By Toyin Falola

One of the tenets of a democratic society is the assurance of the freedom of speech and expression for its citizens. This includes the right to speak and criticize to ensure that society does not derail in upholding its values. The test of democracy is not at the point of comfortable tolerance of these rights but in allowing everyone to, even at the greatest inconvenience, manifest the utmost freedom granted to them by law and nature.

Criticism is an innate attitude. Humans criticize others and themselves, either when they achieve something or when they disagree with an act. It is not for us to decide but for us to tolerate. But would one be allowed to act and enjoy those rights perpetually without any form of constraint? When does a right become a burden or an infringement on the same or other rights enjoyed by others? Could the concept of a free person truly mean freedom in all ramifications? Would this not put others in bondage, too? While these rights abound, they are qualified by the right of others to protect their dignity, reputation, and the hard work they have built over decades.

I see the brawl between Aare Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi as the clash of these two rights – the former defending dignity and reputation and the latter exercising the freedom of speech and criticism. Farotimi has built a reputation as a respected activist, author, and social commentator, even more so than as a lawyer. His views on equity, justice, and the actual enjoyment of human rights have recently topped the voices of freedom in the country. He has waged war against corruption and inequalities, often dragging inefficient and corrupt politicians for public evaluation. As an activist, Farotimi has championed causes aimed at encouraging citizens to believe in a promising future for the country, as he often calls for the dismantling of the very foundations on which contemporary Nigeria is built.

However, one thing is fundamental about Farotimi: he does not hold back or fear – he speaks out, regardless of who is affected. Chief Afe Babalola is a famous Nigerian who represents the echelon of success in many endeavours. He has climbed up the professional and social ladder to the point that achieving half of his accomplishments would be enough to say an individual has led a good life and to write such a person’s name in history. Babalola is a foremost educationalist, legal practitioner, and philanthropist, among other worthy achievements. Having built a reputation over 70 years of active service, business, and engagements, he is one of those whom we could conclusively say has a name to protect and would go to great lengths to do so.

It is within Farotimi’s right to make accusations based on facts he knows and can prove. The hallmark of freedom guarantees that he is afforded the right to express himself if his claims are based on verifiable facts. Farotimi makes some accusations in his book, and I am convinced that he is not a man who would make unfounded propositions against someone of Babalola’s status, so I expect him to prove his claims. Likewise, Babalola has the right to preserve and defend his rights and reputation. I am convinced that many of those who have condemned his actions would have gone far and beyond to protect their accomplishments, just as he has allegedly done.

Well, this is not a piece to decide who is right or who is overreacting. While clashes often arise from the exercise of these rights, as is common in many cases, societal institutions like the Nigerian Police are charged with the duty of ensuring orderliness. It is the legal and professional duty of the Nigerian Police and other law enforcement agents to ensure everyone’s equal standing and fair hearing in the prosecution of matters, with the goal of ensuring that justice is served. The aim of the law is not to persecute but to prosecute offenders, yet the Farotimi saga suggests that the Police are standing in the ease of the former rather than the latter. I mean, it has been reported that the Nigerian Police, with remarkable agility, tracked Farotimi from Ekiti State to Lagos to effect his arrest.

One of the common complaints and excuses the Nigerian Police often give victims of crimes and alleged crimes is that the Force lacks the facilities and means to effect arrests and investigate troubling situations. They claim a lack of vehicles or even money to fuel them. These excuses have allowed countless dangerous criminals to escape justice. What about the criminal herdsmen who disturb people’s farms and livelihoods yet remain at large? What about the hardened criminals who do not look one in the face twice before ending it all? The security challenges on highways and other problems militating against the peace of the nation? Is it that the Police now feel the headache more than the owner of the head, or is their commitment to the protection of a statesman suddenly becoming a matter of national interest?

The Police are charged with the duty of maintaining law and order while protecting the interests of the citizens. However, their actions in this case seem to align with an agenda to suppress the freedom of expression, a perennial complaint of the citizens. With this duty to maintain order comes the responsibility to investigate without bias to give both the victim and the defendant equal playing grounds. Still, they have acted with such conviction of guilt and are ready to take Farotimi to the slaughter.

The Nigerian Police’s reaction only reinforces the people’s fear of the Force being used to pursue personal interests. What immediate benefit would the urgent and aggressive prosecution of Farotimi bring, compared to the already many pressing issues the Police are faced with? It only allows the citizens to suspect foul play. Do not get me wrong: my position is not that Farotimi should not be tried for any suspicion of criminal infractions, but he should be prosecuted, not persecuted in the way the Nigerian Police have handled the matter.

Remanding Farotimi is an unnecessary and apparent misuse of state power, seemingly aimed at punishing a “child” for insulting an elder. The charges against him do not warrant that the accused be incarcerated while an investigation is done. The Nigerian Police have granted administrative bail to people who have committed more serious crimes. Farotimi is a well-known public figure with an office, family, and other responsibilities attributable to him, which should guarantee his responsiveness.It is now clear that when there is enough motivation and interest in a case, the Police will act accordingly and within the required time. This highlights the need for greater accountability and reform within the Nigerian Police. The Nigerian Police must evolve beyond being mere instruments in the hands of the powerful. They must prosecute when the state is offended, not to persecute when private interests are affected. Farotimi has been taught an unnecessary lesson, but the joke is still being broadcast to the Nigerian Police!

PS: This piece was written at Gombe State University, Gombe, on December 10, 2024. I appreciate the management of the university for allowing me to use their space.

By Toyin Falola

The spread of knowledge in human history owes its existential success to the efforts of daring individuals who are categorized as walking libraries. These individuals are themselves a pastiche of different intellectual resources acquired during their interactions with people around them and the educational institutions available in their environment. Dr. Michael Oladejo Afolayan comes readily as an instance of this description in that his journey into academic stardom is littered with the experiences captured in the above introduction. Among other things, he was raised under the tutelage of prodigious individuals with solid native intelligence whose method of knowledge transmission differs completely from what is obtained elsewhere. Their stock-in-trade of knowledge transfer is to expose an individual to practical exercises and experiences so that they can activate their heuristic potential and discover things for themselves. To that extent, they can assimilate knowledge beyond the confines of their immediate borders. Education sticks to their head because they have been groomed to understand that knowledge is acquired through observation and, more importantly, with immersion in the values of their world and the world around them. Therefore, when you come across Yorùbá people, and by extension Africans generally, with sound knowledge of operations of social structures, that comes from their direct observations of their immediate family, especially in a way that their affairs are organized when they were growing up. The case of Michael Oladejo Afolayan is evidence of this transformation, and that explains why he remains an important icon for using his intelligence to transform the world.

Afolayan’s journey in his native environment helps to expose him to the fecundity of Yoruba traditions, especially in terms of how they organize their social activities. Among other things, this knowledge is revealed from his insightful publication, Fate of Our Mothers: The Collected Memories of An African Village Boy. In this memoir, I am fascinated by the knowledge of gender politics, as has been the practice among the Yorùbá people, which has been transferred to him by his people. He makes very profound clarification in the book to correct the wrong notions that one can universalize people’s experiences and impose on them modalities for which they would organize their cultural events and realities. This is illustrated in how he explains the conditions of the Yoruba women in their pre-capitalist history. African mothers have been an integral voice in shaping the world of their people through their participation and contributions in the affairs that concern the collective community. Rather than being sidelined by their male counterparts or being excessively dominated by them, Afolayan shows how they have made very impressive leaps to regulate the activities of their surroundings. For illustration, as he points out, an average Yorùbá woman in the environment where Afolayan was raised as a child is a custodian of social and economic institutions. Through their active participation in the economic affairs of their society, they wield the authority to shape how their world would be carved. They are, therefore, not passive stakeholders in the development of Yorùbá society. As custodians of the economic spectrum of their institutions, women could determine their domestic politics and socialization process as they have sufficient power to oversee their aspirations.

This native intelligence plants in the minds of everyone who has been raised in that society the understanding that mothers are not disposable materials that can be reduced to an article of satisfaction for their male counterparts. Instead, they are stakeholders and have the power to shape what occurs in their environment. Afolayan’s familiarity with such an area enables him to begin to understand the reason for the socialization process in society. With mothers in charge of economic power and also simultaneously controlling the domestic affairs of their society, they have the soft power to raise children in particular ways. The mothers relate with their children amidst the responsibility to improve themselves so that they can remain in an exalted position. This knowledge, therefore, helps to reproduce the thoughts of fairness and transparency in running the social and political affairs of the people. Afolayan admits that the remembrance of such an experience brings nostalgia, but it nevertheless helps him to understand that the place of women in Africa is central to social development. They were not to be considered articles of enjoyment for their counterparts on the assumption that they were weak, as perceived in some other civilizations.

As a young boy developing in an African village, it becomes apparent that he belonged to everyone in the community. Among the Yorùbá, the upbringing of children is collective, which gives people of parental age the freedom to intervene in issues affecting children other than their own. This way, they could collectively build a social group that is resilient and adaptive. But there is more.
Afolayan published a book in 2023, which he titled Fifty Children That Played Together for Fifty Years: Thinking about My Classmates. You don’t need Orunmila’s intelligence to understand the motivations behind his intellectual adventure in this book. The inspiration for the book is drawn from the popular Yorùbá axiom that “twenty children cannot be together for twenty years”. It remains apparent that the saying comes from the understanding that humans are meant to toe different paths in their process of self-realization or discovery. Life has been programmed to come with numerous experiences that people cannot escape their evolutionary mandate, which often necessitates that they take different directions in their course of development. Between the ages of 0 and 20, youths are bound to encounter difficult moments that compel them to make decisions about their life direction. As a result of that, they would be faced with the temptation to take lines and roads that are sometimes unpopular. But this does not undercut the fact that people who make conscious efforts towards strengthening bonds are only investing in good relationships. The sarcasm in his title is easily noticed in how he and his group of friends have been able to keep going for half a century. This speaks to the deliberate investment of time and other resources in their engagements so that they would not be distracted by the issues of life. I particularly derive from this book the knowledge that when humans consciously commit themselves to indulgences, they have the intention to improve the lives of others.

Apart from being an established academic, Afolayan’s contributions to humanity cannot be overemphasized. His profile, in this respect, deserves accolades. This prodigious academic has single-handedly organized different workshops for people to benefit from. In the United States of America, he conducted many of these community services that have become central to the improvement of educational engagements in various places. In addition to this, Afolayan has spearheaded community development programs that are geared towards the rehabilitation of people of different backgrounds. This is informed by his ceaseless commitment to anything that would bring progress to human life. He understands that people have unique experiences, and before they can become useful to themselves, there is a need to transform them into something better. To achieve this, they must invest in anything crucial to their growth. In every dimension of his involvement, one thing stands out: the provision of quality resources, mostly intellectual and financial, to the point that they would have an immeasurable impact on a target audience. He has been very valuable in the diaspora and remains constant in his recognition of his homeland. That way, people are continually tapping into his ideas because he represents a dynamic figure whose engagement and activities are worthy of emulation.

What more can reveal how important he has been to the global academic network than the recognition he has had in the profession of teaching? This great man has won numerous scholarship awards from well-established foundations to continue to carry out research engagements that would shed more light on the world. He is the winner of the 2021 J. A. Atanda Best Essay on the Yoruba, which means that he has always been someone with quality intellect who does not compromise on quality for whatever reason. More than one would imagine, he has become very important to the lives of many for whom he has given the opportunity to rise. He is a contributor to the course of humanitarian good. He has made candid donations where necessary to forward his investment in the betterment of society. Oladejo Afolayan has a good working relationship with people because he believes that everyone has latent values that they can share if we can provide them the atmosphere to do so.

Happy 70th birthday.

By Tunji Olaopa

In preparation for his inauguration as the 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump has commenced the process of choosing a cabinet that will assist him in the onerous task of governance. Being a very controversial figure himself, Trump’s many appointments are already setting the public sphere on fire. From Marco Rubio (for secretary of state) to Pam Bondi (for attorney general), and from Pete Hegseth (for defense secretary) to John Ratcliffe (for CIA director). One of the most controversial of the cabinet pick, however, is the choice of billionaire Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy for the post of leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Elon Musk is as controversial as Donald Trump. The combination of both of them was a handful during the presidential election these past few weeks. Musk was so invested in the possible election of Donald Trump that he offered a $1m a day giveaway for voters in critical swing states. And then Trump won the election, and now Elon Musk has got a cabinet position. This is not just a role that Elon Musk is already well suited for given his leadership of a private business enterprise and many years of business leadership. It is also one he has been angling for since Trump won the Republican nomination for president.

In appointing him, Donald Trump said that the task for Musk and Ramaswamy will be to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.” And this is one responsibility that Elon Musk is rearing to step into. In line with the critical restructure that he brought to Twitter (now X), he has once said recently that he strongly believed that the US government’s budget is capable of being cut by $2trillion out of about $6.5trillion. And that a number of government employees and departments can also be significantly reduced.

Donald Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk, his vision of government efficiency and Musk’s willingness to accept the task all have historical antecedents, especially in the emergence of managerialism as the framework for reconstituting bureaucratic efficiency and productivity. Public administration all across the world is now forced to operate in what has been called VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—world that revolved around the idea of polycrisis. A polycrisis defines a situation in which several crises converge at the same time and in ways in which the impact they generate together outweighs their impact individually. Within such a context, public administration must necessarily also adapt to the emerging context of crisis and difficulties. The implication is that the old and traditional Weberian idea of the bureaucracy has become too inflexible and outdated as an administrative means for getting government business done effectively and efficiently in the quest for democratic service delivery to the citizens.

In its Nigerian incarnation, the inherited Weberian bureaucratic model rides on a one-model-fits-all service-wide standard operating framework encoded in the General Order (GO) that we now call the Public Service Rule (PSR). The old Weberian—“I-am-directed”—administrative tradition is founded on an underlying theoretical framework that has been aptly called Theory X. This framework has three propositional dynamics underlying it as the basis for understanding how the bureaucracy works. One, it conceives management as involving the deployment of people, material and money in order to facilitate particular economic objectives. Two, organizational objectives require the control and motivation of people. Three, it assumes that without a strict organizational regimen to put employees in check, humans are usually unproductive and resistant to organizational protocols.

We are able to therefore exhume a very gloomy understanding of human nature that perceives an average employee as being (a) indolent by nature, (b) lacking in ambition and motivation, (c) naturally egoistic and therefore set to work contrary to organizational requirements, (d) naturally resistant to change, especially those that antagonize selfish desires, and (e) naturally deceivable. Given these assumptions, organizational goals can only be achieved if the discerning manager employs very strong “command and control” tactic in getting his indolent employees to achieve the set targets and objectives. It is easy to see how this Douglas McGregor Theory X of administrative structure has the capacity to evolve into a monolithic and bureaucratic culture that breeds passive subordinates who are not eager to deploy their creative and entrepreneurial energies to further organizational objectives. This Weberian structure required from civil servants the requisite characteristics of anonymity, neutrality and impartiality, and an overall profile circumscribed by efficiency, effectiveness, integrity, accountability, responsiveness, representativeness, loyalty, equity, fairness, and so on. However, it is a system that is essentially hierarchical, cumbersome and acutely bureaucratic to effectively fulfil the mandate of good governance.

With the managerial revolution, the public service is compelled to adapt to a new normal that is motivated first by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic struck most governments and their public administration dynamics at the critical service delivery point. Aside from the regulatory and policy functions, service delivery is the mechanism that connects or disconnects the governments from the well-being of their citizens. And the tragedy of the pandemic is that it caught the entire world at varying administrative stages and phases of the normal. This is even worse for the third world countries, and Africa especially. The significance of the pandemic is that it stipulates several initiatives that public administration must confront in order not to ever be caught napping again. These initiatives must however ride on the existing new public management (NPM) framework that delivers efficiency through new managerial developments that, for instance, leverages new digital technologies, artificial intelligences and open government initiatives to deliver fast, economic, flexible and efficient service delivery to the citizens.

The new normal for public administration involves the imperative of administrative new thinking. The idea of new thinking is conditioned by a reform program that is strategic. In other words, new thinking for any organization or institution combines strategic thinking and strategic planning to be able to face the future. It is this strategic thinking that allows an institution like the public service to rethink and reengineer its modus operandi and business model to become better. And this new thinking framework is backstopped by strategic decision-making that builds on various developments in decision science.

Decision science has become a critical field that has integrated cognate developments from artificial intelligence, organizational psychology, systems thinking, machine learning, probabilistic modeling, scenario analysis, big data analytics, and many more to become a key area that the public service must buy into to push forward its policy intelligence that strengthens decision-making. Modern policy making that has taken cognizance of decision science will most likely possess nine fundamental features: (i) forward-looking; (ii) outward-looking; (iii) innovative, flexible and creative; (iv) evidence-based; (v) evaluation; (vi) review; (vii) joined-up; (viii) inclusive; and (ix) learned lessons.

Thus, it becomes strategic for Donald Trump to want to shake up the US bureaucratic processes in order to facilitate government efficiency. He is simply toeing the path taken by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s when she strategically appointed Lord Derek Rayner, the Chairman and CEO of Marks and Spencer, to put in place a rigorous managerial and capability review of the MDAs at Whitehall. Much earlier after the Second World War, Japan deployed the Keiretsu principle that brought the organized private sector—manufacturers, suppliers, bankers, industries and so on—around a unique dynamic of economic cooperation, further strengthened by the introduction of experts with deep understanding of the relationship between economic growth, development, productivity and performance. And the private sector expertise of the American management consultant, W. Edward Deming, was contracted in the bid to introduce and deploy the idea of quality management that led to: (a) Better design of products to improve service; (b) Higher level of uniform product quality; (c) Improvement of product testing in the workplace and in research centres; and (d) Greater sales through global markets.

No matter the disapproval that attends Donald Trump’s governance capacity, one cannot quarrel with the significance and prospect of the dealing with the cost of governance in ways that accentuate government efficiency. If Elon Musk is able, as he claims, cut $2trillion from a $6.5trillion government budget, that is already a huge success in terms of the reduction of the cost of governance. This, for me, is one huge lesson for the Nigerian government and the fundamental challenge of the cost of governance and the dearth of a waste management strategy for achieving efficiency in performance and productivity. The transformation of the productivity profile of the Nigerian economy is the most critical premise that recommends the audacious institutional reform of the public service. And the reform initiatives will involve critical transformation of the civil service commission, the industrial labour law, the pay and compensation dynamics, and also the trimming of the workforce as a means of undermining the cost of governance burden.

The Oronsaye Committee on the Restructuring and Rationalization of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies still remains a crucial first condition in getting the situation right in terms of a critical restructuring of government efficiency, the same way Donald Trump has fingered Elon Musk as the key personality to weed out inefficiency in government productivity and service delivery. All in all, it might not be who sits at the helm of government affairs but what such a person is able to achieve to alleviate the well-being of the citizens.

Prof. Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja , and Professor of Public Administration.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com