My esteemed friend and mentor, Dr Tunji Olaopa, one of Nigeria’s most brilliant public intellectuals, has just been appointed to the distinguished rank of professor of public administration at Lead City University, Ibadan, Oyo State. This elevation, which comes three years after the end of his illustrious career in the Nigerian civil service, spanning nearly three decades, will see Olaopa returning to the classroom, not as a student, but in a professorial capacity in which he is expected to stimulate critical thinking while also imparting his innovative ideas in public governance scholarship to his students.
Were it to be in one of America’s top colleges, Olaopa would have been conferred with the title of ‘Professor of Practice’ in Public Administration, an academic honour reserved for a select group of scholars who combine exceptional intellectual accomplishments with high level real-world experience in their chosen careers. Nonetheless, this appointment by LCU is a testament to more than two decades of Olaopa’s prodigious contributions to public education and nation building in Nigeria.
My first encounter with him was in 2013 and it was on the pages of four Nigerian national dailies – Thisday, The Guardian, Daily Trust, and Leadership – where he regularly churned out scholarly articles to address critical issues in public administration and management, education, and national development. At this time, he was serving as permanent secretary in the Federal Ministry of Communications Technology, being the fifth post he was superintending in that capacity, between 2010 when he was first appointed as permanent secretary and 2015 when he retired from the federal civil service. Within a space of five years, he had served consecutively as permanent secretary in the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation, State House, Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity, and Federal Ministry of Youth Development, before ending at the Federal Ministry of Communications Technology. Despite his enormous responsibilities, he still maintained his columns.
I finally met him in person later in 2013 at a public discourse on good governance organised by The Kukah Centre, a public policy think-tank, in Abuja. Bishop Kukah was the one who introduced me to Olaopa. Until then I had only maintained contact with this prodigious intellect by email and telephone. After our first meeting, I began to follow his academic and intellectual engagements with near keen mindedness. Reading his brilliant commentaries on national issues in the dailies always left me wondering how a senior civil servant with immense responsibilities could still have the time to produce such intellectual masterpieces. I concluded that there must be something about what Chinua Achebe calls “commitment” running through Olaopa’s mind.
In his stimulating memoir, There Was a Country, Achebe asserts that, “it is impossible to write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment, some kind of message, some kind of protest.” Achebe’s idea of commitment is a moral imperative to put one’s literary and scholastic gifts at the service of nation building, while his idea of protest is dictated by the decadent state of much of postcolonial African society at the time when he cut his literary teeth in the public domain. For Achebe, every writer is expected to take this postcolonial disposition into consideration, with the state of health of his society dictating the style of his writing: “if a society is ill, the writer has a responsibility to point it out. If a society is healthier, the writer’s job is different,” Achebe states.
It seems to me that it was on the basis of Achebe’s wise counsel that he chiselled the orientation of his public intellectual engagements, which was tailored to “protest” against the bureaucratic inertia and decadence in Nigeria’s civil service after a vicious legacy of military bastardisation. Thus, Olaopa’s overriding desire was to see progressive leaps in the overall performance of the nation’s civil service in line with global best practices in a modern political economy. Even though he was operating within the confines of a decadent environment suffused with the politics of lamentation about poor and inefficient public service delivery, he cut out for himself a different path. Instead of joining the bandwagon of artisans of complaints, he chose to rise above the suffocation of the moment. By wielding the radical cudgel of scholarship, he became an active change agent and a catalyst in Nigeria’s civil service transformation. He clearly understood the fundamental role of the intellectual in nation building and fashioned his art in response to this arduous task.
In his preface to his book, The Labour of Our Heroes (2016), this is how Olaopa conceptualised his intellectual mission: “When I began writing in the public sphere, I had just one objective – to critically highlight those issues that I consider germane in our collective attempt at coming to terms with the objective existence of Nigeria.” In this way, he shows the remarkable commitment that runs through not just his writings but also his entire civil service career, namely, heeding the summons of the first stanza of our national anthem, “Arise o compatriot, Nigeria’s call obey. To serve our fatherland, with love and strength and faith.”
Born on 20 December 1959 at Awe in the Afijio Local Government Area of Oyo State, Olaopa studied at the premier University of Ibadan obtaining a BA in Politics in 1984 and an MA in Political Theories in 1987. When he entered the Nigerian civil service in 1988 in Lagos, he was already well groomed intellectually to understand the critical role of the civil service as the engine of national development.
With this new knowledge, he returned to the civil service with new zeal and new commitment to combine scholarship and the strength of ideas in the context of his professional career. He set again for himself the task of pulling up Nigeria’s civil service by the bootstraps so as to reposition, re-engineer, rebuild, and transform it for world-class performance in the modern knowledge economy. He planned to achieve this ambitious task in three ways. First, through the generation of serious intellectual conversation on critical issues and challenges facing the Nigerian civil service and governance space and how these issues are to be resolved. These conversations took place through his newspaper commentaries on national issues, essays in academic journals, critical monographs, and lectures at classrooms, boardrooms, seminars, and conferences.
The second way he set out to achieve his mission was by putting his vast breadth of knowledge and expertise at the service of the nation through his civil service career so as to contribute his own quota to national development. He discharged his duties in the various offices and posts he served with high diligence and never turned down any task assigned to him that was geared towards the good of the nation.
The third way that he set out to achieve his mission in the civil service coincides with his insider understanding of the dynamics of our national development project, and the role of the civil service in the actualisation of that development agenda. This led him to intervene through well-researched published books. In this area, Olaopa’s scholarship spans a wide range of concerns such as: civil service reforms, public administration and management, politics, leadership and good governance, and the role of education and educational institutions in improving Nigeria’s public sector efficiency and performance.
After his civil service career during which he gave birth to about a dozen books that were a crystallisation of his innovative ideas on public sector reforms, he took his patriotic commitment to scholarship and nation building further and set up the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy. The school is devoted to cutting-edge research and scholarship in government, public policy, public administration, and human resource development in Nigeria.
Ojeifo is a priest of the Catholic Archdiocese of Abuja
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