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Release Of Boko Haram Suspects Impeachable Offence – HURIWA Tells Buhari

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Buhari Pays Condolence Visit To Families Of Kano Explosion Victims

The trending report of the freeing and resettlement of hundreds of Boko Haram terrorists on the orders of President Muhammadu Buhari is not just an unpardonable ethical crime but amounts to an impeachable offence because it undermines the basis of the rule of law, according to the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA).

HURIWA disclosed this in a statement made against the backdrop of the report of the release by the military of 1,009 ex- Boko Haram fighters to the Borno State government.

Besides, HURIWA has asked President Buhari to release Mazi Nnamdi Kanu and all the detained members of the banned Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) because in the thinking of the group, if government can undermine the constitution to free hardened terrorists, why is the government detaining members of a self-determination group that denies government accusations of its involvement in the killing of security operatives in the South East of Nigeria?

HURIWA recalled that the Nigerian military on Wednesday released 1,009 ex-Boko Haram insurgents, who had been in military custody at Giwa Barracks in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital.

Citing media report, HURIWA said the former terrorists were handed over to the Borno State government in a secret ceremony that was initially billed to take place at an earlier date but was suspended indefinitely by the military authorities in the wake of the appointment of the new COAS.

HURIWA said sources in the army disclosed that the ex-terrorists were handed over to the Commissioner for Women Affairs and Social Development, Hajiya Zuwaira Gambo, who represented the state government at the event.

READ ALSO: Woman As A Powerful Force For National Development

The officer said: “The army handed 1,009 Boko Haram insurgents to the state government today (Wednesday). It was done in secret. We were warned not to allow journalists to the venue.”

HURIWA in a media statement by Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko the National Coordinator and the Director of Media Affairs Miss Zainab Yusuf has called on the National Assembly to wake up from slumber and defend the constitution by compelling Buhari to stop breaking the law by releasing terrorists and to move to impeach him should he refuse to rescind the unconstitutional conduct.

According to the rights groups, releasing terrorists is counter- productive for the following logical reasoning:  “It is said the culture of violence brings with it a class of cruel people who believe they are entitled to determine the value of other humans. This is a reality which dawns on a society with weak criminal justice system where crime is not only prevalent and under-reported and officially rarely todocumented but also seldom meted out . This state of affairs breeds a most vile,  oppressive and daring criminal sets like kidnappers and arm bandits.

The US Department of State’s Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) report on Nigeria indicates that kidnapping for ransom occurs throughout the country. There is hardly a part of the country which has not experienced kidnapping and armed banditry in recent times and most disturbing is the hard fact that there does not appear to be a conscious and concerted effort to arrest the situation.  This subject therefore deserves attention and the reason for this paper.

Kidnapping and abduction are used interchangeably to describe the forceful taking or confinement of another against their will for several illegal purposes. A criminal legislation in Nigeria defines the terms as different sides of a crime while in some others, the age or state of mind of the victim is the distinguishing factor.

A lot of the states of the South have passed laws criminalizing kidnapping and abduction.

According to section 1 of the Kidnapping (Prohibition) Law of Lagos State 2017, the term “kidnap” includes the act of unlawful removal or abduction of person(s) from a place to another against the person(s)’ will, either by force or use of offensive weapons, firearms or deception or the act of holding somebody hostage with or without the person’s consent with the intent to demand ransom, for ritual killing or for any other unlawful purpose.

By section 2 of the Law,” the punishment for abduction is life imprisonment but where death results from the kidnapping, the punishment is death sentence. The section provides thus:
From the commencement of this Law, any person who-
(i)            Forcibly takes, holds, abducts, deadlons
(ii)           Instills fear in another or the purpose of kidnapping through coercion or by any other means against the person’s will with intent to demand ransom;
commits an offence, and is liable on conviction to life imprisonment.

READ ALSO: Fresh Trouble For Lai Mohammed As Kwara APC Ratifies Suspension Of Supporters

2)            Where death occurs as a result of the commission of the offence of kidnapping, the offender(s) shall be liable on conviction to death sentence.
(3)           The death sentence imposed under subsection (2) may be executed by-
(i)            hanging;
(ii)           lethal injection; or
(iii)          as the Court may direct.”

Under the Penal Code Law (PCL) which applies in the States of the North including the FCT, the term kidnapping is defined under section 271 in the following words:
Whoever takes or entices any person, under fourteen years of age if a male or under sixteen years of age if a female, or any person of unsound mind out of the keeping of the lawful guardian of such person without the consent of such guardian or consent of someone legally authorized to consent to such removal, is said to kidnap such person.

While Section 270 of the PCL states that whoever by force or by any deceitful means induces any person to go from any place, is said to abduct that person. Punishment for kidnapping range from 10 to 14 years under section273 and 274 of t depending on the intention of the actor.

On the other hand “armed bandit” is  not a legal term for any particular kind of crime but used in association with criminals who carry arms especially firearms which the most deadly of all kinds of offensive weapons. Section 3 of the Robbery and Firearms (Special Provisions) Act criminalizes the illegal possession of “firearms” which is defined under section 11 of the Act to include any canon, gun, rifle, carbine, machine-gun, cap-gun, flint-lock gun, revolver, pistol, explosive or ammunition or other firearm, whether whole or in detached pieces.

To underscore the gravity of firearms related offences, robbery with firearms is punishable with death under Section 1(2) of the Act while receiving property subject of the Act carries a sentence of life imprisonment as well. It is also a crime under section 4(3) for any person’s hospital or clinic to admit, treat or administer drug to a person with bullet wounds without reporting same to the police.

The state has two tasks in which potential victims of wrongdoing are likely to take an interest; first is to criminalize certain behaviors which wrong others, the second is to punish those behaviors. It fulfils only one part of the law when all a society has is provision in a piece of document without complementary enforcement of those provisions aga defaulters or deviants.

The first legal basis and rationale for punishment of those crimes is that the law has provided for their punishment. It must be reiterated that the usual procedure for law passage involves the executive and legislative arm of governments, so much so that even in military regimes, quasi legislative assembly or committees are constituted to serve as the parliament to either formulate the set of rules that eventually decreed or in the least embellish it with the legislative or legal jargons. The point is that at the violation of a law, the organ of government with powers to adjudicate is the judiciary.

READ ALSO: Nigerians’re Suffering – Kano Emir Tells Buhari

Another basis for which the crime of kidnapping and arm banditry must be punished is that they are not compoundable offences. A crime is compoundable when the victim of an offence which is personal to him accepts settlement from the perpetrator in lieu of prosecution. However the offences of kidnapping or abduction and armed banditry are not personal to the any particular victims. The whole society is a victim of kidnapping and armed banditry.   They are offences which deal with the state of safety of the public and for which any member of the society could be a victim either by virtue of social standing in financial terms, or by virtue of mere membership of a particular tribe or group or merely by being a believer or practitioner of a particular faith or religion.

Again the manner of carrying out of these offences involves the use of fire arms which only the state has prerogative over.

Moreover it is some way compounding of offence to fail to prosecute and punish kidnappers and arm bandits. In the case of PML (NIG) LTD v. FRN (2017) LPELR – 43480 (SC), 39-44, Paras. B-C the Supreme Court shed light on the concepts of compounding of offence and compounding offence in the following words:

“Compounding a crime” is defined in the same Black’s Law Dictionary, 9th Ed., as follows;
The offence of either agreeing not to prosecute a crime that one knows has been committed or agreeing to hamper the prosecution.
Compounding a crime is also “a criminal act in which a person agrees not to report the occurrence of a crime or not to prosecute a criminal offender in exchange for money or other consideration.”

The offence is complete when there is an agreement to either withhold evidence of the crime, conceal it, or fail to prosecute it.

READ ALSO: BREAKING: Senate Restricts Electronic Transmission Of Results In New Electoral Law

“Compounding of offences” on the other hand, is an act on the part of the victim, who decides to pardon the offence committed by the accused person, and requests the eourt to exonerate him. This does not mean that the offence has not been committed;”

In Ramesh Chandara v. A.P. Jhaveri [A.I.R.1973 SC 84] the Indian Supreme Court made a profound statement which appears to shade light on the conspiracy of silence in the midst of the gruesome crimes and state of unrest in Nigeria today. The court held that an invisible permission to compound a compoundable and non- compoundable offence is totally invalid.

Prevalence of an offence is another reason for the need for stiffer measures and sanctions to ensure deterrence. In the case of Onyilokwu V The State (1981) 2 NCR 49 where the offender was initially detained for causing hurt, and later, he unsuccessfully tried to escape and was additionally charged with escaping from lawful custody. Although he was later discharged and acquitted, the court expressed the view that three years imprisonment earlier imposed on him did not show adequate consideration not only for his first offender status, but also , for an offence which was not prevalent in the community. The rationale for reconsidering the sentence gives a clear indication that a prevalent crime should not be treated with kid gloves if such a society must survive the crime.

In the case of Olanipekmi V The State (1979) 3 LRN 204 1979 (alias junta manta), during a robbery, the leader ordered one of his followers to shoot a victim. He complied but the gun did not go off. In sentencing him to five years imprisonment with hard labour, the court cell said:

‘’society demands that such a man should be kept out of circulation for some time-the offence is a serious one………’’
Similarly, courts have taken a very serious view of the offences which injure or threaten the lives of citizens. In the case of R. v. Ozuloke Suit No.HU/4/47/C/71 (High Court Umuahia, Unreported) where the appellant met a little girl aged about eight years who was related to him on a village road, he covered her eyes with his hand and stuffed bread into her mouth to stop her crying out and took her into a bush, he laid her out on the ground, stood on her hand, poured acid over her body and cut off her left ear, he forced her eyes open and poured acid into them. He later ran away leaving the little girl unconscious. A twenty year jail sentence was considered adequate; the offence was regarded as being most revolting. What could be more revolting than the present state of widespread and indiscriminate possession of firearms and the attendance wanton crimes of kidnapping, molestation, killings, terrorism in all parts of the country today?

“Lastly the present prevalent state of armed criminality is direct affront to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (CFRN) 1999 (as mended) and undermines her territorial integrity, national unity and nationhood. Section 1 (3) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria provides that

” ‘The Federal Republic of Nigeria shall not be governed nor shall any person or group of persons take control of the government of Nigeria or any part thereof, except in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution.”

“The history of rebellion and revolution all over the world began with proliferation of arms and unbridled state of crime associated with such arms as in the present state. Nigeria therefore cannot afford to treat the present state of crime and insecurity lightly under any guise. To do so will be a clear decision to ignore history …”, the group added.

 

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Iwuanyanwu And The ‘Political Rascals’ Rhetoric 

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Nigerian Destiny: In The Hands Of The People
Dr. Promise Adiele

By Promise Adiele

Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot avails itself of multiple interpretative tools with a compelling grip on the moral imagination of the audience. As a timeless drama, it thrives on the hopelessness of the human condition dramatized by two vagabonds, Estragon and Vladimir who waited for a mysterious, titular Godot that never came. One of the features of the absurdist literary tradition portrayed in the play is the failure of language in the verbal context as a means of communication. The verbal exchange between the two vagabonds is evident of misinterpretation. One says one thing, the other interprets it differently. Thus, it calls to question the potency of language in the verbal medium as a means of communication. The preceding analogy reminds me of Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu and his purported insult to the good people of the Yoruba ethnic group. Perhaps, misinterpretation currently manifests as an inexorable content of Nigeria’s absurd credentials.

Last week, Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, philanthropist, accomplished businessman, the Balogun Babaguwan of Yorubaland, Ahaejiejemba of Igboland and elder-statesman, while reacting to events that happened in Lagos during the last election when many Igbo people were bloodied and harassed, assured the world that “the Igbo and Yoruba are not at war”. On the heels of that statement came another one “they are Yoruba political rascals”. A syntactic analysis of the two sentences affirms that the Chief never meant to insult the entire Yoruba ethnic group. Rather, he was referring to rascals in Lagos who maimed, killed, and vanquished Igbos, non-Yorubas, and even some Yorubas with Igbo semblance, stopping them from exercising their voting rights during the election. He also said “we know them and we will deal with them”. Language scholars know that Chief Iwuanyanwu did not mean to insult the Yoruba. Sadly, some social nitwits, victims of acute cognitive impairment, went on a rampage to misinterpret and manipulate his statement to suit their treacherous, mischievous purposes. It is absurd. 

 Anyone who knows Chief Iwuaynanwu’s antecedent will never ascribe offensive rhetoric to him. He is soft-spoken, conciliatory and peace-loving. Like every sensible person around the world, not just the Igbo, he was aghast with lurid photos and video evidence of harm against the Igbo in Lagos during the last election. Unfortunately, people who ordinarily frolic in the whirlwind of ethnic hate have seized the opportunity to insult the Igbo ethnic group while using acerbic words on the revered Chief. These people, in their degenerate and diseased mentality, are trying to install a wall of hate between the Igbo and Yoruba. Let me state categorically that the Yorubas are wonderful people whose spirit of brotherliness, conviviality, and tolerance speaks volumes across the world. I have maintained over time that the Igbo and Yoruba share a cordial, interwoven relationship in marriage, business, friendship, association and neighbourliness. The two ethnic groups can never be involved in a conflict. Many Yoruba people have helped many Igbo people to their destinies and many Igbo people have helped many Yoruba people to their destinies too. An attempt for one ethnic group to harm the other will result in serious harm for the two. It is as implicating as that. 

Since the presidential elections, keenly contested by different candidates from different ethnic groups in Nigeria, some people have desperately sought to reduce the entire development to an ethnic affair. It is myopic and at once condescending. Does Peter Obi represent the Igbo? Does Bola Tinubu represent the Yoruba? Does Atiku Abubakar represent the Hausa/Fulani?  These candidates all have supporters across the country. Of course, they will have a preponderance of support from their ethnic base. That is the way of politics. Unfortunately, ethnic jingoists have, in the inerrancy of their bleak convictions, reduced the entire political discourse to an ethnic affair especially Yoruba vs Igbo. These people, stranded in the realm of ethnic hate and communal intolerance, have done everything within their powers to inflame ethnic tension to crucible dimensions. It is wrong for anyone to insult a whole ethnic group in whatever guise. In Chief Iwuanyanwu’s case, he has put the records straight by clarifying what he meant, insisting that he was quoted out of context. But the morbid and decadent will not hear of it. They insist that Iwuanyanwu and all Igbo should be roasted alive. As far as these simpletons are concerned, the Chief spoke the mind of all Igbos. How idiotic and harebrained can anybody be? 

Recently, some people have also indulged in ethnic slurs. Unlike Chief Iwuanyanwu that clarified himself, Bayo Onanuga offered no apology and insisted on standing by his words. Onanuga spoke for himself and couldn’t have insulted the Igbo on behalf of the Yoruba. MC Oluomo, while registering his socio-political disorientation, spoke for himself when he threatened the Igbo on an  election day and went on to make good his threat which the police shamelessly called a joke. FFK has also made inflammatory remarks which were his personal opinion and not the opinion of Yoruba. It is therefore, a function of disabled, primitive awareness for anyone to insult an ethnic group based on the comment of one person. Such insults and abuses expose the quiddity of phenomenal foolishness which, hitherto, was concealed in some people by the façade of education. No, these hate mongers belong to the stone age. Nobody should be deceived by their pretentious liberalism. 

The question is, are there political rascals in Nigeria? Definitely yes! These are the particular people Chief Iwuanyanwu referred to concerning what happened in Lagos during the last elections. Of course, all parts of the country have their share of political rascals. It is not peculiar to one ethnicity. Political rascals are those who walk the streets, snatch ballot boxes, stab people due to their ethnic origin and prevent them from exercising their civic rights. They are not educated. They are thugs, street urchins and never-do-wells employed by politicians to advance nefarious objectives. There are also some educated political rascals. They don’t walk the streets, but demonstrate humane deficiency of unimaginable proportions using social media and sundry news outlets. They spread hate, provoke enmity and fan the embers of war. They incite the uneducated, urging them to bay for the blood of ordinary citizens. Their social media handles are replete with expletives and insults. Abusive engagement allows them to flourish. Another category of political rascals populate government establishments like INEC, the Police and different security agencies. These people compromise the electoral process in exchange for financial inducement and material gains. They are unconscionable, desperate and invidious. Are these people from another planet? No, they are among us. We know them. 

The ethnic hate narrative is a device enunciated by the political class to keep the people divided, breaking their rank and file to unite and fight a common enemy. The opposition LP and PDP are convinced that the election was marred by sharp, underhand practices and therefore have gone to court. Is going to court to challenge the outcome of an election a legitimate practice? If it is, why can’t detractors of equitable process allow the law to run smoothly? The call by some decidedly frustrated fellows in search of relevance and pecuniary patronage for the arrest of the opposition presidential candidates is from the pit of purgatory. The propaganda that there is a plan to disrupt the handover ceremony is a bundle of falsehood from the depths of Hades. Although many Nigerians regard the judiciary with a pinch of salt, people of goodwill should advocate for a peaceful resolution of Nigeria’s political challenges. Ethnic rhetoric should stop immediately. People should sheath their swords. Let us all close the road to Rwanda. 

Adiele, PhD, writes from Mountain Top University.

Promee01@yahoo.com

 

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Olaopa: The Self As  A Patriotic Reformer – The Tales Of  A Memoirist

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Prof.Afolayan

By  Adeshina Afolayan
Autobiographies and memoirs are very difficult to write. One of the reasons is that they place the autobiographers and the memoirist in a very difficult position that draws the attention, and even the ire, of the public. Once the volume is written and presented before the public, the writer can no longer control its reception. And some or even all of her certainties and verities are shredded by those who must approach the book from different perceptions. But there is an even more daunting challenge. Writing an autobiography or a memoir dances at the very edge of hubris and vanity. This is what Michel de Montaigne thinks. His understanding of the human self is dark and gloomy. According to him, “If others were to look attentively into themselves as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of emptiness and tomfoolery…. Our self is an object full of dissatisfaction: we can see nothing there but wretchedness and vanity.”Now, imagine an act of self-portrait emerging from such a dark view of the self.

In The Essays, Montaigne pens a paradoxical opening statement addressed to the readers of the volume who are not supposed to read it because it is a work of vanity: “Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore, Farewell.” If the self is locus of emptiness and wretchedness, then any attempt at a self-portrait is doomed already; the autobiographer or memoirist thinks more highly of herself than she should. And yet, Montaigne subtly invites the reader to peruse the volume through a strategy of dissuasion.

In The Unending Quest for Reform, Tunji Olaopa faces the charge of hubris head-on , and persuades us to plunge into a narrative that connects the self with a larger space of meaning, struggle and fulfilment. This is an even more difficult endeavor since it goes beyond the self-portrait that embroils the self in its own dynamics of maturation. On the contrary, a memoir like the The Unending Quest for Reform, like Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died, connects the self to non￾self, or to its Other. The autobiographer or the memoirist then invites the reader to weigh the significance of the self in relation to its other. Only those who have a strong sense of inner worth and  significance can ever achieve such a courageous level of self-ascription.

I think a reformer deserves his memoir or autobiography. I have read the late Professor Akinlawon Mabogunje’s autobiography — A Measure of Grace. It details not only birth, historical trajectories  and intellectual maturation, but also the agonies of a public servant eager to see some of his best ideas and insights inserted into the policy architecture of the Nigerian state. He met brick walls at every turn. In The Unending Quest for Reform, Olaopa typifies a more enduring courage to serve and confront the dysfunction of a system that had been rigged to be inefficient since independence.

The public service is not just another vocation. It embodies a double imperative. First, it is a service that transcends any consideration of self-interest. Within the service and its accountability dynamics, the self cannot be placed in contradistinction to what is required of it. The service is therefore a
selfless one that demands that the servant serves. Second public service is a service to public, the public. It therefore requires a different kind of spirit—public-spiritedness—that insists that the public  servant must bow to certain logic of service that bend the will of the public servant to the will of the citizens. The task of a public servant therefore becomes a very arduous one: she must bend the self to serve the others. However, serving others becomes very onerous when the system that enables the service is inefficient and dysfunctional. When Olaopa first confronted this dysfunctional system, his first human instinct was to flee. But he did not. This was where his scholarly instinct—to learn, to reflect, to research, to rethink, to reorganize—kicked in. And he had a background in Plato and a mentoring acquaintance in Professor  Ojetunji Aboyade to trim his fears and fuel his reform thinking.

The Unending Quest for Reform details the long trajectory that took an Aáwé boy to the Presidency and then the very height of public service status as a permanent secretary. But in each of the fifteen chapters that make up the memoir, you are compelled to encounter and reflect on how ideas and insights emerged from Olaopa’s interaction and engagement with intellectual and administrative forebears, and how both
the forebears and the ideas molded his own original philosophy of reform—with a huge dose of providential intervention.

While Plato’s Republic maps the boundaries of the ancient Athenian city-state and its utopic possibilities, Olaopa’s
The Unending Quest for Reform delineates the circumferences of a
dysfunctional public service, and how it could be rehabilitated within a comprehensive institutional and governance reform blueprint that took years to design, and even many more years to attempt mounting for the benefit of making Nigeria work better. This is where he joins the community of suffering that Mabogunje, and many others, once belonged. At every turn, the system itself frustrated all his well-being intentions and yearning.

Olaopa carries the burden of a man driven by God’s purpose. Or how else does one understand the passion that
drove and still drives him to dedicate his research and professional life to a system that seems too dense to allow self-examination? As an expert-insider, he had to face the fundamental significance of whether the public service can reform itself. That query, for Olaopa, could not have been just an academic exercise; he must have had to face the suspicions and stubborn resistance of those who could have considered him “too know” and obnoxious. There are ways by which a
debilitated system punishes those who would claim diagnostic knowledge. There are several means by which those who benefit from the status quo impede the progress of a reformer. And yet, Olaopa kept at this onerous task, even after retirement,with  a single-mindedness that belies any logical understanding.

It was not just Plato and philosophy that gave him inspiration. All through The Unending Quest for Reform, one sees him holding onto a deep understanding of the place and role of the divine in human understanding and trajectories. If God could save him from blindness, as he narrated, then he would dedicate his life to service, spiritual and institutional;
he would commit his expertise to Nigeria and her quest for a world class public service that will be able to transform the quality of life of Nigerians. He has not faltered in that commitment.

But we need to highlight the role of philosophy in Olaopa’s professional and intellectual maturation. Right from discovering Plato and the capacity of philosophy to reconstruct, Olaopa had
remained fixated on the potential of philosophy to both enlighten and enable. He had taken Plato’s Republic far more seriously than I have seen anywhere. The Republic gave him the basis
from which to reenact the possibility of reflecting on dysfunction and reconstructing the parameters for
utopia. While Plato’s Republic was entirely a thought experiment about what could have been, Olaopa’s philosophical, intellectual and administrative exertions were right within the context of an actually existing Nigerian state that combines what he calls “bureau-pathologies” and possibilities for greatness.

The Unending Quest for Reform is therefore  not only a paean to the existential exertions and Sisyphean achievements of the self, but also a testament to what reform can make possible for the transformation of the
Nigerian administrative entity. With the memoir, Olaopa is reaching out to
Nigerians, and especially fellow public servants and aspiring institutional and governance reformers,with a manual for technocratic action. The memoir bristles with pain and optimism about the ascent of a self from the obscurity of a small town in Oyo State to the convoluted
bureaucratic spaces of the Presidency, from a struggle to master political science and political theory at the University of Ibadan to the urgency of deploying a range of ideas and ideologies to the understanding and operational optimality of the public service system. In The Unending Quest for Reform, the self and the nation merge in a struggle for realization. And the denouement of that titanic struggle is a finale that is yet to happen. And we will know it when
it happens because that would be the end the reformer has been waiting for. With the new administration, may we not arrive at a tragedy to the high drama of hope and possibilities Olaopa’s memoir has treated us to.

Prof. Afolayan is the Head of Department of Philosophy, University of Ibadan

 

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Reflection on The Unending Quest for Reform, Tunji Olaopa’s Memoir

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Prof. Eghosa Osaghae

By Eghosa E. Osaghae
Intellectual autobiographies come as absorbing and engaging as other profound academic works tend to be. Professor Tunji Olaopa’s intellectual memoir is not different and certainly ranks as one of the more profoundly intellectual autobiographies to come out of Nigeria. The reflections on the nexuses among public policy, public administration, civil service and governance on the one hand, and how these can be transformed along the paths of the reforms that seek to address the pathologies of bureaucracy – or bureau-pathology as Professor Olaopa calls them – are done in the best traditions of rigorous scientific analysis, normative and empirical. And given the relative leanness of analytical and theoretical scholarship in the field of public administration in Nigeria and Africa, it is obvious that this book, even as an autobiography, has all that is required to be a major contribution to the discipline, especially on the subject of reforms, which is a central theme of the memoir.

From the story of his progression  through life as told in the memoir – from being a scholar-in-the-making since the
age of five, to earning the alias, Azikiwe, at the highest level of ‘-isms’ in secondary  school, to finally becoming an expert-insider in the federal civil service and professor at Lead City University, only a knowledgeable, visionary, and activist-reformer like Olaopa, with the zest of patriotism and nationalism has the qualifications and credibility to say the kinds of things he has said in this book. His premature and unexpected retirement from the federal civil service in 2015 seemed to have halted the leading roles Olaopa played in the complex arena of reforms; these were roles that his academic pursuits and engagements with The Commonwealth , The World Bank, the UN system, and reforms institutions and processes in Australia and South Africa,continental and global professional institutions, amongst others, prepared him for; but this book documents the hows and whats of those roles and sets a well-reasoned rationale and template for continued reforms. The concluding chapters of the book, which are addressed to the reforms the leadership expected of the Office of the Head of Service of the Federal Civil Service in particular, fill the gap of what might have been. That is, if the unexpected retirement – another
painful reminder of the insecurity of tenure that has plunged the civil service in Nigeria deeper into the recesses of instability, demotivation and corruption, did not happen.

Olaopa engages the more substantial and critical issues elicited by public servicee reforms including those that constitute formidable obstacles in highly perceptive ways. “The public service”, he writes, “was not a place where mere ideas are sufficient to achieve  significant transformation. Those ideas have to be immersed in the deep and dirty crevices of bureaucratic dead weights. As a public servant, it increasingly became clear to me that reading was not enough for the reformation of the public service. Ideas and knowledge had to be consciously adopted, creatively adapted, and deliberately owned and domesticated to achieve optimal results”. This was the lynchpin of reforms and transformations buoyed by Olaopa’s continuous research and development opportunities offered by the strategic positions he held especially in the Ministry of Education and the Office of the Head of Service. But the high expectations and ideals are easily brought down by the limits of realistic possibilities: “As an expert-insider”, he also writes, “I was equally confronted by a limitation: Can the civil service supervise its own reform? Can civil servants supervise the reform of their own institution?” Which all goes  back to perhaps the greatest puzzle faced by reforms and their drivers: “In a situation where administrative dynamics have already congealed, can we expect the publice servantsto oversee the reform of their institution? How can reforms be jumpstarted by the very people who have vested interests in operating the bureaucratic culture? The obvious answere seems negative. And experience has revealed that most reforms failed because they were undermined by vested interests”. This is the essence of ‘bureau-pathology’ – “a state of stagnancy in which the civil servants protect themselves against any attempt to reform the very system with in which they operate. In this terrible situation, reform becomes the exception  rather than the rule”. The pathology also leads to “too many people doing nothing, too many doing too little, and too few people doing too much”.

But these obstacles – and frustrations – which Olaopa experienced firsthand in hugeo tons thanks to the complexities, intrigues, treacheries and politics that climaxed with his premature retirement, do not diminish Olaopa’s conviction, enthusiasm and unending quest for reforms .The decision to set up the Ibadan School of Governance and Public Policy (ISGPP),take up the professorship at Lead City University, become a directing staff member at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, and this memoir (just in case the other platforms are necessary but not sufficient to actualise his vision) represent important milestones in this quest. Olaopa’s analysis also shows that the journey of reforms requires a lot more thanh the individual motivation; that motivation emanates from several other reinforcing anchors: expository reading, such as is found in his reading of Plato’s The Republic and other texts; the benefit of sound education and good peers, such as he encountered in Aawe, Olivet, and UI; the sheer boldness, such as is demonstrated in his forays into radical student unionism; the   strategic opportunities that come through postings such as those to MAMSER, Ministry of Education, Office of the Secretary of Government of the Federation and Head of Service; and, perhaps, most importantly, the mentoring, reassurances and confidence-building such as he had from Professors Ojetunji Aboyade and Akin Mabogunje (these two had the OPTICOM modelt that provided a foundation for participatory reforms), Professor Tunde Adeniran and many more.

Although Olaopa engages public service reforms in an intellectually robust and engaging manner, there are issues that he has either left out or not engaged sufficiently. One of these is the cultural and historical specificities of particular reform situations. Surely, reforms have not grown to the level of a science of universals. Is there a need to decolonise the civile service for example? Another is the omission of the age-long debate between generalists and specialists in public service. Is it possible that the decision to bring specialists into the core of the civil service in Nigeria – that led to the appointment of engineers, medical doctors andc accountants for example, as permanent secretaries – has created problems of a different kindf for the civil service? Thirdly, for all the points raised about a purpose-driven public service with substantial federal restructuring, it is a  little curious that very little consideration, if any,was given to the subnational spheres of the public service. Would the public service be trulyr reformed if the state and local government domains are not reformed? Should the federal public civil service be the federalist empire/colonial service?

Knowing Professor Olaopa as well as I do, I am sure that these issues will be taken up in his next volume on public servicee reforms– after all, the present volume is strictly a memoir and should not be read as an academic treatise, irrespective of all that I have tried to say.

Although the scholarly insights of Olaopa’s Unending Quest for Reform have the upper  hand in this foreword, the memoir is far more extensive and encompassing. It covers his historical progression and, in the process, the several lessons to be learnt from his interesting experiences and discussions on familyhood, marital relations, religion, the role of God in humanl lives, mysticism and human relations in their adversarial and friendly forms. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this memoir and digesting its deeper and very reflective lines. They show that Olaopa’s initial and continuous love for philosophy has crystallised into a way of life.

Professor Osaghae is the Director-General, Nigerian Institute of
International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos.

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