I just turned down a job
I attended a dinner party last week, and when I introduced myself to one of the guests, he called me troublemaker, then offered me a job in a federal establishment. I declined, and then he threw the following gem at me: “Guys like you are comfortable with staying on the sidelines to criticise. Knowing what you know, why don’t come and help? Come join us and change things from within.”
To be honest, I’ve had this argument with myself before, and very early on in this particular government, I came close to joining government but ended up not getting it because I gave a condition that they were unwilling to meet.
Time has made me say, “Thank God” for that because, given the job description back then, the possibility is high that my small reputation would have been in tatters by now.
But having said that, this paradox is something that needs close examination, and I talk about it, as well as my reasons for declining this latest offer in today’s BusinessDay.
I gave three reasons: first, the “soldier come, soldier go, barracks remain” mentality that is rampant in the civil service is such that almost anyone with a genuine intent to change things is sure to be fighting a losing battle. Our civil service in Nigeria, federal and state, have been fucked since Murtala Mohammed sent more than 10,000 public officials on their way back in 1975. Yes, in my entire lifetime, Nigeria has not had a functional civil service.
The second reason I gave was of money. The money the government would have to stump up to pay people like me has effectively created a parallel civil service funded by grants. This has in turn made the career civil servants unhappy, which has in turn fuelled the corruption that eats the entire institution up. At some point, we will have to have that conversation about letting go of most of the existing civil service so that those that remain can be paid properly. For the record, I’m a believer in the Oronsaye Report.
The third reason I gave was simple, and this one I’ll expand on here (for the other two, read the BD piece).
There is a thing about this government. We have all seen how better brains than mine have flopped after being added to the current federal government. President Buhari appointed an economic advisory or management team last year, headed by the cerebral prof Doyin Salami, which had interesting names such as Bismarck Rewane and Chukwuma Soludo. At the time, I put out a tweet expressing doubt that they’d succeed and was pilloried for that tweet by the usual party online supporters. It’s been a full year after the hype that ushered them in. The borders are still closed, and Buhari has delivered yet another recession, this time under their watch, thus soiling their reputations.
Simply put, in a very hierarchical society like Nigeria as currently structured, everyone takes their cue from the leader. To state unequivocally, the people in, and the advisory team have been practically rendered useless especially with the policy and cognitive dissonance that have come to characterises the Buhari regime, simply because Buhari himself does not believe the “rubbish” they are saying.
To make matters worse, the resistance to criticism and feedback mechanism the government has adopted has made it insular to sound advice. The well-publicised criticism (with advice) of CBN’s policy by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) and the vitriolic rebuttal by the former is a sorry incident that leaves a sour taste in one’s mouth. You can’t wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep.
No sane person would expect me to take up a position in this government, especially seeing how critics who attempted to venture into the same government in a bid to help, were hounded out. Festus Adedayo was appointed Senate president Ahmed Lawan’s media officer. BudgIT’s Seun Onigbinde was appointed a technical adviser at the finance ministry. We all watched how APC hate groups waxed hysterical about both appointments leading to their sack. For these persons, there is no middle ground. Everything is viewed with partisan lenses which makes it needlessly difficult for a genuine person trying to make a difference.
In a parallel universe, the best brains are incorporated into public administration. We had that parallel universe before July 1975 when Murtala Mohammed destroyed an already decaying civil service that had post-1960 continued the British colonial practise of hiring the best minds out of our public university systems.
From my point of view, the decrepit nature of Nigeria’s decrepit public service system is not where a person looking to make a change and influence policy from within should be aspiring to. With partisan hacks acting as wolves guarding the door to a not so beautiful promised land (symbolised by the national cake syndrome), it reads a clear danger sign of “keep out”. When one duly considers the evolution of Femi Adesina from hero to zero, it is hardly any incentive to commit one’s reputation to take a solid beating, and especially not after reading what Reuben Abati had to say concerning the superhuman forces at Aso Rock.