It was Mahatma Gandhi that once said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” And Gandhi was eminently qualified to know this. He was the embodiment of the struggle to restore the dignity and the progress of India from colonial dehumanization. Indeed, he gave himself to the service of Bharat Mata, or Mother India. The same can be said of the late octogenarian Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji—gentleman, diplomat, public servant, technocrat, expert, patriot, and elder statesman. To characterize Triple A, as he was fondly called, as a career civil servant is to compliment his dedication, excellence in service and commitment. It is to recognize someone whose public-spiritedness and professionalism defined the very essence of what it means to be in service to the state and the people. From 1964 when he joined the civil service till his retirement, he rose to become a permanent secretary, a federal minister and Nigeria’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom. That was a sterling trajectory of public service.
However, the label of a career civil servant will not do justice to the full stretch of Alhaji’s patriotism as a public servant and his full-blooded humanity. In his person, he combined a love for the people and his community and a total and unflinching dedication to the service of the nation. That is a rare persona. And it takes someone who was close to him to unearth that personality. I encountered Alhaji Abubakar when he was already a permanent secretary emeritus and had made the transition to becoming a minister at the Ministry of National Planning and the Ministry of Finance and then as High Commissioner in the UK.
Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji was a consummate civil servant and a professional bureaucrat to the core. Having studied political economy, Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji went the extra lengths to concretize his key expertise in economic and financial matters. And that expertise served him well during his very long tenure as a permanent secretary. That rise to the very top of the administrative ladder commenced as an assistant secretary at the Federal Ministry of Finance, then as a principal assistant secretary at the Ministry of Industries. He made the position of permanent secretary in 1975 at the Ministry of Trade from where he later again moved to the Ministry of Finance where he had a chance to deploy his economic knowledge in intervening Nigeria’s external creditors. He was later also a permanent secretary at the Ministry of Planning before the Babangida administration elevated him to the status of a Minister of State for Budget and Planning in 1988. He was indeed a Fellow and former President of the Nigerian Economic Society (NES).
It was almost inevitable that Alhaji Abubakar, the economist and financial analyst, will find his way into the famous network of expert-professionals constituted by the President Ibrahim Babangida. The Presidential Advisory Committee (PAC) was a high-powered gathering chaired by the late Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade, and included others like Dr. Kalu Idika Kalu, Dr. Chu Okongwu, Dr. Michael Omolayole, HRM Olu Falae, Abdukadir Ahmed, Prof. Jonas Elaigwu, Prof. A. D. Yahaya, and others. The PAC was the think tank platform that was meant to deliver on policy advisory from the standpoint of deep professionalism that would deliver on policy-engaged research. This policy advisory professionalism was constituted around the solid technocratic expertise of core experts who met regularly to discuss and debate governance and policy matters that were meant to backstop good governance. In this particular instance, the entire intellectual and technocratic energies of PAC was concentrated on dissecting numerous policy concerns including one that would later have significant impact on my research; the policy implications of the Dotun Phillips Commission Report of 1985 and its metamorphosis into the Civil Service Reorganization Decree of 1988.
The PAC had to figure out the administrative conundrum of how the Nigerian civil service system would fare in institutional terms when the parliamentary system was replaced with the presidentialism that the Babangida administration took on as his organizing framework for governance. Indeed, the discourse had to tie presidentialism not only to the structure and functioning of the civil service system but ultimately to the Nigerian state and Nigeria’s federalism. It was therefore a very significant moment in the Babangida administration; indeed, a testament to Babangida’s resourcefulness in gathering competences for the purpose of inducing governance and policy breakthrough. Something would have been amiss if Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji had not been inducted into this seminal space of high-caliber deliberation. He had what it took and contributed with remarkable erudition and panache to the debates and discourses at PAC. It was in that space of acute brainstorming that I cut my teeth as a policy analyst and implementation researcher in the early 1990s.
We will leave it to administrative historians in Nigeria to figure out the significant contribution of Alhaji Abubakar to the Babangida administration and its governance credentials. Part of that historical assessment would have to factor in the key role he played in the implementation of the structural adjustment programmes that had the imprimatur of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This is where we have to connect the dots in Alhaji’s training at the IMF Institute in Washington DC, his orthodox fiscal and economic conservatism and apparent and unapologetic support for the structural adjustment programs. The IMF and World Bank have a standard reaction to economic instability especially in the third world, and Africa. And that standard policy insists on the emasculation through the redefinition of the role of the state in favor of market orthodoxies—privatization, commercialization, liberalization. Market deregulation demands, for example, that interest rates would be deregulated, government parastatals would be dismantled or privatized. It also involved the deregulation of the banking sector, and of the foreign exchange market (and the introduction of the Second-tier foreign exchange market), as well as the abolition of import licenses
The uncommon courage and tenacity of Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji derives from his willingness to put his heart where his mouth was as principled resolve without fail. He stood by his conservative economic and fiscal arguments that Nigeria needed the structural adjustment programs. And his arguments hinged around Nigeria’s sloppy economic profile, especially its monocultural oil-dependency and the fiscal drains that government agencies were affecting on the government coffers and fiscal legitimacy. There was no doubt that for Nigeria’s economy and development planning to become sufficiently firm as to arrest the downward spiral of governance, it was inevitable that some very hard decisions had to be made, and key institutional and governance reforms had to be undertaken. Alhaji Alhaji did not flinch in his pursuit of what needed to be done, from the restructuring of the Central Bank of Nigeria and the establishment of the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Nobody could fault the premise for the introduction of the structural adjustment programs. However, no one could also deny the depth of the austerity and hardship that the measures brought on millions of Nigerians. The structural adjustment programmes overstepped their boundaries in terms of the institutional damages that the civil service and other governance structures suffered for instance. And yet, Nigeria needs civil servants in the stock of Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji, courageous, firm, unflinching in his conviction and willing to confront the nation with the hard truths about its economic and development conditions. One could almost hypothesize that Alhaji’s administrative longevity was the result of his quiet competence that enabled him to become the embodiment of policy continuity across several governments, civilian and military.
My takeaway from a critical assessment of Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji’s stint as a public servant derives from his administrative solidity. He came into the civil service with a sense of loyalty, dedication and commitment to an endeavor that he understood what was required of him. And he bent his professional expertise to the task and did it with his strength and the force of his administrative and ideological conviction. And in the process, he became an embodiment of institutional memory that straddles several regimes and administrations in Nigeria. The nickname of a “super permanent secretary” is not just a reference to his administrative longevity; it is also a critical nod to his capability to range over administrative, technocratic and diplomatic spheres in the civil service system. This was one civil servant who knew what he was committed to and followed it through with ardent fervor. Add to this his traditional religious and communal role as one of the custodians of northern values. His role as the Sardauna of Sokoto also comes with lots of responsibilities in terms of aligning the north with broader national concerns.
Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji demonstrates for us the portrait of a committed civil servant that ought to undergird the efforts at reforming the figure and persona of the public servant in institutional reform. The reform of the civil service must commence with a deep reflection on not only the type of public servant required to drive the civil service into the knowledge and technology society, but also the kind of entry-level critical assessment that will mainstream such a public servant into the context of institutional effectiveness and performance. Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji represents a long line of civil servants, from Chief Simeon Adebo and Chief Jerome Udoji to Allison Ayida, Sule Katagum and Phillip Asiodu. All these figures streamline for us the very essence of what Nigeria needs in terms of the persona of a public servant that can drive the engine of effectiveness and efficiency with a deep sense of public morality and patriotic commitment. May we have more of such public servants in the corridors of the civil service in Nigeria.
