Ahmed Joda: Super-Permanent Secretary and Elder Statesman indeed

Ahmed Joda—husband, father, friend, journalist, super permanent secretary, patriot and statesman—has just transited to the great beyond. At 91, we can consider him to be old enough to go the ways of the elders. But Ahmed Joda was not just another Nigerian. And not just another civil servant of the glorious era of public service in Nigeria. And this is the more reason why his sudden transition generates a deep grief that goes beyond losing a father and a mentor. Ahmed Joda was an embodiment of all that being a public servant entails. And this lesson is all the more needed at this time when those who are the exemplars of the best in Nigerian public service system are unrelentingly transiting: Allison Ayida, SuleKatagum, Francesca Emanuel, TheophilusAkinyele, AbdulahiMa’aji, M. LeleMuhtar, A. O. Okafor, S. B. Ajulo, MoibiShitu, and the much younger, TundeLawal, and so on. All these were old bosses, friends and colleagues, and the leading lights of the public service profession in Nigeria. I am honoured to have delivered a lecture at Francesca Emanuel’s 80th birthday, and her last public event. And significantly, I was also the guest lecturer at the colloquium organized by the Oyo State government in honour of Akinyele.

Joda lived a life of patriotic service to Nigeria. This in itself speaks volume about the kind of public servant he was. This was a distinguished personality of whom we can say, like all the others in that even more distinguished cadre, that he was a dedicated public servant all his life. Again, like Adebo, Udoji, Asiodu, Ighodalo, Aziz Attah, Erediauwa, and others, he came to the civil service from journalism. I like to recall one insight from one of our many seminal engagements on the unfinished business of civil service reform. He went back memory lane to recount his formative years in Qur’anic school. He then described how Islamic instructions, the rigor and associated discipline, prepared and helped him to excel when he transited to formal western education and, much later, in his career as a bureaucrat. The lesson there for me was one of how wrong people could be when they equate speaking English with literacy when, indeed, English language is not the only medium of education. And when he eventually got into the civil service vocation, he embraced it while rising from the rank and file, and learning that entirely he could about what the “public” and the “service” entailed. It was as if he was getting prepared for the most critical assignment that will later involve the administrative destiny of the Nigerian state. And then, when the Nigerian civil war happened, Ahmed Joda and others like him, patriots all, were ready. And they did not fail. Though he retired from active service in 1978, a true public servant never retires since the love of the public and its well being is a lifelong calling. In 1999, he was the head of the committee to advise the presidency on poverty alleviation. In 2015, he became the head of MuhammaduBuhari presidential transition committee. In-between, he will provide leadership in crystallizing the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) that is standing hugely tall today as a foremost nation’s think tank. And he never stopped attempting to intervene critically and functionally on behalf of the Nigerian state and its reform trajectory.

One of his final attempts included a partnership with the OlusegunObasanjo Presidential Library that commenced a technical process involving a team of technical experts and reform specialists that worked to unravel the missing pieces in Nigeria’s administrative reform efforts. This is to the end that the conclusion of the technical process could serve as the basis by which he will add value to the Buhari administration’s “Next Level” change agenda so it could be taken truly to the next level. I was humbled when he invited me to be technical lead to the team.

With the unfortunate demise of Ahmed Joda, and in the spirit of the reform technical process that he initiated, I consider it appropriate to, as tribute to the great administrative icon, ventilate about the fundamental essence of his life and service, for the sake of the institutional reform mission that his time as a public servant encapsulate. What are the significant issues about reforming the public service that Joda’s exemplary service points at? In this piece, my tribute to this great public servant and patriot is to see how we can go from thoughts about his term as a super permanent secretary to insights about the role of the permanent secretary about the institutional reform of the public service system in Nigeria.

The generation of Ahmed Joda was a very lucky one. And the luck derives from the fact that the set of public servants that laid the foundation of the Nigerian civil service system—from Adebo through to Joda—got the best in the professional grounding facilitated by the legacy of Victorian values-based administrative tradition left by the British after colonialism. The British civil service had gone through a series of reforms that was meant to transform the British bureaucracy from a great rock in the tideline into an efficient administrative system. From the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 to the Fulton Report of 1968, the British system nailed the significance of the public service as a vocation. This was a lesson well learnt by the pioneering corps of Nigerian public servants. And this is a lesson that stands at the core of the institutional reform of the civil service system in Nigeria. It is one insight that the demise of Joda brings to mind with absolute cogency. Being a public servant is being public spirited. The virtue of being public spirited brings home the values of the “public” and of “service” in ways that goes beyond being a careerist. It consists of public servants and modern-day priests of the Levitical order who owe a patriotic loyalty to the state.

The collective body of the super permanent secretaries, of which Ahmed Joda was a prominent and functional member, was called upon to administratively rehabilitate the Nigerian state in the throes of a civil war. And within the context of anarchy and a framework of scarce resources made scarcer by war, these patriotic administrators were tasked to keep the Nigerian state within a boundary made sane for developmental progress. However, fifty-one years after the end of the civil war, the Nigerian state is not just struggling to achieve just the basics in the status of a developmental state, but has regressed to become a failing and seemingly failed state. And all its pioneer and public-spirited public servants are all almost demised. How then, out of the legion of systemic and structural changes that are urgent, do we recreate the office of the permanent secretary in their image?

The post of the permanent secretary came into effect with independence and the implementation of the Nigerianisation Policy that was meant to fill the supernumerary posts with Nigerians. The office of the permanent secretary, historically speaking, since it was inaugurated by PM Lord Grey in 1830 to replace the post of Under Secretary in Britain with Sir John Burrow as the first to bear the title of perm sec, is meant to assist the ministers of a government in ways that obey the restriction imposed by the politics-administration dichotomy. This is why the permanent secretary has been characterized as “the permanent custodian of permanent problems”—in her capacity as chief policy adviser, chief administrative or operations officer and the accounting officer. It is the permanence of the office that facilitates the continuity of succeeding governments. Indeed, it is the functional optimality of the permanent secretary that ensures that the public service serves as the backbone of a developmental state. This is why the office of the permanent secretary becomes the number one candidate for institutional reform.

Reforming the office of the permanent secretary, following the imperatives of managerialism, is transforming it into a CEO, a technology-savvy, efficient, accountable, effective, and entrepreneurial manager and change agent with the capacities and competences to superintend a public service in a knowledge age and postcolonial administrative context. The reform agenda is to make the performing PS answer the objectives of optimal productivity for a country like Nigeria that has been bedevilled by low productivity. In reforming the permanent secretary into a transformational manager responsible for a ministry’s performance profile, the reform is also meant to set up the office of the PS into a hub around which a new breed of public-spirited public servants will be recruited, trained and deployed. To therefore become an efficient change agent, the permanent secretary must not only be an institutional memory, but a product of a professionalized recruitment, retention, talent pipelining, and incentivization process, while she must also be circumscribed by an individual performance agreement or contract that is part of a larger performance management strategies meant to boost the productivity of a developmental state. The recruitment process, with a larger objective of constituting a senior executive service (SES), will be subordinated to human resource management dynamics that recruit based on the administrative philosophy underlying the developmental state.

Given that the twenty-first century permanent secretary must operate within a VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—administrative environment made more complex by COVID-19, there is the need for both technical, administrative and cultural reorientations that insinuate the training of the public servant within the new ambit of public values, action-molding administrative imperatives (ethical values, i.e. integrity, honesty, respect; democratic values, i.e. responsiveness, representativeness, rule of law; and professional values, i.e. excellence, innovation), and what has been called “twenty-first century literacies” (interpersonal skills: facilitation, empathy, political skills; synthesizing skills: sorting evidence, analysis, making judgements, offering critique and being creative; organizing skills: group work, collaboration and peer review; and communication skills: better use of new media and multimedia resources). And in straddling the generalist and professional roles, the new permanent secretary is required to function as an expert (to advise the government on policy design), regulator (providing oversight on the non-core responsibilities of government), an engager (mediating between government and the citizens on what constitutes the public good), and a reticulist (who identifies new competences required for performance).

In administrative and institutional terms, the new understanding of the permanent secretary as a change agent makes her a transformational leader that is more collaborative than heroic. With strategic intelligence and collaborative competences, she is saddled with the responsibilities of overseeing the transformation of an institution of which she must manage to generate policy intelligence that will stimulate performance and eventually enhance productivity. This is what Ahmed Joda and the band of super permanent secretaries exemplify. This is the legacy we should perpetuate in their honour.

Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary & Professor of Public Administration, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos. [email protected]