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A COURAGEOUS AND FEARLESS ADMINISTRATOR: A Tribute to Ahmed Joda

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A COURAGEOUS AND FEARLESS ADMINISTRATOR: A Tribute to Ahmed Joda

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Dr. Kayode Fayemi, CON

One of the most serious consequences of our long history of military coups is the widespread skepticism about public sector leadership and politicization of the civil service that has been seeded into the national psyche. It is the popular belief that the civil service has long lost its lustre and all its practitioners have become carrots of patronage. And yet even if many public servants on our shores have earned well-deserved reputations for dishonesty and dishonour, painting the entire civil service with such sordid colours, is an unfair generalization. There are still honourable men and women of principle and competence in the civil service. One of such exemplars was administrator Mr. Ahmed Joda who passed away on August 13, 2021.

Joda was one of the best and brightest civil servants with compelling character in the post-civil war era. He belonged to the early generations of public servants who placed greater emphasis on competence over charisma, substance over style, and results over rhetoric, which augurs well for productivity and sustainability. They bequeathed to succeeding generations the tradition they equally inherited from their forebears— our obsession with the unity of the Nigerian people, quest for institution building, insistence on speaking truth to power, and pursuit of peace and progress.

I was privileged to know him and saw what drove his conviction when I served as the Chairman of the Third National Convention Planning Committee/ Presidential Primaries in 2014 and the Director, Policy Research and Strategy Directorate of the APC Presidential Campaign in 2015. It was here that I encountered and forged a much treasured friendship with Mr. Ahmed Joda. I found him to be a pleasantly personable, deeply religious, humble and thoughtful individual, who was fiercely committed to a progressive and just nation. He tackled his assignment with all his immense cerebral, diplomacy, and moral gifts as Chairman of the 18-member transition committee, appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari to liaise with the past administration to ensure smooth hand-over/take-off, and make policy recommendations to guide the present government. He was a good listener who respected the opinion of others, regardless of differing political and religious backgrounds. At his age, he was very agile as he traversed the length and breadth of the country to speak on the need for conciliatory spirit sharpened by empathy and lasting peace through fair accounting, justice and healing.

Born in Yola, Adamawa State, on February 13, 1930, Joda attended Yola Elementary School and Yola Middle School before proceeding to Barewa College, Zaria from 1945 to 1948. He had a brief stint working with Moor Plantation in Ibadan before venturing into journalism at Gaskiya Corporation, Zaria. He departed to Pitmans College, London to further his education in journalism from 1954 to 1956. Upon completion of his study, he returned to work with the Nigerian Broadcasting Service as a correspondent from 1956 to 1960. He rose to the position of Chief Information Officer with the Northern regional government, and later as Permanent Secretary from 1962 to 1967.

Sequel to the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War in 1967, Joda was seconded to the Federal Civil Service as a Permanent Secretary serving in the federal ministries of Information, Education and Industries. Historians place the contributions of the civil service from 1966 to 1975 when the nation fought a civil war and steered itself towards recovery and reconstruction as remarkable. It was at this time that Joda alongside Philip Asiodu, Liman Ciroma, Ibrahim Damcida, Alison Ayida and a few others earned the sobriquet “super Permanent Secretaries” by which they became famously known during the administration of General Yakubu Gowon. This was in regard to their prowess, successes, and strategic role in driving the public service as the engine of governance and the fulcrum of policy implementation during the darkest period of our nation’s history. In the absence of ministers and with the military leaders as opposing protagonists, it fell on the leaders of the federal civil service to articulate and defend the ideal of federal unity. Though Joda’s visible activism and advocacy in favour of the federal union gave him a higher profile than he had ever enjoyed, and in the national consciousness, he remained an impartial patriot seeking to serve the government of the day to the best of his abilities and preserving a social order threatened by centrifugal tensions.

Yet beneath the patina of fabricated legend lay the man Joda himself, an administrator and media professional who was competent, courageous and exceptional at his job. He won the respect and admiration of both his colleagues and superiors for his reputation and moral stature to act as an arbiter during a time of national distress and uncertainty. He retired in 1978 and ventured into private business where he served as chairman and board member of various companies in Nigeria. As an institution builder, he was instrumental to the growth of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Pastoral Resolve (PARE), SCOA Nigeria PLC, Chagoury Group, Flour Mills of Nigeria PLC, and the Nigerian LNG Limited (NLNG). Joda was never cynical in his pursuit of change and transformation. He demonstrated throughout his career a broad outline for extricating ourselves from the present transactional politics to a future of transformational ethos. He has shown in his imitable way that it is possible to develop the delivery capacity within public and private service to take a proposal and translate from a bright idea into a truly tangibly transformative policy with material consequences.

Much has been said about the state of public sector leadership in Nigeria and the need to restore a missionary sense of purpose to the public service; to get civil servants to see their work in sacramental terms at the altar of a transcendent purpose. From the trajectory of Ahmed Joda, it is clear that Nigeria worked when the civil service worked. The country’s unfortunate reputation as a place where nothing works corresponds with the era of the civil service’s decline. We must therefore rediscover and recapture the role of the civil service as the creative hub of policy-making and implementation, the brains thrust of government and the custodian of institutional memory.

The greatest tribute we can pay this Nigerian exemplar is to ensure that the civil service is de-politicized and run as a meritocracy. This is especially acute in a hyper-politicized climate like ours. Given the tone of politics, we require a corps of bureaucrats single-mindedly dedicated to achieving policy objectives to keep governance focused on the real issues of development. For Ahmed Joda, only a public service populated and led by our best and brightest can justly and efficiently provide the public goods such as education, healthcare and housing that will achieve the developmental aspirations of our people. His passage marks the departure of one of the great voices of reason, frugality and sobriety in our society, arguably at a time when the polity needs these traits the most. We can only hope that inspired by his example, our generation and the ones behind us will rise in his stead.

May his soul rest in perfect peace.