The Accidental Public Servant

by El-Rufai, Nasir

  course of some months, even with our depressed economy at that time. This was the one and only time

  that we seriously contemplated living abroad.

  Three things I noticed from those first trips to the UK created lasting impressions. The first was,

  compared to what I was accustomed to, Londoners were not very friendly. Everybody tended to mind

  their own business too much. People did not greet each other, neighbours did not know each other,

  and that was very strange to me. Where I come from, you know the name of your neighbours, and you

  pop in to share drinks and meals during moments of sadness and joy. In the UK, people did not seem

  to know their neighbours and they did not seem to care. Even when people greeted, the accompanying

  smile seemed plastic.

  The second thing I noticed was that everything was so expensive. With the salary I was offered by the

  UK Property Services Agency, which by strict conversion to Nigerian currency looked like a lot of

  money, most of it would go towards taxes, utility bills, groceries and mortgage payments. It dawned

  on me that in places like the UK, one could have a decent quality of life - the electricity works, water

  runs, the trains run, but it really is not possible to save much or accumulate wealth without doing

  something really different. Otherwise, one is destined to be middle class at best, and we were not

  prepared to just be that and have a good life. We had the ambitions of being something better.

  The third observation was how well the public transportation system worked – and this really

  impressed me. The trains ran well, the bus system worked, the taxis were designed to take a lot of

  luggage and seat five passengers comfortably. I found that very impressive and wished we could have

  something like that in our country. However, I also thought London was not pretty. The buildings all

  looked the same, particularly the residential areas, which struck me as one massive low-income

  housing estate. In most of London, virtually all the buildings looked the same. Coming from Nigeria

  where each house stood on its own with its own grounds and fence, I was expecting something else,

  something better.

  The appeal of the transportation system was really an outgrowth of a broader statement about Britain,

  which is that there is a general sense of order there. Everyone joined queues. Traffic rules were

  strictly observed, houses were numbered with odd numbers on one side of the street and even

  numbers on the other side. This order and predictability appealed to my mathematically-inclined mind

  a great deal, and I kept asking myself why we could not have this kind of voluntary orderliness and

  rule-compliance in Nigeria. I thought fleetingly at the time, that if they could do it, we must do it too.

  On that trip, we stayed in Stratford, East London, E15, with a Nigerian friend of mine who worked

  for the BBC at the time. He still lives in that East London neighbourhood, and the last time Hadiza

  and I went to visit him, we thought that if we had decided to take that job with the Property Services

  Agency, we would probably live in the same neighbourhood. They had moved from the single-room

  apartment we knew into a spacious three bedroom apartment in another part of Stratford, and their

  lives looked about the same – decent, comfortable and stable. Their children have acquired a sound

  education and we could not help but speculate how different our life and that of our children would

  have been if we had made a similar choice.

  Shortly after our UK trip, the Buhari military government was overthrown in a palace coup and

  Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) took over as president. He delivered an inaugural speech that

  made everyone adopt a wait-and-see stance, with hopes that things would change for the better. He

  released political prisoners, promised to hand over power in 1990 and work out an arrangement with

  our creditors. The rest, as the saying goes, is history. However, some of the issues that confronted us

  then as a family, as construction professionals and as Nigerians at that time have still not gone away.

  One of the biggest issues is that parenting remains as formidable a challenge as ever. Yasmin our first

  child, I think was conceived during our honeymoon in London, so I am not surprised that she liked it

  there. Yasmin died in her Lisson Grove flat in London on 26th November, 2011. She was buried a

  week later in Abuja, Nigeria. Yasmin's death was both sudden and heartbreaking. A sweet child who

  had grown into an intelligent, confident and altruistic young lady, Yasmin was the pillar of strength in

  our household and carer for all her siblings, including cousins older than her. My wife and I, along

  with every member of our family, will miss Yasmin dearly and for the rest of our lives. She had

  studied Economics at the University of Bath and completed an M.Sc in Political Economy of Late

  Development at LSE. Her sister, Ramla, who studied Economics and earned an M.A. in Development

  Economics from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, preferred a life in the UK - individual

  differences, I think rather than upbringing! My other children are Aziza who holds an M.Sc in Human

  Resources Management from the University of Surrey, UK,Zulkiflu who also studied Economics at

  Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, USA, Mohammed Bello who is pursuing a Masters’

  degree in public relations at Georgetown University and Hamza, an undergraduate engineering major

  at the University of Virginia. The younger ones are Bashir Jr., Ibrahim, Ahmad Jr., Bilqis and

  Mustapha.

  Prior to her death, from the standpoint of where she wanted to make her life having completed her

  master’s degree, and then studying law, Yasmin’s choice was apparently Nigeria, as is her immediate

  brother, Mohammed Bello’s. The very existence of this question is certainly a departure from the way

  life was when I was their age. Back then, the brightest students got into Nigerian universities and

  hardly ever went abroad. The exceptional cases were parents with a lot of money who could send

  their kids to Oxford, Cambridge or Imperial College in the UK. Hardly anyone sent children to

  America as American education was then considered inferior – the only children that went to the US

  for undergraduate studies were those that could not get admitted to Nigerian or UK universities.

  Nigerian universities, for those old enough to remember, used to be quite good. For me, when I look

  back at my life, I find that a lot of the enduring friendships which contributed to my personal success

  had to do with the networks I built in high school and university. I really would have loved for my

  children to have gone through the same system, I would have loved for my boys to have gone to

  Barewa College, and the girls to St. Louis Girls’ Secondary School in Kano, and for all of them to

  have gone to Ahmadu Bello University. Unfortunately, in the 1990s, the sense of order, academic

  freedom and the quality of education in our universities collapsed. We began to produce some

  graduates who could not construct two sentences in decent English, even though English is the

  language of academic instruction in Nigeria. So we were forced to make adjustments in our family

  spending priorities to send our children abroad just for them to get a decent quality of education.

  Sending them abroad is not only horrendously expensive but that also means depriving them of the

  local networks they would have built by g
oing to the same schools as other Nigerians, with access to

  Nigerian alumni networks, which are potentially quite powerful. I got a lot of help in my life and

  career because I went to Barewa College. The Ahmadu Bello University alumni network is very wide

  and quite beneficial as well. My children have been deprived of access to these kinds of networks,

  which are important in business as well as politics.

  A second issue with this scenario is the risk that one’s children become excessively westernized and

  have great difficulty settling back into the society they came from to contribute to nation-building. We

  have seen many examples of our friends who stayed too long abroad during those formative years and

  they have never really quite come back to face the on-the-ground realities of Nigeria. Many, who

  returned, left Nigeria frustrated and went back to the UK and the US where they felt more at home!

  So with all this said, it was quite a surprise to me to hear that two of my children - a daughter and a

  son, say they both wished to enter public service or run for public office here in Nigeria. I am quite

  serious when I say I have not attempted to influence them in any way on this question, but what I have

  said frequently to Nigerians abroad is that they should all come back home, but not right away.

  How this applies to my own children is that I have told them that I would starve if necessary for them

  to have the best education they can anywhere in the world. No matter which school they get admitted

  to, I will pay for it all, even if it means selling the last shirt on my back. Not only will I pay the

  tuition, I will pay everything because I want them to be more comfortable than I have been. I do not

  care about my comfort – that is my gift to them. When I die, I will not leave a big bank account

  because that is not what I inherited from my parents. What I give to them is not only an education but a

  range of options so that each of them can choose what they want to do. It is their call to choose what

  they want to do, and if any one of them asks me for advice, I will advise them based on the

  circumstances of the moment. One question I did put to them recently, on the heels of my return from

  exile, was, “After the experience we went through as a family - the persecution, the sponsored smear

  campaigns in the news media targeted at me - do you still have the courage to go into public service

  in Nigeria?”

  I found their responses quite surprising. Aziza has an entrepreneurial flair and would prefer starting

  her business as soon as she acquires some experience. My deceased daughter Yasmin’s take on it was

  simply, “If we do not build on what you and the likes of Uncle Nuhu and Aunty Oby have started,

  where will the country be when we have your grand-children?” Her sister Ramla, did not see it quite

  that way, and would have preferred to quietly work and live in the UK. Bello is interested in politics:

  “You have made a name for us. It is our duty to take that name and leverage it. I could be the first El-

  Rufai to be in partisan politics for real, not like you, starting as a technocrat.” His attitude is that

  since I have already paid the price, he intended to capitalize upon the name recognition and thereby

  build a political career. I am not sure what else to do here but to be as encouraging as I can and

  provide whatever they need to do whatever they wish to legitimately pursue.

  As I have mentioned, my father died when I was eight, so my memories of him are few, but what I

  remember was that he was everything. If I had problems with anything or anyone, I ran to him. He was

  next to God. That was how I thought I should be as a father. Although I had my uncle and will remain

  eternally grateful for all he did for me, and I have had many people who played very important roles

  in my life but I did not have much of a father figure since my father died because no one can really

  take the place of one’s father. In general I think a father should be there for his children, ensure they

  can get the best in life that he can afford and be protective of them without smothering them to a point

  that they become too dependent on him all their lives. Striking the balance between love and

  responsibility is incredibly tough, but I hope we have done that pretty well.

  As if parenthood was not already tough as it is, the environment in which we bring up children now

  makes it even tougher. Technology, lots of television and the internet have made parenting really very

  difficult. The cost of bringing up children has also risen astronomically. If I were getting married for

  the first time, and I were to bring up children now, I would not have so many because it is a huge

  challenge and horrendously expensive to bring up children the way one would want these days.

  Frankly, considering the environment they grew up in, I am surprised that my children are all avid

  readers and most of the older ones are not really into television or video games. The world is

  changing which means parenting will have to change I suppose. Nevertheless, I am a little scared of

  the environment in which parents now must bring up children.

  Hamza Zayyad

  As I stated earlier, since my father died, I have had a handful of men who became role models. My

  elder brother Bashir was certainly one of them, as was my cousin Yahaya Hamza in Kaduna. With my

  marriage to Hadiza Isma came a third one - unwittingly, Dr. Hamza Zayyad, Wazirin Katsina .

  Dr. Hamza Zayyad was Nigeria’s first privatization czar and at one point one of the most influential

  people in Nigeria. I got to know him and we got very close when Hadiza and I married because it

  happened that Dr. Zayyad was a very close friend of her late father's and was the one who stood in as

  her father during our wedding. We therefore became family members and he became very much my

  father-in-law. For this reason, we visited the Zayyad household regularly and he got to like me. I

  would go visit him virtually every Sunday and we would have lunch and just chat. He was a chartered

  accountant by training who spent most of his life in public service in finance functions and grew to be

  very influential. In his lifetime, there was virtually no one that Hamza Zayyad could not call in

  Nigeria and arrange an appointment with, from the president downwards. He had at different times

  telephoned at least four presidents of Nigeria in my presence. In his life time, I believe he knew

  everyone of substance in Nigeria.

  I once asked him, “What is the secret? Should I go back to school and be a chartered accountant?” His

  response I have kept in mind through all the years since. “The first secret is Barewa College,” he

  said. Like me, Zayyad was a Barewa old boy, as were four or five Nigerian heads of state. At the

  time that Zayyad attended Barewa, it was without a doubt the premier high school in the northern

  region. So the Barewa network was one secret. “The second” he continued, “is, developing people.

  In my career I developed people; I hired good people and trained them to be better. I trained many

  people, I made sure I educated more and more people; these people tend to grow in their careers and

  one can always draw satisfaction from that.” Finally, he said, “Maintain your friendships.”

  He then explained to me that when he was head of the New Nigeria Development Company – the

  NNDC – and when he was the chief financial officer of Ahmadu Bello University, he made sure that

 
all those that worked for him obtained degrees and professional qualifications that they did not

  previously have. He sent them to the best institutions like Harvard Business School, Massachusetts

  Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), and such other places for professional development and training.

  Many of those people eventually became successful in their private and public lives and they owed

  part of their success to him, so he could call anybody when needed. Even through my time at Barewa

  College, the old boys’ network mostly worked that way – General Gowon was Zayyad’s senior and

  head boy, Murtala Muhammad, I think was his classmate. So Hamza knew several Nigerian

  presidents, either through being classmates/schoolmates, or via the influential alumni association - the

  Barewa Old Boys' Association (BOBA). Fast forward to our generation, the Barewa tradition and

  networks were sustained - Umaru Yar’Adua was Sani Maikudi’s cousin, who was in turn my

  guardian, so we were linked. Afakirya Gadzama was my house prefect, General Luka Yusuf was a

  Barewa Old Boy - President Umaru Yar'Adua appointed Gadzama head of SSS, and Luka to head the

  Nigerian Army!

  Hamza Zayyad also assisted our consulting business in a significant way because whenever we came

  across any public or private institution undertaking a major construction project that we had no direct

  contacts with or did not know well enough to approach on our own, he would call and set up an

  appointment for us to go, market our services and make a presentation. We got a lot of work that way

  and our business grew with his kind assistance. So he was really a mentor in addition to being father-

  in-law and a role model.

  It was also Hamza Zayyad who interested me in privatization and encouraged me to enrol in a

  certificate course in privatization with the Arthur D. Little School of Management. As the head of the

  TCPC and its successor, the BPE - the federal privatization agency - he got me involved in the work