By Tony Afejuku

Indigenes and citizens of Oboghoro, like those of more than several Itsekiris who inhabit their rural and riverine communities, deserve all the adornments of a reasonably good, healthy life to which at best they have meagre (or even less than meagre) access. This was one long thought that entered my mind and stayed there for a pleasantly long time after I persuaded myself to cruise there before the Christmas that has just passed. As a matter of fact, time after time, the details of the wealth of Oboghoro-land are encouraging and nourishing to the loyal joy of every true Itsekiri patriot – even though in the distant past what there is now in Oboghoro was not what there was there.

Where is Oboghoro? It is an important Itsekiri Royal Community in Warri North Local Government Area of Delta State. It can only be reached through the sea and rivers in the Kingdom of Warri. Itsekiri history has it that the town was founded by Crown Prince Ijala at about 1740 AD at the heels of moral disapprobation – which envy and jealousy engendered. This very tiny bit of its coming into being – or of what led to the founding of the town after Prince Ijala departed Ale-Iwere for the reason already stated should satisfy the curiosity of those who are knowing or hearing about Oboghoro for the first time.

Geographically speaking, Oboghoro is located as an island in the egregious sea which inhabits the vast majority of Itsekiris, the denizens of the magnificently wealthy Kingdom of Warri. But as egregious as the sea has been from timeless time, the Itsekiri people, universally acknowledged as a people, an ethnic minority of quintessential intelligence, have very successfully learnt how to still the sea (and rivers) and tame their marshy land to their advantage. With respect to Oboghoro of Ijala in particular I am not hesitating to quote with pleasurable pleasure for this column’s teeming readers the following truthful and factual historical and geographical remark of acute commercial and economic significance: “The historical truism that Oboghoro was the emporium and commercial gateway to the Benin River was evidenced by the presence, in the days of yore, of companies like Harris & Co, Douglas Stewart, Millers Brothers, James Pinnock & Messrs Horsfall. In the course of the development of the New Face of Oboghoro, Mass of Coins, which were the currencies used in legal tenders in the pre- and post-colonial eras were unearthed at the Oboghoro River bank, where the merchants were berthing their boats,…”

Of course, things have since changed for the people of Oboghoro and descendants of Ijala. But they are determined, very determined, that their very rich and wealthy land of rich riches and wealthy wealth must regain all that they have seemingly lost to the vagaries of Nigerian political independence that brought to the fore over the years the wrong species who to all intents and purposes are not – and cannot be – stars of the people and of their respective communities.

Ceaselessly, I was regaled with positive stories of some Oboghoro people, and the general “Ijala descendants who intersperse several communities spanning across Warri north, Ethiope west, Okpe Local Government Area of Delta State, the Ikara of Edo State, as well as Ondo State” who by a variety of means are loyally and patriotically committed to tilting the moral economy of the land at the favour of all. The destiny of Oboghoro of the modern time is the destiny that should follow the shape of Dubai. “That must be the new vision.” I recall vividly an indigene of Oboghoro telling me this sometime in August of our rotten 2024 – well before the thought of visiting the popular Itsekiri town visited me. But different feelings of antagonism welled from different places of my portion as a human being and a Prince of Warri: can Dubai visit Oboghoro from the United Arab Emirates? Will powerful elites from within and outside our land, and from within and outside our Niger Delta territory out of envy and jealousy allow this to happen? Will the parvenu personalities and personages about town not feel threatened and encourage and nourish and nurse “skepticism about the legitimacy of personalities” that would push them aside?

On Thursday, 19 December, 2024 when I boarded the speedboat in the company of my usher/conductor mandated by my chief host at Oboghoro to bring me there unfailingly, the above sensations glaringly articulated themselves in me. Our cruise started from Sapele in the bright cool morning. When my usher conducting me to Oboghoro wanted to know what was going on in my mind, I simply answered that we were not cruising in Tinubu-like yacht! My conductor, a very intelligent and seasoned Barrister-at-Law, replied me with a healthy guffaw! Some of the other persons who were in our speedboat shared my sentiment jocularly, but seriously when they were in the know of what transpired between us. I went further: why did the president not grant Warri Kingdom (and the Niger Delta including Ilaje-land) the privilege to utilize the stupendous amount of money gotten from us to develop our land? Or is the money not ours? And must we as a minority people continue to languish in pain and penury because we don’t have the power and privilege that the majority groups who have the power and privilege have? Must we continue to suffer in this country that is wickedly skewed against us, and that is divided between the haves and the have-nots who are the natural and providential owners of their natural wealth? And what does Tinubu really need a yacht for? We deserve more – we the less given owners of our natural wealth.

As we cruised to Oboghoro I could see in the expansively expansive mass of water and the green vegetation all about us the true meaning of being a riverine or water people. The longitude and latitude of the mass of water rendered me speechlessly speech-less. For well over several decades I have been an absentee waterman, an absentee riverine denizen – not any longer beginning from Thursday, 19 December, I promised – and still promise.

We arrived at Oboghoro before Atuwatse 111, CFR, whose visit climaxed and terminated the end of the activities that the Oboghoro community partook in for three months continuously at Atuwatse 111’s palace in Warri. The Warri ceremony was GHIGHO AGHOFEN (“which is a ceremonial watch-keeping of the Olu’s palace by communities within” the domain of Atuwatse 111, whose vision for Itsekiris and Warri Kingdom is the vision of visions).

I don’t wish to dwell extensively on the events at Oboghoro on the said 19 December (and other days up to 24 December) for strategic reasons which the columnist is chest-keeping. After the series of cultural dances by different ethnic groups that graced the occasion in the spirit of harmony, I went on physical communion with Oboghoro the Dubai of Itsekiris in the making. Our host-in-chief, Dr. Godwin Ebosa, a man I perceive, rightly or wrongly, as one person and personage of few words born to stardom but prefers to be effaceable, was in his element of elements. He clearly is on a very firm ground in Oboghoro where he and his team patriotically conceive for the town its current picture and what it is going to be in the future that is the future.

The personalities and personages from different walks of life that were guests at Oboghoro were personalities and personages indeed, but I must skip their names and identities – minus Chief Brown Mene who gave us the Olu’s words that marked the greatly forward-looking monarch of monarchs’ super Royal attributes. My boyhood chum, the ever-radiant Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor and his elder sister Chief Yemi were equally present as a son and daughter respectively of Oboghoro. It was something that was more than something for us to meet and see again after centuries!

I left Oboghoro “the Dubai of Itsekiris” in high spirits and with fond memories. I shall return.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.

By Leo Igwe

A recent case where a Catholic priest shot and killed a member of his parish in Imo State in southern Nigeria has occasioned a crisis of faith. The incident has compelled people, believers, and non-believers to raise fundamental questions about the conduct of clerics, and faith in divine protection. As was reported, this Catholic priest shot and killed a church member on December 31, 2024. The church member allegedly threw a knockout or banger at him during an end-of-the-year activity, and in return, the priest shot and killed him. The police are investigating the matter, and the Catholic priest is currently in custody.

Some people said the action of the priest was  not intentional, that he shot the guy in self-defense. That he did not know that what the guy threw at him was a knockout.

Others said it was an accidental discharge. Whatever the case, whether the shooting was deliberate or not, the fact is that this priest shot and killed his church member. And people are asking many questions. People are trying to make sense of this tragic event. A key question in the minds of many people is this: What is a Catholic priest doing with a gun in a church? Think about it. This is a valid question. What was this guy doing with a gun in a house of god? Some are wondering: Does it mean that the priest does not believe in divine protection?

The Catholic church will have to confront these questions for the foreseeable future because this incident highlights some crises, contradictions, and hypocrisies. The killing has caused many to be confused and conflicted in their faith. Look, many people go to church to seek divine protection because they believe that there is a god and that god, not guns would protect them. Priests claim to embody and dispense divine power and protection. Priests, like this cleric who shot his parishioner, are paid to pray and deliver divine protection to the people. The political economy of clerics is largely based on ensuring and trading divine protection. Now, in this case, this priest used the money he got from praying for divine protection to purchase a gun to protect himself. Is that not a contradiction? Is that not deceitful?

Clearly, this priest had more faith in his gun than in god. He does not believe in divine protection of either himself or of others hence he bought a gun to protect himself.

Meanwhile, he profits and professionally thrives on selling faith in god and divine protection to the people. His main business is preaching to people most of them have no guns or cannot afford a firearm that god would protect them.

What priests and other clerics preach and practice do not add up; they do not align. Clerics make their members and followers believe that there is a god who protects them and that they, the clerics, represent that god. They make people trust god or rely on god, not on worldly guns for protection. Clerics make people pay or provide for them in exchange for prayers and assurances of divine protection, which as this case shows they do not believe in. This hypocrisy is not peculiar to the Catholic church or Catholic priests. The contradiction is religion-wide. Prominent religious leaders move around with gun-tottling police officers and soldiers. Armed personnel guard many churches, mosques, and other so-called houses of god.

So the message is clear. It is either there is no god to protect anyone as atheists popularly believe or such a god is too weak and impotent, such a god is so ungodly to effectively guard his houses or protect his people, and estate.

Igwe, PhD , is an ex- Catholic seminarian from Imo State.

By Tunji Olaopa

This piece was meant to be my address and reflection during a planned courtesy visit in 2024 to the Federal Civil Service Commission of my old boss, Mahmud Yayale Ahmed, commander of the federal republic (CFR), former Head of Service of the Federation, former SGF and Hon. Minister, Ajiyan Katagum, and Chairman of the Governing Council, Ahmadu Bello Univerity, Zaria; a visit, which objective indeed was achieved by other means. When a personality like Mahmud Yayale Ahmed decides to pay a visit to an organization like the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) to honour his mentee, then such a visit is far from being a mere courtesy visit. Such visitation generates reflections and discourses, and activate possibilities. That is the kind of personality Yayale Ahmed is. And such a visit especially to the FCSC carries both the burden of administrative history and reform possibilities. Yayale Ahmed was not just my former boss, he is also a veritable mentor; I owe a significant portion of my trajectory into becoming a bureaucrat-scholar-reformer to his mentorship. He had a fundamental impact in shaping my foray into the maelstrom of public service institutional reform programme management in the federal service. Having such an old boss visit his boy at the FCSC is an event in itself, one that is sufficient to make me tremble at the possible comments I would receive.

However, when he is visiting in his capacity as the national chairman of the Council for Retired Federal Permanent Secretaries (CORFEPS), the matter becomes even more critical. CORFEPS is the association of retired administrative professionals that has been throwing the weight of its institutional memory and competences behind the ongoing efforts to transform the dwindling status and reputation of public administration and the capacity readiness of the public service in Nigeria. Thus, when CORFEPS meets FCSC, we are already not only laying the templates for all hands to be on deck, but also articulating the critical historical and administrative records that must undergird the necessity of institutionally rehabilitating Nigeria’s public administration architecture.

When CORFEPS held its maiden colloquium on 5-7 March, 2024, and had in attendance the administrative bigwigs—from HRM Olu Falae to Amb. Babagana Kingibe and, Dr. Bukar Usman, as lead speaker—the association demonstrates that the past administrative leadership cannot be retired out of the collective responsibility of institutional reform that the public administration and public service sorely need in Nigeria. Indeed, that maiden colloquium brought a new energy into the functionality of the communities of practice and service—retired heads of service and permanent secretaries at both the federal and state levels, platforms of retired directors, pensioners, Nigerian Association of Public Administration and Management (NAPAM), etc.—and the strategic and restorative responsibility for the institutional repositioning of public administration as a noble vocation in Nigeria. And the fundamental objective is clear: how the Nigerian public administration framework, and the public service system, can be reformed to jumpstart Nigeria’s strategic inclusion in the fourth industrial revolution and its implication for infrastructural development to service the wellbeing of Nigerians.

In this piece, my objective is to insert the administrative personality of Mahmud Yayale Ahmed into the reform trajectory of the Nigerian civil service system during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency. This is with the aim of filling out some missing gaps in the reform experiment at the commencement of Nigeria’s democratic governance in 1999. His proactive role as an institutional reformer par excellence also constitutes the occasion to ask fundamental question about the capacity of the civil service system to reform itself. This will eventually not only provide a historical and administrative basis for situating his significance in Nigeria’s reform progress, but also his current role as the chairperson of CORFEPS and its ongoing efforts to backstop restorative institutional reform.

The years between 2000 and 2007 were significant in Nigeria’s administrative and reform history because they present a moment of a major paradigm shift in change management praxis that contributed a fundamental template of reform progress to Nigeria’s reform architecture and achievements. And Yayale Ahmed was right in the centre of the critical efforts to lay the foundation of a world class civil service institution for the Nigerian state. It was at a critical juncture that Yayale Ahmed took over the reins of administrative affairs of a civil service system that had weathered several reform commissions and reports meant to translate the fortunes of the system into concrete administrative advances that Nigerians can relate with in terms of service delivery. The Udoji Commission (1974), Dotun Phillips Study Team (1984) and Ayida Review Panel (1994), all attempted to ground the public service on a pedestal of managerial efficiency and effectiveness that delivers the goods and the services.

When I met Yayale Ahmed, it was right in the midst of the unfolding reform efforts at making sense of the public service system within Nigeria’s democratic experiment. He was the permanent secretary at the federal ministry of education when I was the head of the policy division, as well as the special assistant to Prof. Tunde Adeniran who later mentioned me to his successor (the late Prof. Babalola Borishade). I was later introduced by the late Prof. Akin Mabogunje to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo who then seconded me, on the strength of my articulation through a concept note of the institutional reform challenges and direction of the civil service, to serve as the technical head of the secretariat of the strategy team located within the Management Services Office. I reported directly to the permanent secretary, the late Mr. O. O. Oyelakin, who reported directly to the head of Service, Alhaji Yayale Ahmed.

Given the reputation of someone that the president, Olusegun Obasanjo, referred to as “Mr. Civil Servant,” his in-depth grounding in the dynamics of the system, as well as the crucial understanding of the democratic imperative underlying institutional change, Yayale Ahmed was able to courageously articulate a reform methodology that jumpstarted a new era of administrative reforms in Nigeria. In 2001, as the second phase of the implementation of the Ayida Report was underway, Alhaji Yayale Ahmed faced the federal executive council presided over by President Olusegun Obasanjo, and boldly asserted that the civil service possessed the sufficient resident capacity to diagnose its institutional debilitation, articulate a reform strategy and oversee its own reform. And this revolutionary declaration was coming at a time when skeptics were not sure anything good could ever come out of the civil service.
Indeed, I strongly believed that it was part of the determination to prove the strength of his conviction about the system’s capability to reform itself that facilitated the broadminded learning and proactive space that led to the institutional and professional maturation of someone like me and my eventual transformation into a bureaucrat-scholar. What I mean to say is that under Yayale Ahmed’s watch, I saw the evolution and full maturation of my growing research expertise that came at a crucial point when the diagnostic study and strategic development of the reform methodology was unfolding. No wonder therefore that it was under his ambitious, firm and visionary headship that one of the largest reform programs in the annals of change management in Nigeria was successfully implemented.

Yayale Ahmed’s stature as a public servant cannot be properly decided outside of the reform architecture during his time as the head of service. Indeed, his reputation is tied in with the establishment and fortune of the Bureau of Public Service Reform (BPSR) which is supposed to be the arrowhead of the courageous assertion that the civil service is able to diagnose and reform itself. The BPSR was established in 2003 as the lead reform implementation and monitoring coordinating agency armed with the objective of managing and sustaining service-wide reforms agenda of the Obasanjo administration, while also ensuring that the reform mandate was implemented in the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), the operational units carrying out government business. The three major justification for the existence of the BPSR are: The need to create a clearing house, a one-stop-shop of a sort, where all stakeholders could receive information and guidance on all the reform programmes of the Federal Government; the strong conviction that the reforms objectives will not be realized in the long term, through an ad-hoc committee or task force; and the need to have an “engine room” that is enabled with the required capability and resources to leverage local and international knowledge networks and communities of public administration best practices, to support policy, institutional and governance reform processes with required expertise, and good practices on an on-going basis (http://www.bpsr.gov.ng/index.php).

However, the trajectory of the operational dynamics of the BPSR since 2007 has been less than optimal. And so, the question of whether it has been able to live up to its mandate is a difficult one to answer. And this is because of so many crippling circumstances, bureaucratic and political, that attended its operations. Since 2008, the capacity of the BPSR to manage and sustain institutional reforms has been stunted. For instance, by transferring its supervision from the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HCSF) to the OSGF, its mandate was though expanded from being confined solely to the core civil service rather than the wider public service, but at that it lost the required professional supervision it needs so badly to function. And it also implies that it would henceforth be managed as an appendage of the OSGF rather than as an active player in the few significant initiatives that have taken place in the civil/public service since then.

Reform efforts before the BPSR have always been hampered by an oscillation between comprehensiveness and selectivity in the choice of methodology for pushing reform through. And that indecisiveness also played out within the operational dynamics of the BPSR. But then the many attempts at pushing the BPSR into strategic irrelevance could not diminish a paradigmatic reform methodology: there was a decisive transition away from a decade of episodic structural review of the civil service system to a methodological perception of administrative reform as one trajectory of continuous learning and incremental improvement. And this is where the BPSR proved its most fundamental importance in providing the organizing framework for enhancing this paradigmatic reform methodology. It did this by developing a generic guideline for restructuring, streamlining and monitoring the operational bases of the MDAs.

Pilot MDA reforms were carried out as the basis for measuring and documenting the administrative challenges confronted by the public service that undermine its performance efficiency. The pilot study also enabled the scaling up of the reform implementation strategy to other MDAs at: (a) service-wide systemic reform level, (b) the MDAs’ specific level which entails the implementation of performance improvement plans and the deepening and consolidation of reforms as it concerns cross-cutting reform programs with instruments such as challenge and performance improvement funds, and (c) the implementation of such reform programs as pension reform, national health insurance scheme, statistical reform, pay reform, SERVICOM, to name just a few.

It was therefore broad-based analyses of the fundamental assumptions, presuppositions, indications, deductions and findings from the pilot MDAs study that generated the initiatives for designing and firming up the irreducible national strategy for public service reform (NSPSR). The document constitutes a fundamental reform blueprint for articulating the trajectory of reform management in Nigeria. The significance of the NSPSR derives from the host of reform initiatives and achievements that its methodological emergence made possible, especially post-Yayale Ahmed. I could mention a few. There was the finalization of the African Public Service Charter that encompass a continental administrative blueprint around which the NSPSR could also be mainstreamed. There was also a concerted and genuine effort to resurrect the National Association for Public Administration and Management (NAPAM) which fell through because of a lack of push-through by the bureaucratic leadership. We cannot but mention the service-wide significance of the tenure policy and the concern to contain the exploding but unsustainable institutional redundancies that birthed the Oronsaye panel on the rationalization of agencies and parastatals that became a poster initiative for the post-Obasanjo reform era. That reform policy is still the focal point of every effort to deal with the cost of governance problem that bedevils the public service. We must also signal the introduction of the ministerial scorecard as a managerial strategy for performance management under the Goodluck Jonathan administration. This is complemented by other initiatives like online training programme which has been expanded into the formidable Leadership Enhancement and Development Programme (LEAD-P).

In retrospect, the courage displayed by Yayale in insisting that the civil service possesses the capacity to reform itself, and the series of administrative incidences that attended the BPSR’s effort to championing that argument, only makes the issue even more cogent. All across the world, there is healthy scepticism around the possibility of a bureaucracy leading its own administrative reform. And the jury is still out on whether the Yayale Ahmed’s leadership of the civil service was able to undermine that skepticism enough given the undercurrent of the battle-royal between the federal service and the economic management team during the President Obasanjo second-term. And this generates more questions and discourses that public administration theorists and institutional reformers in Nigeria cannot run away from. Institutional reform in Nigeria always appears Sisyphean, as if the reformers are confronted with the task of rolling the boulder of administrative reform up a hill only to watch it roll back down perpetually. So, why is the task of institutional reform a series of motions without many substantive movements? In concrete terms, why is it the case that despite the numerous service-wide reform initiatives from 1999 to date, the federal civil service system is still, on balance, progressively declining in some critical performance indicators and parameters that overall, limit its capability readiness to sustain service delivery to Nigerians?

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, the French satirist, once remarked: ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.” In change management terms, this is a crippling observation that not only inhibits the capacity of the system to backstop Nigeria’s democratic governance, but also glosses over, in an unfair manner, the enormous and paradigmatic efforts of institutional reformers like my old boss, Yayale Ahmed. I am however optimistic that Nigeria’s change management discourse will receive a new lease of life. For one, Alhaji Yayale Ahmed is not one to give up easily. His chairmanship of CORFEPS is just one significant indication of that. Second, the collaboration between CORFEPS and the Federal service, if concretized, portends a fundamental direction that brings the institutional experiences of retired permanent secretaries and heads of service in a critical conversation with successive serving administrative leadership in time and space to move the civil service forward. This is why I am excited that my old boss had chosen to reach out to his mentee at the FCSC the way he did.

. Olaopa is Professor of Public Administration, and the Chairman,
Federal Civil Service Commission,
Abuja.