The Accidental Public Servant

by El-Rufai, Nasir

  advantage.

  The bottom line was my realization that anyone who achieved that sort of leadership level tended to

  have certain character traits, indeed, to even arrive there required a certain moral flexibility. In

  discussing this with an American friend of mine not too long ago, he pointed out to me that when Bill

  Clinton came into office, the word, one of the many, that entered the American political lexicon in the

  1990s was ‘compartmentalization’. Clinton was a famously adept practitioner of this craft. The

  general concept of this is apparently the ability to mentally isolate certain ideas and behaviours in

  certain compartments and not have the terms of engagement that govern one compartment spill over

  into another compartment where they may not be necessary, relevant or convenient. It appears that this

  is a skill that must be possessed to be able to ascend to a certain leadership level. I am hoping that

  this is a skill that can be acquired, as I would very much like to master it someday.

  The Theory of Second Comings

  Another major revelation, which came partly out of this class, but also just from having some more

  distance, both mental and physical, from Abuja, was what I have come to call the theory of second

  comings.

  The Obasanjo I met in early 1999 and worked with from end of 1999 until the middle of 2005 or

  thereabouts was a totally different person from what emerged after that. The presidency and the

  circumstances changed him. Now, it is easy to fall back on the usual tropes about power, corruption,

  egotism and the like, but as befitting my activities during my years in exile, I came to take a more

  academic approach to this. Many people I have studied with or worked with in public service, who

  left with a decent record of integrity or achievement the first time around, often came to grief when

  they returned to public service a second time. Obasanjo, who ascended to the presidency the first time

  because his predecessor was assassinated, did a decent job for the most part. He kept to the

  democratic transition programme they agreed upon; he presided over a government that was overall

  decent. He organized acceptable elections, handed over power and then retired to his farm while

  enjoying international acclaim for being the first African military head of state to voluntarily hand

  over power.

  Obasanjo became one of the most revered persons in Africa – Mandela was still in prison then. He

  also went broke in the intervening years. Why did all this happen? As military president, he

  reportedly did a few things to prepare for life after retirement - buying shares during the

  indigenization programme, some real estate investments and such rainy day activities – to prepare for

  the future, but in the broad scheme of things, he did not engage in nearly as much corruption as he was

  accused of in Fela Kuti's songs. Perhaps he had every opportunity as a military dictator to do so. As a

  basic example, as petroleum minister for the 14 month period between August 1978 and October

  1979, [133] he could have set himself up very nicely. During his first outing, Obasanjo and his troika

  colleagues did not do things like that. They were angels when compared to today’s gang.

  After handing over, Obasanjo retreated to his Ota farm and got involved in all sorts of leadership

  foundations, international NGOs like Ford Foundation, Transparency International, and the like.

  Twenty years later, once he came back as an elected president, one could safely speculate that the

  thought may have crossed his mind that he did not adequately take care of himself the first time

  around. It would surely have occurred to him that he borrowed from banks to set up his farm and

  nearly went personally bankrupt. He would almost certainly have entertained the thought that

  Nigerians did not much care that he had served them honestly and well. He was accused of corruption

  anyway. Everyone danced to Fela’s Zombie, International Thief Thief and Coffin For Head of State,

  and his defenders were few. It would not have been entirely shocking if he had allowed himself to

  entertain the thought that, this time, it would be different. I see this pattern in many people-- career

  civil servants, cabinet ministers, presidents, and governors, very decent by Nigerian standards the

  first time out, but who, if they get a second chance, decide to take the fullest advantage, and then we

  see abusive acquisition on a large scale. This is the essence of my theory of second comings.

  Why? How does one come to this point? How can anybody, who has a demonstrably clean record,

  purposely tarnish it? It is a phenomenon that I began to observe while practicing as a quantity

  surveyor and it continued to intrigue me while in government. I spent nearly two years in exile

  thinking about this issue. What I have concluded is that it is a combination of a few things that I only

  ever could have understood by leaving government and having some distance from Abuja. The first is

  that being in government is deceptive, financially and materially. There are so many things that come

  to public servants for free, one does not have to be corrupt and accept bribes to have them. Put

  simply, there are waves of gifts that come on one’s birthday, on Christmas, Eid el-Fitr, Eid el-Kabir,

  during other religious festivals, weddings and wedding anniversaries, and children's graduations; and

  the culture and the ethics in government service allow one to accept a pen, a simple watch, and things

  of that nature on these sorts of occasions. Nobody has a problem with this. What everyone frowns

  upon is when a person collects a box full of cash. When a person is offered a watch as a birthday

  present and rejects it, this will be a big issue – what is wrong with this man? How can he reject the

  gift of a simple watch on his 40th birthday? [134]

  One example from my own experience: because of the public way I fought senators who asked me for

  N54 million, I was not offered bribes as people were scared of giving me such ‘gifts’. During the

  Muslim festival of Eid el-Kabir, everyone who can afford it is expected to slaughter a ram. When I

  was head of the BPE, I used to receive many rams every year. Everyone knew I could afford a ram or

  two, so I really did not need people to give me any. However, companies, banks, and everyone we

  did business with or wanted to do business with would send me two rams each, as it was one of the

  few opportunities they had to give me a 'token gift' that I could not decline, without appearing

  needlessly disagreeable.

  What I did was I kept all the rams within the BPE premises. Two days before the festival, we would

  distribute them to the staff, starting with the lowliest and working our way up. All of the junior staff

  got a ram and it went up the hierarchy from there until the collection was all exhausted. During the

  eight years I was in government, I never had to buy a ram because I always got between fifty and a

  hundred every year, and even after giving away a lot to my staff, I still had some left over after the

  festivals. A minister would typically receive dozens of diaries and calendars each year, and

  deliveries of truckloads of rice and beans, so would not even need to buy much food. Even if one

  constantly gives them away, one would still have bags of rice in the store that would remain from the

  Christmas gifts of the previous year. During my public service years, my wives had instructions on

  ho
w to handle these and usually gave them to our employees, the domestic staff and our relations

  immediately, but they kept coming in as long as I was in public office, often without my knowledge.

  ‘Why Is My Phone Not Ringing?’

  Once a government official leaves public service, however, this generosity vanishes overnight. The

  guy who sent a Merry Christmas card last year will not send another card now that the government

  official is out. In any given year in office, one might receive some 1,000 cards; the next year out of

  office, perhaps only ten. That rough ratio applies to all gifts, from rams to cash (for those who took

  bribes.) It is not difficult to understand why people feel deeply deprived after they leave government.

  Any friends a person thinks he or she made while in high positions of power in government are

  nothing more than a deception. After receiving a couple of hundred phone calls a day and scores of

  visitors to one’s house when in office, these phone calls and house visits drop to near zero the

  morning it is all over. The only friends are the ones who were there before that person even

  contemplated being in these positions. There is such a massive change in the attitude of people that it

  hurts. Unless one is properly grounded, there can be a huge emotional letdown.

  There can also be a lot of financial turmoil for anyone who becomes dependent on those gifts. It is not

  uncommon for many high officials, the relatively clean ones, to go completely broke within a few

  years of vacating their posts. You get accustomed to the high life, the adoring crowds of hangers on,

  the official cars and police escorts, the constant refrain of “Honorable” This and “Honorable” That,

  the rams and the Christmas cards and the supplicants waiting on you constantly in the outer office or

  your living room, and when the music stops, the silence can be deafening. Many will be depressed

  and many will be both broke and depressed, spending money they do not have to keep up appearances

  of their former high life.

  I have a friend who was a principal officer in the National Assembly. As such, he was entitled to a

  convoy of policemen and aides to go with him wherever he went. He lost his position in the next

  election cycle, but he felt compelled to still maintain his convoy of cars, policemen and aides so that

  he did not look depreciated. When he was a principal officer, those cars were bought and maintained,

  and the aides were paid by the National Assembly. The moment he insisted he wanted to maintain

  them and he was not entitled to the police escorts, he had to pay them out of his own pocket. Within

  two years, he became broke and had to start selling off assets to maintain the standard of living to

  which he was accustomed. This happens to lots of former high officials.

  Personally, even before I became minister, I had a fixed list of people I would give gifts to during the

  Muslim festivals: my mother, my stepmother, Yahaya Hamza’s family, my six sisters, a handful of

  other relations, and that is all. Those are the ones I felt were my direct responsibility, no one else,

  and I have never expanded the list in 22 years. Even when I was minister, I kept to that list, and I did

  not, on account of being minister, give any of them two rams instead of the one I was used to and

  could afford on a sustainable basis. I obviously had the additional rams to give while in office, but I

  knew that one day I was going to leave that office, and I would have to try harder to maintain this if I

  started giving them two rams instead of one, so I never started that habit. Many people make the

  mistake of starting what they cannot feasibly sustain without the freebies of public office.

  The next element of second comings is that when one leaves public office, one’s universe of people

  all of a sudden shrinks to something equal to or less than what it was prior to entering public office,

  which for most people, is not very large. As minister one would receive between 200 to 300 phone

  calls a day. The day after one became an ordinary citizen, one would receive maybe a dozen. One

  would even think the phone system was down – ‘Why is my phone not ringing?’ Even people to whom

  one has been especially helpful and supportive, and in some cases trusted, would not so much as call

  to say hello. In my case, some of them actually became part of the smear campaign against me, and

  actively fabricated stories to make me look bad in order for them to get favours from the new

  government in power. They knew that they were lying, but they did not care because I was no longer

  in a position to be either threatening or useful to them.

  When all these dynamics converge, most people out of public office easily become embittered. If they

  get the second chance, many of them think to themselves, ‘This time, I will not repeat my earlier

  mistake.’ The thing is, it was not a mistake – the ethical way one behaved in public office that first

  time was the right way to do it and there should be nothing to be regretful about. It is simply the nature

  of human beings. It should not be an excuse for anyone to move from one extreme of doing things right

  to the other extreme of doing things the wrong way.

  I’ll be the first to admit that there are some things I miss about high office. One was the influence I

  had to get things done for the benefit of others. For instance, when someone needed a job and would

  send me a CV, I could make one or two calls and the person would have a job the next week or

  month. I missed that once in a while, because there are many people who need such help – we have a

  broken system where merit does not get you what you deserve, and being qualified alone is not

  enough to get you past the door. So everyone needs help getting simple things done - like being

  interviewed for a job. The rest, the material and financial freebies, I did not benefit much from and

  have lived without. My experiences during the six months’ break after serving in General

  Abdulsalami Abubakar’s government and the five years since the end of the Obasanjo administration

  have given me a lot more food for thought about second comings and the risks attached to them.

  Whether this theory is generally applicable is still open to question, but I am personally acutely

  aware of it all the time.

  “You are an inappropriate person to be in our programme”

  This theory of the tragedy of second comings I only fully understood when I left office and went to

  study at Harvard. Of course, not all of my time at Harvard was spent studying and theorizing; I still

  had the matter of my reputation and name to look after. I kept getting stopped from entering or exiting

  many countries, particularly the UK. Three or four times, I landed in the UK and the immigration

  officer would take my passport, disappear for 10 or 20 minutes, re-emerge, and stamp my passport

  for entry. I did not know why until much later, when another friend in the know informed me: I had

  been red-flagged by Interpol, on the request of Yar'Adua's government. I suppose when immigration

  authorities check an Interpol flag and see the flag is for a politically-related ‘offence’ – as opposed to

  being a drug dealer or a terrorist – they just conclude that this is a political thing and let it go.

  Regardless, going through the process everytime just made me angrier and angrier at the Yar’Adua

  regime. Just as I had predicted, there were a lot of continuous, slow-burning tactics Yar’Adua and hi
s

  administration deployed to keep the campaign on, even though I was out of the country and not even in

  the public eye. One of them never even made the news, but it was an inconvenience all the same.

  A year earlier, during the summer of 2007, I had escorted my son, Mohammed Bello, to the US to

  begin his undergraduate studies in Norton, in the Boston area. I went to the Bank of America branch at

  Harvard Square and opened an account for him and for myself. Since senior government officials are

  legally barred from operating bank accounts outside Nigeria – it is prohibited by our constitution –

  when I was appointed to the BPE, I had to close all my foreign bank accounts. The only one that

  survived was in the UK, a joint account with my wife, opened in 1985, from which I withdrew my

  signature and my wife became sole signatory, since she was not a public officer. All other accounts I

  closed as legally and ethically required. So in 2007, once I left office, I opened a new bank account

  in Cambridge and put a couple of thousand dollars into it, and then opened another for my son. When I

  came back to Harvard a year later for my master’s programme, I had wired about $85,000 of the

  $145,000 my company gave me to cover tuition and living expenses at the Kennedy School, only to

  learn that I did not have to pay the entire fees immediately, so I had over $50,000 balance in my

  account.

  One day during the fall of 2008, I received a letter from Bank of America informing me that they had

  decided to close my account. I showed this letter to my local branch manager who was shocked

  because the letter came from Bank of America’s corporate headquarters. The branch did not even

  know about it. The manager logged on to the system and confirmed the order to close my account,

  with no reason to be given to me. My contract with the bank stated that the bank could close the

  account any time, so I had three weeks after which the bank would freeze the account and issue a

  banker’s check for the balance in my favour. I did not understand what was going on but I walked