IF NIGERIA MUST GET OUT OF THE WOODS

Meritocracy must replace the quota system and mediocrity

Nigerian Heads of State both past and present

The story is told how former President Olusegun Obasanjo chose Professor Dora Akunyili, now late, as the Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration Control(NAFDAC). Obasanjo wanted a brilliant and honest Nigerian who will clean up the issue of fake drugs in the country. He asked persons around him to source one for him. Someone said she knew an honest woman who was sent abroad and given estacode but returned the unspent part to the government.

But there was a snag; she is Igbo and would not fit as a director because, in the hierarchy of the Ministry of Health which is the supervising ministry for NAFDAC, there were already three Igbo. Obasanjo would not budge; even if everybody at the top of the health ministry is Igbo, he would not mind the woman joining them as long as she is brilliant and honest. Dora Akunyili got the job. She did not apply but got it by the strength of her character and competence.

Dora Akunyili was a gifted person, she was on scholarship throughout her education. Before she resumed the job, she wrote a letter to God and dropped it at her Catholic Church, where God is supposed to live. According to reports, she wrote in the letter that if she ever steals money in her new job, God should kill her immediately. Dora's performance was sterling. She was a bold and courageous woman. She dealt a fatal blow to the fake drug racket even among her own tribesmen and women who were making fortune from that racket. Dora did not die because she stole, she did not die from the guns of well-armed fake drug militia when they shot her in the Igbo land from where she hails. She died from the massive scourge of mankind, cancer, during a meritorious service to the nation. But the nation will not forget her for a very long time to come. She must have a place in a national mausoleum when somebody thinks of building one.

The story of Dora Akunyili and others like Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, former minister of finance, and now Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Professor Charles Soludo, one-time governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and now the new governor of Anambra state, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the CBN governor that succeeded Soludo, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, one-time Director-General of the Institute of International Affairs, Lagos and former minister of External Affairs, Professor Attahiru Jega former Chairman of INEC, are stories of sterling and credible performance because they are brilliant people selected on merit.

Somehow they all beat the incompetent system in the country. Obasanjo was a bulldozer who wanted the best team around him. Obasanjo had to, on many occasions jettison the quota system. He had more Igbo in his cabinet than any other ethnic group. When he was asked why he drew an analogy from the Igbo dexterity in trade and commerce and said whoever wanted performance cannot bypass the Igbo. Nobody can doubt that these men and Professor Bolaji Akinyemi who served the military and brought innovations and revolutionary ideas into our foreign relations are examples of what can happen to Nigeria if the system of quota system is jettisoned for meritocracy.

When I wrote, 'Incompetence is a Nigerian', a friend and classmate and also a lawyer got across saying that although he agreed that incompetence abound but there are many highly qualified Nigerians. True, even America acknowledges the great brilliance of Nigerians who had taken many top jobs in their country. For example, Wale Adeyemo is the US Deputy Secretary of Treasury. Many high-flying Nigerians occupy high political positions in Europe and USA and other parts of the world. Many Nigerian doctors, engineers, and other professionals also give a good account of themselves abroad.

The question is not that there are not qualified and well-trained professionals in the country but the preference for the incompetent has driven many of them into oblivion or abroad where the environment for merit makes them flourish. There are also many competent peoples who have joined the race of the incompetence, they also employ the tricks of 'incompetence', seeking the help of juju, seeking the help of pastors or alfas, genuflecting before third rate politicians in order to get an appointment and in the end because they have forsaken the way of meritocracy, join the looting gang.

The case of Professor Charles Ukeje, of the Obafemi Awolowo University where the current agitation to install a 'son of the soil' over eight other more competent persons who beat him in an exercise that is very transparent exposes the danger that choosing people because of their connection, political, or tribal has done to the development of Nigeria and the crass injustice that has been visited upon many Nigerians in their fatherland thus disallowing them from contributing their best to their country. Professor Charles Ukeje's story that circulated on WhatsApp recently illustrates the foolishness of Nigeria's choice. Charles Ukeje's father worked for the Obafemi Awolowo throughout his work career, and he came with the university when it moved from its temporary Ibadan campus to the present location at Ife.

On his part, Charles Ukeje has lived in Ife from birth till now, attended primary school at Ife, got admission as a freshman in OAU in 1985, got his degrees in OAU, and rose through the ranks to become a professor of International Relations in 2008. He is widely recognized abroad than in Nigeria, speaks Yoruba more than his ancestral Igbo, but had been bypassed in appointments even as head of his department or dean of his faculty, all because he is Igbo. Professor Charles Ukeje wondered the kind of hell that would have broken loose if he had applied and had been chosen. Because of the reality of preference for incompetence, he had decided to just resign to his teachings and be faithful to his students. That is another name for frustration. Nigeria is thus denied the service of a talented son who just by accident of birth happens to be Igbo.

Ukeje's experience reminds me of another incident that happened at the University of Lagos while I was a student there. Obasanjo was the military president. He decided to move the professors around. He wanted to distort the practice of academics sitting at home in their tribal enclaves, a practice that is now very popular. So he took Professor Oladipo Olujimi Akinkugbe, now late, an excellent professor of medicine at the University College Hospital Ibadan, the first professor of medicine in Africa who attained professorship at 35 to Ahmadu Bello University as Vice-Chancellor and Dr. Mahmud Tukur from the Ahmadu Bello University as the Vice-Chancellor of University of Lagos. Tukur rejected the appointment and had to be sacked by Obasanjo. Professor Akinkugbe reported at ABU but escaped death by whiskers as religiously inclined students matched to his house to kill him. Tukur was not welcome at the University of Lagos, either. I remember students chanting songs daring him to show up. He never did.

That was many decades ago and this practice of 'sit at home' professors is said to be the reason Nigerian universities are not attracting high ratings in worldwide university rankings. Our professors are regarded as quota academics who sit at home and through political and tribal affiliations become what they are. And when this administration came in, nepotism was taken to a ridiculous height. It took Olusegun Obasanjo to expose it in one of his usual letters to the president. To date, nothing has changed.

It's amazing why leaders in this clime feel they are safe only in the midst of their kith and kin. They think they are safe in the hand of their tribes' men and women but history has not supported that at all. It was the son of ex-President Shehu Shagari's friend, Brigadier Ibrahim Bako, a colleague of then Major General Muhammadu Buhari who strolled into Akinola Aguda House, the then-presidential lodge in Abuja to arrest Shagari in the coup that removed him from power. Bako strolled in as he had always done but this time for a different mission. Again it was Brigadier Joseph Nanven Garba, General Yakubu Gowon's head of Brigade of Guards at Dodan Barracks in Lagos and kith and kin of Gowon, that aided his removal from power.

General Alani Akinrinade, Chief of Army Staff (COAS) during President Shehu Shagari's tenure had to resign when Shagari posted some generals into sensitive positions in the Army without recourse to their COAS. Akinrinade told Shagari that he didn't know those officers as he knew them. Those three officers, all from the North, the home base of Shagari played prominent roles in Shagari's removal. Former President Goodluck Jonathan was abandoned by all the hordes from his south-south base that usually flocked around him immediately they knew he was out of power. It took only Reuben Abati, his publicist, and two other people to follow him to Otuoke his homestead after he lost power.

Only blind men or those benefitting from the rot will say that the Nigeria of the last seven years has seen any good. And it is because incompetent men and women have been fostered on us. Now we don't have electricity, we don't have fuel, we don't have water, our children have been shut out of schools because their teachers are angry with the government over failed promises. Besides we have over 38 trillion Naira debt hanging on our necks and those of our unborn children, all because we elected the incompetent who also appointed the incompetent to govern our lives. Until we jettison the quota system and incompetence and bring in men and women of great talent, we will not get out of the woods.

Tunde Akande is both a journalist and a Pastor. He earned a Masters’s degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos