Ahmed Joda @ 80: My most distressing moment

Weekly Trust: Congratulations sir. You are 80 years old. How does it feel to be 80?  Ahmed Joda:  I think I have been 30 before. It’s not different being 79 and translating to 80. Actually, I normally would not have remembered my birthday, because I have never celebrated it. It’s because a party had been […]

Weekly Trust: Congratulations sir. You are 80 years old. How does it feel to be 80? 

Ahmed Joda:  I think I have been 30 before. It’s not different being 79 and translating to 80. Actually, I normally would not have remembered my birthday, because I have never celebrated it. It’s because a party had been organised, and as you heard, it was meant to be a complete surprise to me. The difference of this birthday has been the fact that it’s been celebrated at home.

What is the secret to a long life?

It’s a very difficult question to answer. You see, it depends on so many things for somebody to have a long life. I’m lucky to have reached this age considering that life expectancy in our country is about 40 years.

With all diseases that are prevalent in our country and with our medical condition, some of us have managed to beat all the odds. I think I’m lucky to have enjoyed reasonably good health throughout my life. I can recall that I have spent only five nights in hospital in my whole life. That happened when I was 17 years old and it was as a result of a medical examination.

I think we were being used as guinea pigs to try a new drug that was undergoing experimentation. One could have died from motor accident, from attack or from anything, but I think it’s the will of God and destiny that has given us the longevity that we are lucky to enjoy.

Sir, could you recall some exciting moments in your life?     

There must have been a lot of moments of joy for any person. I think I was very excited as a young person at the age of 14 to have been selected to go to the only secondary school in Northern Nigeria. I was very happy about that. I think I was also happy when I had my first child. Also, I have been really lucky in my career as I enjoyed promotions fairly rapidly sometimes. Those were the moments of joy.

Then, the coup d’état in 1966 was a very distressing point in my life. The outbreak of the civil war was traumatic. But at the end of it, there was no victimisation of people who reintegrated and I happened to be in the midst of it. That was very exciting and it gave us hope of a bright future to which we tried to work for.        

As you said, you had a very rich and fulfilling career in service; probably the epitome of it is what people call the era of the ‘Super Permanent Secretaries’. What do you think about those days when you were one of the Super Permanent Secretaries that people are referring to now?

Let me say that there was no time that I was officially or a set of people were officially called Super Permanent Secretaries. All permanent secretaries were virtually equal. They were only different by the dates of their appointments and the dates of their promotions.

Therefore, ‘Super Permanent Secretary’ really may be a complimentary appellation. But I think those who invented it never meant it to be so. It was probably meant to disparage the persons that were originally targeted. But as time went on, I think those who invented it lost their vision and then they identified three or four people, of whom I happened to be among, and called us Super Permanent Secretaries.

The only reason for that was because of our activities during the civil war. By virtue of our positions in the ministries we were assigned, we became more exposed than other Permanent Secretaries. I was in the Federal Ministry of Information and I was involved in having to speak for Nigeria at that time.

If you remember, it was military era. There were no politicians and we found ourselves making statements in different capitals of the world and also in Nigeria. We became a focal point. Foreigners who wanted to come and talk to people in Nigeria came to us and we encouraged them. We worked with them very closely. We got involved to the extent of going to war theatre to see where the war was being fought; taking people there, organising for the troops and in fact getting  beyond what we were supposed to be doing.

Of course, we got involved in the formulation of policies, writing the speeches of the Head of State and managing many different tasks. So it became not an official title but the perception of critics. That time, I personally did not feel that I was super anything. I did not feel I was doing more than anyone else. I did not feel that I was exercising power or authority beyond the definition of the DG or the responsibility of the permanent secretary.

But when I reviewed those events at the end of my public life, I began to feel that perhaps, without anybody intending it and without realising it, we were exercising power and authority beyond what was prescribed in our duties/responsibilities as Permanent Secretaries. In fact, we influenced policies and participated actively in decision-making.

Looking at the kind of reforms that have taken place in the public service up to recently when tenure was introduced for permanent secretaries, what will you say of the civil service of today?

You know the civil service is a permanent institution and the content of the work and responsibility of the civil service have to be dynamic. Society is not static. An acceptable practice in the First Republic could not continue into the military era.

To survive the civilian changes in governance, there are certain procedures, rules and regulations which guide every practice, whether it is medicine, journalism or commerce. People have to have standard procedures of practice. In the civil service, we had general orders and we had financial instructions.

These are no more than guidelines intended by its authors to be reviewed from time to time as the need arose. Now in our country, people perceive the civil service to be slow. They would like decisions to be taken in the way they are done in companies. They forget that Nigeria is not a company or a shareholder who works to earn profits, to show a healthy balance sheet and to declare dividends.  Nigeria is a country. Government is the organisation created by the country to manage its entire affairs.

In managing a country like Nigeria, something the Federal Government will do which is perfectly good for people in Western Nigeria may not be acceptable to people in Calabar or Sokoto or Borno. Therefore, consultations have to take place before what seems to be a good and intelligent idea will work. By consultations, you will realise that there are various ways to achieve your objectives.

Nowadays, you have public hearings, but then, we did not have public hearings, it was the civil service that made consultations. The cabinet and political process, whether in a military or civilian government, has a very slow and cumbersome process. If the National Assembly takes four, five or six months to approve a budget or a bill, there is nothing the civil service can do. They just have to wait….

In 1975, the late General Murtala Muhammed came and changed everything with immediate effect. That was extremely popular with the general public and press. But it also brought out a number of serious issues which were not contemplated by Murtala or anybody. The Federal Government sacked over 3000 people. The state governments also sacked people. The military and police were not left out. What he did was to get rid of the first eleven, second eleven and then bring the reserves to be on the national team. So they came back very slowly and gradually.

A lot of that can be attributed to what happened during the 1966 coup d’état, 1975 coup d’état and subsequent violent political changes in the country. We need to work hard to restore the lost glory. Nobody wants to go back to pre-1966.   But people have to sit down and work out what they want in 2010, 2012 or 2020.  

You practised journalism in the 50s. How did you find yourself in it and how was the profession then?

I was a trained agriculturist but I fell out with my bosses and resigned. When I resigned, I had no idea of where to go or what to do. But I knew an English man who was Chief Public Relations Officer of the government. I knew him as a schoolboy because he was coming to our school to teach us scouting.

I went to him and said look this is what happened. He asked, ‘What do we do now’, and I said I had no idea, so he said, ‘Well, I know you can write’. So he took me to Gaskiya Corporation and they happened to be looking for someone. The only thing I like about newspapers at that time was their sports column. I liked the style; I liked football and I liked the way they wrote it. So I was very keen.

After one year, I got scholarship to go and study journalism in England. When I came back, I went into broadcasting as News Editor. I worked there from 1956 to 1960, and then I was absorbed into the Ministry of Information. The rest is history.

As an addendum to that, you established the New Nigerian Newspaper. How will you score the performance of the outfit and do you think the objectives for which it was established have been achieved?

I was given the duty to see to the establishment of the New Nigerian newspaper and I was given twelve months to do it. This meant that we had to have the plot of land to build the company, put the equipment and get journalists and so on. But, of course, I had absolutely no idea on what it takes to establish a newspaper publishing company. The only thing is that I had practised journalism and I had been an editor in a broadcasting outfit.

So when I was given the assignment, I was lucky to realise that this was a job I could not do myself. So I slept over it, and the following day, I went to Sardauna and told him that for me to do this job, I needed experts and he said well, it was my business to go and get the experts. I was given free hand and I knew Charles Sharp who had been editor of the Nigerian Citizen.

I got permission to go and talk to him.

I talked to him and he agreed. So we worked together. I really assisted him to get government’s approval for a plot of land and to get contract awarded and so on. He did the rest. I did not work beyond that. I did not work for the newspaper. I was responsible for registering the company….Then there was the coup d’état of 1966. You know it [New Nigerian] started on the 1st of January, 1966 and the coup happened on the 16th of January [1966]. So it could not have realised its objectives, if those objectives were the objectives of the Premier of Northern Nigeria and the government of Northern Nigeria then.

After the 16th of January, we had a military government whose agenda was completely different. But the military didn’t say this is the policy of the New Nigerian. So we continued. But after the coup, I realised immediately that foreigners could not run the New Nigerian. Certainly, foreigners could not be the editors and journalists in the newspaper. So I decided personally that we had to change the editorial personnel. But we did not have people in the practice of journalism who could be editors immediately.

I also realised that you can’t train an editor in a very short time. The second decision I took was to go and get somebody who had never worked in any newspaper at all but who is educated, intelligent and sociable enough to work into that job immediately. But I had to explain myself so I went to the late Alhaji Ali Akilu who was our civil service head. I told him what I thought and he said he agreed.  I then said I needed to talk to two young people and they agreed to my recommendation. One was in Kaduna, one was in Lagos.

I went to talk to Adamu Ciroma who was in Lagos. I flew there in the evening and went to look for him. He happened to be at a party and I called him out of the party and told him the reason why I had come to him. I said this is what we want you to do, will you take it? He agreed and we left and looked for a hotel.

The following morning, I was in Kaduna. I called a meeting and we decided and agreed on the plan. I was very happy that he fitted into that very role because he did the rest of the job. He recruited some people and took over.

You were later given the chance to chair the National Communications Commission (NCC). What were the challenges?

The NCC was set up by law in 1999 but it was never allowed to function. The Minister made himself the Chairman of the Board and operated it virtually from his office. Nothing really happened because late in 2000 when we were appointed, the Federal Government had established a policy called ‘The National Policy on Telecommunication.’

They appointed a new Board and new Chief Executives and asked them to go ahead. So we took over. We had an office in Garki District with just about one or two engineers and two or three lawyers. I think we had staff strength of about 20 or 30. The first challenge was to create a body, to establish a cadre of professionals; engineers of various disciplines; professional lawyers, accountants and economists, among others and to work out the rules and regulations which will be required to run the organisation.

We had to find new offices from where to operate and begin to recruit the right kind of people who can do the job and to begin to regulate the entire industry. In addition to that, what was in the forefront of public mind was the introduction of General System of Mobile Communication (GSM). This was a task we had to face. We organised it and we gave ourselves less than 12 months to do everything.

Because government’s policy was very clear and precise and because we enjoyed the autonomy that the law gave us, the Minister did not interrupt our work and since the beginning, we have been taking decisions very fast till date. We have government’s approvals up to the President’s level. We got every one of our decisions approved within 24 hours.

You know that it can take months to get things out of government’s office. We didn’t take directive from government. We took our decisions and implemented them. Up to last year, we never had any of our decisions questioned by the Ministry or any sector of government. We have been challenged in court many times by different companies over decisions we have taken over the prices and tariffs.

When we set up the first and second tariff, we were taken to court and we won every case against state government and other parties. Last year, one of our decisions was overturned and it’s no longer in our hands because those affected are now in court, and in that particular instance, I think it may take another two or three years before the court disposes of the case. This means that a lot of things cannot happen.

You were part of the Eminent Elders who went to the National Assembly asking President Umaru Musa Yar’adua to transmit a letter to the federal lawmakers to enable the Vice President to act. We have this horrible stalemate in the country. Although you have spoken as part of the eminent persons, what are your other thoughts about how to get out of this situation that the country has found itself?

The law is there. We don’t seem to agree on what the Constitution says we should do. As an ordinary man, the law as I understand says that when the President for any reason will not be available to discharge all his responsibilities, this is what he should do [transmit letter to National Assembly]. But he has not done so. What is the reason that is preventing him from doing so? Is he not in a condition to be able to do so or is he unwilling to do so?

In that circumstance, the Constitution also provides what should be done because you can’t leave the country in this situation. So those responsible should act in accordance with the Constitution so that the country can continue to be and I think what the Eminent Persons have done is to ask those responsible, that is, the President, the Vice President and the Federal Executive Council to take the decision that is best for the country at this time.

Any failure on their behalf, the legislative arm of the government, that is, President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives should take the matter up in the National Assembly and try to resolve it.