The Accidental Public Servant
Page 31
left office. The amount was not settled until Oby had secured a better-paying job as World Bank vice
president.
Many people would say that only someone like Oby could be the final hurdle in approving billions of
dollars in procurement in Nigeria for four years and then have difficulty paying off a loan of $30,000.
Oby was simply incorruptible. She worked for six years in the government in positions that, if she
wanted, she could have allowed herself to be tempted. But that was not Oby Ezekweisili.
Charles Chukwuma Soludo, President’s Economic Adviser and then Central Bank Governor
Ngozi it was who first introduced me to Charles Soludo in 2000. He was something like a student or
protégé of Ngozi’s father while pursuing his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Ngozi's father then introduced Charles to her and over the years, Ngozi reportedly assisted him in
securing some consulting assignments with the World Bank and other multilateral institutions. At the
point she introduced us, he had done a stint lecturing at Swarthmore College, then an attachment with
the Brookings Institution in Washington, and had subsequently returned to Nigeria with a vision to
build a think tank similar to Brookings. He named it the African Institute for Applied Economics – the
AIAE – and he wanted me on the board of directors. In addition to Ngozi and myself, he had invited
Jan Piercy, the executive director representing the US in the World Bank, and a friend of the Clintons,
as well as a few other people that I cannot fully recall now, as we had only one board meeting in
Washington DC that I am aware of.
I protested that I was not an economist, but both Ngozi and Charles pointed out that I was in effect an
applied economist, having served as privatization czar. I also appointed Charles to a couple of BPE
steering committees. There were other issues related to the privatization programme that I involved
him in, which kept bringing him regularly to Abuja. He impressed me as a very bright macro
economist and strong speaker. Though he had earned this Ph.D at a very young age, and had this
international pedigree, hardly anyone in Nigeria then knew who he was. There are many such
intelligent, homegrown brains in Nigeria waiting to be discovered and given an opportunity. Charles
got his through Ngozi's introductions.
A lot like Ngozi, Charles was also very clear-eyed when it came to power relationships. He started
as economic adviser to the president and was initially a reluctant member of the Villa inner circle,
but soon became one of the people closest to Obasanjo, possibly closer than many of us, because we
did not take the time to ingratiate ourselves with Obasanjo as much as Soludo deliberately did. He
joined Obasanjo’s circle of regular Villa Chapel attendants, going every morning to pray with
Obasanjo and discuss ideas with him. He figured out quickly that Obasanjo liked staff who praised
him effusively and attributed every good idea and policy initiative directly to him. Always bubbling
with ideas, Soludo would have them debated rigorously by the team and then present it first to
Obasanjo. Once accepted, Charles would spin it in a way that it was Obasanjo’s vision and ideas,
and Obasanjo liked things like that – great ideas to be appropriated by him, or attributed to him. In
short order, in no time at all, Soludo needed no further intermediaries to gain access to Obasanjo. By
mid-2005, he was appointed governor of the Central Bank-- without Ngozi or any economic team
member being involved in the discussion.
His path to the Central Bank was not without its bumps though, and the first time his name was
mentioned as a possible appointee to be economic adviser – during the meetings with Baroness
Chalker – Obasanjo initially objected to him on the basis that he did not want his finance minister and
economic adviser both being from the same ethnic group. We felt strongly that merit should override
these considerations and Charles was the best macroeconomist we knew, and could vouch for. It was
not that easy though. It took some convincing and in Ngozi's absence, it was Oby who repeatedly took
Charles to Obasanjo and got her pastor husband involved in the mission of getting Charles appointed
as economic adviser to the President.
For a while, this seemed to work out. Our economic strategy, NEEDS, the National Economic
Empowerment and Development Strategy, was a great success due in large part to Charles’
enthusiasm and hard work. We all contributed to the substance of the NEEDS document, [48] but he
was the editor and task manager. His job was to bring coherence to the overall strategy. We received
a grant from the Canadian International Development Agency, and engaged academics in developing
the strategy; we invited former ministers of finance and former economic advisers, and debated the
draft thoroughly. In the end it was a very widely consultative document, and one of the most widely
debated economic reform documents in Nigeria’s history. Everyone commended us for it.
When we presented its outline[49] to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in Lancaster House, London in
July 2003 and again in the autumn of the same year, Prime Minister Blair promised that if we
faithfully implemented the economic programme we had outlined, the UK government would
champion debt reduction for Nigeria. I think he said it because he was so sure we could not do it, but
we knew we could because we thought through and designed the programme on our own, without any
input from the IMF or the World Bank. When the Fund subsequently reviewed it, their staff said that it
was more comprehensive than any IMF-designed economic reform programme. Two years into its
implementation, we had achieved nearly 70 percent of the targets and Blair was compelled to lead the
lobbying for our Paris Club debt relief. Because Britain was our largest single creditor, the rest of the
Paris Club fell in line and it became a matter of how much of a discount we were going to get. We
aimed for 80 percent, better than the typical terms for highly indebted poor countries and wound up
with 60 percent of our debt written off.
Soon enough, however, fissures began to appear in our team. Both Charles and Ngozi were
politically-savvy economists who equally craved the limelight when it came to how economic
reforms and our team were portrayed. Oby did not care for the limelight and as FCT minister I was
regularly in the news whether I liked it or not. But Charles very clearly wanted some attention as well
and he came to see Ngozi as a person who was making the team work collectively while she got the
sole credit. As economic adviser, he was the principal author of the NEEDS programme, but he was
not content to just do this without a public acknowledgement that he was the team’s principal
economist. Thus began a period of constant friction. We met two or three times to try to sort it out,
and both Oby and I took sides with Ngozi in the matter, as she was our team leader. We all agreed on
these things in the beginning, but as Charles got more involved, gained more confidence and got
closer to Obasanjo, I think he decided to develop his own public profile, somewhat like a musical
group that splits because one of the members wants to develop a solo career. Ngozi obviously was
not going to live with that.
The final time we tried to reconcile them was the most telling about what
was going on in Charles’
mind. Charles, Oby and I met in Ngozi’s suite in the Bolingo Hotel.
“Look, you are telling me to do all this work and just hand it over to Ngozi to summarize in four
or five sound-bites and nobody knows all those that did the work,” said Charles. “It is easy for
you to support this, Nasir, you are minister of FCT, you are doing all these demolitions, and
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 on it – you are Madam Due Process. Ngozi is the minister
of finance. Does she have to be the sole public face of these economic reforms?”
This assessment of our individual situations by Charles was in fact accurate and we had no
response.
We sat there not quite sure what to say, but pretty much at our wit’s end. Then he really put the nail in
the coffin of our core team:
“Why can’t I also be acknowledged and publicly recognized? What does that take from Ngozi or
any of you? Must there be only one voice for the team?”
At that point, it was clearly hopeless for him to work with us and what we were trying to achieve.
Each played important parts: I focused on the FCT and the fact that Abuja was the laboratory for
every reform we wanted to implement across the country; Oby spoke, not about economic reforms,
but about the aspects of governance reforms that she was spearheading; Nuhu would speak about
economic reform from the standpoint of anti-corruption and money-laundering law enforcement. We
thought that Charles should be our spokesman on the macro economy. However it dawned on us that
Charles wanted more and what he wanted was not unreasonable, but we were blinded by our loyalty
to Ngozi to be flexible about it. As he himself said in not so many words, he wanted recognition and
being the number two economic voice in the government - what he essentially was as de facto
minister of the economy - was simply not visible enough.
One day, in December of 2003, after less than six months working together, Charles fell out of the
core group:
“I am done. I cannot do this. I have to chart my own course,” he more or less said, and stopped
attending the weekly economic team meetings in the minister's office and the core group meetings
at her residence.
Five months later, he was appointed governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.
Assessment of Charles’ Falling Out
As time went on, it became clear why the conflict between Ngozi and Charles was bound to happen.
Both of them are in many ways very similar, not only because they are both economists with good
Ph.Ds, but they were ambitious, very concerned with public perception and far more politically-
astute than Oby, Nuhu or I were. Once those two began to butt heads, the rest of us considered it our
problem, but having tried everything to resolve it and failed, we eventually made peace with the fact
that they could never fully reconcile. Ngozi was the one who made us work to bring him in, she sold
him to us, so we pretty much took him at face value on her own recommendation.
Apart from the fact that we had all agreed on Ngozi being our team leader and spokesperson, another
reason we sided with her throughout was that she had done so much for Charles – she more or less
created whatever initial positive perceptions we had about him. Even his opportunities with the
World Bank, which led to the fellowship at Brookings Institution, she was said to have played roles
in making them happen. I think Ngozi was the one who got heartbroken about the falling out because at
the end of it, it had to do with her judgment of character and she knew that. The rest of us were around
the same age, but Ngozi was much older than all of us – was it really too much to defer to her for that
period? Charles felt it was, and made his choices. We did not judge his choices, we simply disagreed
with them at that point in time.
Quite plainly, the man had his long-term political agenda, unlike most of us, who were content to just
get the job done. Charles was a politician at heart, and therefore loved to be vocal and visible, and
his attire – even his style of dressing was designed to make political statements, all the time. As a
central bank governor, who should traditionally, neither be seen nor heard too frequently and
certainly not loudly, Charles would mostly wear expensive bespoke suits, complete with a bright red
tie. I think this was his way of being very visible and having his image etched in the public eye for
that ultimate future political contest. [50] Charles is brilliant and leaves no one in doubt about that,
and I think nothing would have stopped him from shining anyway. Charles' very colourful tenure as
the central banker, though initially acclaimed, eventually became tarnished. Unbeknownst to the wider
public, Charles had effectively allowed the Central Bank to be ‘captured’ by the banks it was
supposed to be regulating. Bank chiefs were acting like rock stars, and all restraint was tossed out of
the window. Many large banks had become insolvent, but the public knew nothing until Soludo failed
to secure a second term as governor and everything came crashing down. To bail out the banks and
prevent a national economic meltdown would cost some N4 trillion.
Lessons Learned in Team-building
When I think of all the Nigerians who are extremely talented, want to improve the country and are
dedicated to it, it is striking to me how short the list has been so far. The people I have described
above were the ones I had a real pact with, like blood brothers and sisters, to serve together and
constrain one another’s behaviour. All that eventually fell apart, starting with Ngozi’s departure. The
cost has been steep, because unfortunately there’s almost no one that I absolutely trust anymore. As
time went on, we all discovered some truths about one another that led each of us to think of one
another maybe not in terms of absolute trust, but relatively high levels of trust. I still trust these people
more than any Nigerians, because quite honestly, by whatever standard, these are really decent people
and true public servants. I trust Oby still, perhaps more than anyone. With Oby, nothing has changed
because she has not changed significantly, only older and wiser.
I am not in touch with Ngozi as much as before because she left us a little embittered and was
disappointed that we did not follow her out of the government, so some distance grew between us.
Ngozi and Oby also had some needless tensions while working as colleagues in the World Bank, but I
hope that their relationship has gotten better since both left the bank's employment.
We had differences with Nuhu on political issues in 2011. He moved from the position of embarking
on a one-man crusade to make me the president of Nigeria at all costs to being bitter that I did not
support his bid four years later. What led to the position I took to support General Muhammadu
Buhari instead will be explained in detail in a later chapter. However, many have asked why Nuhu
badly wanted me to be president in 2007. I would like to think that he appreciated all I did to support
the EFCC’s take-off and early success. Secondly, Nuhu had grown to be one of my closest friends and
our families had become one, so indeed, it was better to have one’s close friend as president than
not. Finally, I bel
ieve Nuhu thought highly of my abilities and was initially star-struck at what we
were able to make of our assignments in the BPE and the FCTA, and thought that could be applied at
a higher level.
Nuhu is essentially a good man and by the standards of public service in Nigeria, he is still one of the
best law enforcement officers I know, but I am convinced he has issues that need working on for him
to succeed in public leadership at even higher levels. This is why I think, and I told him, that both of
us needed healing, more experience, some exposure and a lot of internal reconciliation of the bitter
experiences and betrayals we suffered before returning to public service, if at all.
For now he has gone his own way politically by first running for president without carrying us along
and then joining the Jonathan administration in a role that may end up having an adverse effect on his
public image. On reflection, these decisions are consistent with Nuhu’s character though, that dining
with the devil if necessary in this way is justifiable - to get power no matter the cost, and when one
gets power, it could then be used to fix things right. In this regard, even Ngozi was at least initially on
our side, despite the fact that she is a very realistic, open-eyed person about power. Even she thought
on July 31st 2010[51] that while PDP was definitely not the political platform to move our nation
forward, Nuhu was not taking the right path to joining the Action Congress as organized then, and in
the way and manner he did – all alone. She opined that we stood for something in public service –
integrity and performance. The opinion of our group was that whatever political platform we chose to
join should be consistent with our public service record. We were all convinced that going to the AC
as a lone wolf would hurt Nuhu in the long run. If we had all agreed to go into AC together as a group,