of the ruling party? "No way"! virtually everyone will respond. However we did that, and life continued like nothing had happened, as it should" #ElrufaiLeaks

"In 2003, Obasanjo tasked Yayale Ahmed, the crafty head of the federal civil service, with the job of reforming the civil service and a huge budget to support it. Yayale ensured that all monies were expended on travelling all over the world - visiting Malaysia, singapore, Australia, New Zealand, among other nations, to learn 'international best practices', sent beautiful 'progress reports' to Obasanjo but implemented zero reform at home" #ElrufaiLeaks

"While our national has increased by 160% between 1960 and 1999, our civil service has increased by 350% during the same period" #ElrufaiLeaks #OverblownBureaucracy

and still on the public sector decay, the federal civil service has ballooned from N600mllion in 2007 to N1.6billion in 2012. Hmmnn......goodluck Nigeria! #ElrufaiLeaks

According to Nuhu Ribadu, the 'Third Term' team of Olusegun Obasanjo raised over $300million #ElrufaiLeaks

"Muhammadu Buhari remains the only politician in the North that can announce that he needs 1million people to attend an event tommorow and 2million will show up without being paid to do so" #ElrufaiLeaks

ThirdTerm " Nuhu Ribadu asked the Financial Intelligence Unit of the EFCC to track cash movements, mostly from states into Abuja, which accounts most of th money ended up in. Most of the money was allegedly going into companies and bank accounts of Andy Uba, the president Senior Special Assistant on Domestic Affairs" #ElrufaiLeaks

Conversation Between El-rufai, OBJ and Anenih on Third Term

ER: 'Mr President, this is going nowhere. This 152 House of Reps members will not support this, no matter what. They plan on withdrawing from the chambers so that the term limit provisions will be impossible to be passed by any presiding officer. So why not just end this?'

OBJ: 'No your information is wrong. Go and see Tony Anenih, he will give you different picture - your in

ER: 'No sir, these people are our friends. They have told us this is what they plan to do'
OBJ: 'No . They cannot do it. Your friends are misleading you'

#Off to see Tony Anenih: Tony Anenih brings out a list of 260 Reps and 86 Senators in support of Third Term.

ER: 'I do not know where you get your informatioot your information but I have a list of 152 members who have signed statements to the effect that they intend to withdraw from the proceedings

TA: ' No, your information is wrong'

ER: 'No it's not'

TA: 'Look Minister. By the time we give them money, all of them, they will change. May be your information is right, right now, because we have not yet distributed the money'

#ElrufaiLeaks #ThirdTerm

Last Day of OBJ administration
"The sentiment of the final breakfast, was for the most part upbeat, but it struck that Olusegun Obasanjo that morning looked like he had grown several years older. He looked as if he was about to face death - his skin was sallow and it was very clear that this (leaving office) was difficult for him, like someone in the finak hours before heading to the electric chair. He did not eat any breakfast, he just had some tea. I never thought of leaving power being that painful but he was visibly pained"
#ElrufaiLeaks #LastBreakfast

UMYA Visits Nuhu Ribadu
"No, Obasanjo has not told me ( about UMYA been the preferred choice), and as far as the presidency is concerned, I have my candidate for president and that is Nasir el-Rufai. I am going to have to speak to Obasanjo about this" - Nuhu Ribadu

OBJ Puts UMYA In The Driving Seat #Accidental Presidential Candidate
"UMYA came to my house that evening looking like a man who had just had the weight of the world thrust upon him. He told me that Obasanjo had just called and asked him to submit a nomination form to run for president and that he was really not expecting this and felt totally unprepared, but that if he was to go ahead, he will need me by his side and the rest of the economic team" #ElrufaiLeaks

The truth really also really was that Obasanjo would not even in his wildest dreams think of supporting me to be president, largely because he knows that he wouldn't be able to control in that or indeed in any position. If, as president, I find out that he did something seriously wrong, he knows as well as I do that I would not overlook it simply on the basis that he used to be my boss" #ElrufaiLeaks

"I do not want the govt to drop the charges against me.The charge against me is that I have committed an offence by approving the allocation of a plot of land to my wife. That is the kernel of the charge against me. I want a judge to rule that it is an offence to do so. Every Nigerian is entitled to a plot of land in Abuja if he is over 18. If my wife applied in 2001, and I got to the FCT in 2003 and she finally got the land in 2006, I do not see how it can be an offence. It is not like I got there and on the first day I said to people, bring my wife's paper to approve an allocation for her. I still stand by this position" #ElrufaiLeaks

"Umaru Yar'Adua had a historical problem with me. He considered me a competitor"- #ElrufaiLeaks Hmmn.....ngbo Umoru? Over to you! Oh sorry, he's six feet under

"I always had difficulty understanding how Obasanjo could sit with us preaching sacrifice and transparency one moment, and the next moment he sits with Gaius Obaseki (Group Managing Director, Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation), on how to get some payments to PDP from some oil or LNG deals" #ElrufaiLeaks Hmmn......Mallam, are you insinuating that Aremu is corrupt?

"During my eight years in govt, I never had to buy a ram because I usually get between 50 and 100 rams a year" #ElrufaiLeaks

According to Obiageli Oby Ezekwesili, the IQ of the Yar'Adua administration was about 30. #ElrufaiLeaks

" Just before he took his leave, the traditional asked Umaru Yar'Adua to give him the names of anyone he had considered a 'successor', so that the mystics could pray appropriately and ascertain if the person can successfully wear the crown of leadership. UMYA thought carefully about this, got a piece of paper, wrote four names and handed them over to the Emir without another word............The names on the list were UMYA wife, Turai, his sons-in-law Governors Saidu Dakingari of Kebbi state, Isa Yuguda of Bauchi state and Bukola Saraki, then Kwara state governor" #ElrufaiLeaks

Olusegun Obasanjo did not disagree with me that Goodluck Jonathan was personally ill-prepared and incapable of shouldering the burdens of the presidency and taking Nigeria as his constituency rather than his very narrow Ijaw mindset" #ElrufaiLeaks

"If the leadership of a country does not care about its citizens, why should the citizens care about the country?"- Mallam Nasir El-rufai

Wow! Since last week Friday!! Accidental public servant indeed. Mallam El-rufai you have done well. I don't give a TOSS what people think or say about you, I must admit that my knowledge has greatly enriched by your 'epistle'. Even if your book is full of 'lies' as some people have said, they are very few people in the world that can conjure such lies with great boldness, and even have the temerity to have it published.

As for your future political ambitions, I wish you well. The question I have asked myself is, will El-rufai make a good president? And my straight answer is No! The reason being, you do not have 'temperament' to lead a complex nation like Nigeria. I will rather prefer you to be a Vice-President with administrative powers (more like a Prime Minister), and an enforcer of govt rules and regulation. I see you more like the 'Idiagbon' of the current political dispensation.

I attended the launch of the controversial book, The Accidental Public Servant, written by a former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre Abuja last Thursday. A close friend of mine bought me a copy which the author graciously autographed for me. I had listened to the author several times as the Director-General of the Bureau for Public Enterprises but I had not met him face-to-face until last week. I listened to most of the commentators at the book launch and was most fascinated by those by the Governor of Central Bank, Lamido Sanusi. He said, “There are many things that will surely be contained in the book but one that will not be there is that I share something with Nasir. Both of us are small in stature and that led to the fact that our mouths are the most developed parts of our bodies. Therefore, we are ever ready to fight with our mouths”.

I read about 75 per cent of the book all through the weekend and one thing I must say is that it is a brilliant piece of work. I congratulate the author both for the book and the conversations it will elicit which will enrich the governance landscape in Nigeria. I have always admired the fantastic work that el-Rufai did in the FCT while he held sway as minister. He comes across as a courageous and hard-working man. Those who hate or like his person or disagree with his style always acknowledge this. No one can take for granted the amount of effort that might have gone into writing such a voluminous book – no less coming from a quantity surveyor.

In the book, the author really made substantial efforts to portray himself as a nationalist who is exceptionally intelligent and who discharged his duties as a public servant with utmost integrity – such a move deserves my commendation. Many Nigerians have been freely commenting on the book even without reading it. Some have gone ahead to lambast him in the media while others have caught the dummy that he is desperately trying to sell to the public to begin to applaud him as an untainted reformer.

But if you critically read and analyse the book, you will discover that the book actually reveals the author as someone whose bloated picture of himself led him to several political blunders that he is now desperately trying to cover up. It presents him as a vindictive character, on a clear revenge mission, struggling to get political mileage by demonising his godfathers and benefactors. A “born again” political activist still gasping in the euphoria that he is the most qualified person to become a beneficiary of the palpable public indignation against bad governance whose foundation some of them contributed to. However, one will not dismiss the shocking details of the insider intrigues and manoeuvres in high places in public service and the lessons that come with it. Many people refer to el-Rufai as an accidental progressive and political opportunist. Is he really any of these? One can overlook his derision for his former boss Olusegun Obasanjo who was clearly his target for vengeance.

Obasanjo’s sin apparently was the fact that he did not anoint the former FCT Minister as his successor but that is by the way. How about his friends and colleagues in the economic reform team, namely, Nuhu Ribadu (whom he described as a typical policeman) , Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (whom he accused of having civil war hangovers) and Charles Soludo (whom he described as a Central Bank Governor often seen with expensive suits). I will draw a few points with an intention to simply contribute to the ongoing debate about the author and his motives at this time and allow you to make up your mind.

The third term misadventure is by all means unfortunate, despicable and reprehensible yet the author left his readers guessing about what could be his motive for making the subject the first chapter in his book. Could it be for a deliberate reason? It may be true that El-Rufai did not support the ill-fated project; however, one would have expected that if he hated it as much as he painted in his book, he could have resigned from Obasanjo’s government. Yet, he stayed on. The so-called “siddon look” approach was ostensibly due to his expectations and positioning to become the beneficiary of a possible failure of the project. Sadly, that did not happen and that is probably a bigger source of frustration to the author than the project itself.

Let us assume that what el-Rufai served the Nigerian public in his book is the full story of all that happened. Does it mean that he did not commit any error in his nine years in public service or is this a mere selective narrative? Was he such an infallible man in public service? Yet, he was able to chronicle and amplify the failure of others. How come someone who claimed to have dabble in something did it so perfectly? Did he deliberately choose to rob his readers the lessons that could be learnt from his mistakes, if any? For instance, how come with all his experience, he saw nothing wrong in presiding over the procurement process where Motorolla, a company he worked for and that is known to be associated with his elder brother Bashir, took part in? How else can you define conflict of interest? How about the alleged allocation of choice plots of land in the FCT to his friends and family members including his two-year-old child? Really! Who is he trying to fool? Nigerians?

The author emphasises the role of meritocracy, competence and track record in governance in producing competent leadership. The chronicle of his achievements and meteoric rise is unique and impressive yet it reveals him on a closer look, as a classical product of man-know-man. A product of the so-called big families united by marriage. Clearly from his own account, four factors were responsible for his entry and rapid growth in public service. The first was being an old boy of Barewa College. The second was being the younger brother of Bashir el-Rufai. The third is his network for Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. The fourth is being an adopted son in-law to Dr. Hamza Zyyad.

The most interesting part of this book in my view is the conversation that held between Obasanjo and el-Rufai between pages 125 and 128 of the book. In those pages, the author himself narrated how the former President drew his attention to three of his problems bordering on cleverness. That short encounter gave me a very important insight that can flow from the wisdom of an old man. In all, el-Rufai unwittingly painted Obasanjo as a master political tactician with a wealth of experience. Never mind that he might have deployed his experiences for more selfish ends and less common good. My mother once had a similar conversation with me many years ago. She told me that there was a big difference between being brilliant and being clever!

In all, I have learnt so much from reading this book. I will read it over and over again. Everyone who wants to understand how Nigeria operates should read it. Every student of Nigerian politics and a future career aspirant in the Nigerian public service deserves a copy. Let the conversation continue.

http://www.punchng.com/opinion/el-rufai-accidental-public-servant-or-political-opportunist/

@MAYOWAAK, a standing ovation for you, you really gave life to this rich thread of yours! I must get my own copy. Truly, most of what ER declared in his book are raw facts if you really follow the political temperature of this country right from the time Umaru died you will agree with me that they (northerners) never wanted Jonathan....wao such a rich thread, I doff my hat for you

Wow such an insightful script bro. Two books on my mind: There was a country by Achebe and Dis Malam own.

How about the truth which he (malam rufia) knows yet refuses to say it, things like the northern nigerian very evil policies on how to keep a section or some sections of the country being the ones to get blame for everything?

He surely have more than this damage control to do, but a coward will always try to appear.

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.

The most obvious differences in cadence are in the treatment of four characters in the book that, by reason of death, are no longer around to speak for themselves.

These are:

Waziri Mohammed, late former Chairman of the Nigerian Railway Corporation and alleged arrow-head of President Obasanjo’s Third Term bid, who was tragically killed in an air crash;
Chief J.U. Igweh, proprietor of Bolingo Hotels in Abuja, who, was killed in the same air crash with Waziri;
Justice Bashir Sambo, former Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal;
and President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, also the author’s senior at Barewa.

To these four, the author applies three different narrative standards. He introduces Waziri into the narrative on Third Term namelessly merely as “an Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) alumnus and friend who chaired the board of a federal parastatal and was very close to Obasanjo.” Most readers would struggle to identify who this is about. With respect to Chief Igweh, the author limits himself to a narration of the official interaction.

Similarly, with Justice Bashir Sambo, the author acknowledges that following his death in April 2007, he (the author) “remained silent because the man could no longer defend himself”,12 and tastefully limits himself to disclosure of the official correspondence in the matter. Although it is possible to deduce possible reasons from the text, the author offers no explicit explanation, however, as to why he fails to extend this standard of restraint to the parts of the narrative relating to President Yar’Adua, whose High School nickname, the author discloses, was “Bad Man.”

In hind sight, he may consider that this could have been essential to a better understanding of this part of his story.

In recalling the public statement issued on 2 December 2010 by the collective initially known as G-55 which later became G-57 asking President Yar’Adua to vacate office, the author narrates that this was followed by “initial set back, when, under pressure from the NSA, Abdullahi Sarki Mukhtar, some of the people dissociated themselves from the statement claiming that ‘they did not sign’ any statement.”

This contains a factual inaccuracy.

This Reviewer is one of the people that “dissociated” themselves from the statement. No one called me about this and, surely, no one put any pressure on me to do so. The fact is I thought it was plainly poor organizing and utter bad manners for anyone to associate me with a document – no matter how well intentioned – whose contents no one had made any prior effort to inform me about. I still think so.

The production of The Accidental Public Servant is professionally done. The book is not marred by habitual editorial slippages that often mar a lot of our books, although a few slippages nevertheless intrude. Anoraks may wish that the Indexing at the end of the book could have been a little more comprehensive and the appendices were better clustered. The quality of the product nevertheless is excellent.

On the whole, this is a book by a brother who must make many of us feel proud to be Nigerian and which must restore our faith in the project of nation building. Anyone considering public service in Nigeria would do well to consult this book, or, if you have access to him, its author. You do not have to agree with everything in it but it is a compelling read with jaw-dropping disclosures on every other page and compelling lessons dripping from most of its paragraphs. The disclosures in this book will surely inform and possibly affect the landscape of Nigerian politics.

Even if they don’t, this book is likely to inspire spirited conversations that should enrich citizenship and political participation in Nigeria.

For this and more, Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai deserves our gratitude for memorializing his record of public service and for courageously inviting public scrutiny of that record. Many more who preceded him in public life and all who do so after him should do well to accept his invitation to “document their experiences and tell their sides of the story.”

http://premiumtimesng.com/news/119180-in-defence-of-public-service-a-review-of-the-accidental-public-servant-by-chidi-anselm-odinkalu.html

How nice would it be to lay hands on the full book or the link.

My appetite is wet already.

Very interesting.

More interesting is the fact that most of the dramatis personae are still alive!

Nice job El Rufai, nice job @OP.