So often, when themes like the dearth of transparency, corruption and the abuse of power are the subject of public discourse, the context is usually the political domain. We politicians are the scapegoats for all that is wrong in our country and are thought to be the most afflicted by such deficiencies. As a political operative myself, I can certainly relate to this. The conversation on leadership, for example, tends inevitably to focus on political leadership as though this is the only type of leadership that matters or exists.
The theme of today’s lecture therefore offers an opportunity to discuss a dimension of leadership that is rarely given as much prominence as it deserves, but which has become increasingly vital and strategic. Of course, political leadership remains both necessary and important; hence this paper will focus on the nexus between Corporate Governance and Public Sector Leadership as we explore progressive ideas for stimulating national growth and development.
According to James McRitichie corporate governance is most often viewed as both the structure and the relationships which determine corporate direction and performance. The board of directors is typically central to corporate governance. Its relationship to the other primary participants, typically shareholders and management, is critical. Additional participants include employees, customers, suppliers, and creditors. The corporate governance framework also depends on the legal, regulatory, institutional and ethical environment of the community. Whereas the 20th century might be viewed as the age of management, the early 21st century has been predicted to be more focused on governance. Both terms address control of corporations but governance has always required an examination of underlying purpose and legitimacy._
The theme that emerges from present-day definitions is that in the 21st century, corporations are no longer perceived and narrowly defined as solely commercial entities. They are now recognized for their wide-ranging impact on society, politics, and indeed on everyday life. More than ever before there is greater interest in how corporations are run. As Robert A.G. Monks and Nell Minow wrote in their book, ‘Power and Accountability’, "Corporations determine far more than any other institution the air we breathe, the quality of the water we drink, even where we live. Yet they are not accountable to anyone." _
Corporations are no longer simply evaluated as being able profit-making institutions but as corporate citizens with broader responsibilities to the society at large. Contemporary perspectives on Corporate Governance demand accountability to not just shareholders and management but the entire society.
The Crisis of Corporate Governance in the Early 2000s
The subject of corporate governance has become particularly salient since the beginning of the 21st century when a gale of scandals swept across Wall Street, ravaging several American corporations and resulting in the high profile collapses of establishments such as Tyco, Enron and WorldCom due to financial fraud. The scandal also claimed the famed accounting firm Arthur Andersen which was auditor to both Enron and WorldCom and was indicted for complicity in the fraud perpetrated by both corporations. The financial costs of these frauds were astronomical. Enron’s stock collapse wiped out $67 billion in shareholder wealth while the nosedive of WorldCom’s shares cost investors over $175 billion – nearly three times the value of what was lost in the implosion of Enron._
In the wake of the scandals in Enron, Tyco and WorldCom, there was widespread recognition that these events had badly shaken investor confidence in the integrity of financial statements and that an overhaul of regulatory standards was required. In 2002, the U.S. congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to protect investors from the possibility of fraudulent accounting by corporations. The act mandates strict reforms to improve financial disclosure and prevent accounting fraud._ It also required chief executive officers and chief financial officers to certify at regular intervals that both their reports and their financial statements contained no untruths and omit no material facts. More recently, just this year, we have witnessed the scandal in Volkswagen seriously damage the reputation of one of the world’s most iconic carmakers and lead to the resignation of its leadership.
Nigeria has also had its own share of corporate governance scandals. During the 1990s, the then newly liberalized banking sector became a theatre of large-scale fraud as poorly run banks sucked up depositors’ funds while promising unrealistic interest rates only to crash leaving untold misery in its wake. This was the era of the Cowboys who ran the so-called magic banks or wonder banks and allied financial institutions. In reality, many of those new banks were complicit in an elaborate regime of official graft and serving conduits for illegal remittances abroad by the ruling elites and eventually collapsed during the gale of bank failures in the early 1990s._ Commenting on the financial crisis that bankrupted several banks in the early 1990s, Olusegun Obasanjo wrote, “Banks and the foreign industry in Nigeria seem to have made money-making without regard to production and the health of the economy, their objective.”_
In December 2006, a multinational company operating in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector of the Nigerian economy fired its Chief Executive Officer and finance director over the doctoring of its 2005 financial statement. The independent auditor appointed to investigate its financials confirmed a significant and deliberate overstatement of the company’s financial position over a number of years to the tune of between 13 and 15 billion naira. The company consequently disclosed that since 2003 it had recorded a loss of N5 billion while reporting huge profits to shareholders and the general public._
In 2009, the Securities and Exchange Commission disclosed that some bank chiefs gave some N388 billion in unsecured loans to investors without collaterals. Subsequently, these investors dumped the loans on the stock market driving up share prices thus triggering the declaration of fabulous profits and dividends._ In order to maintain the illusion of size and strength, several Nigerian banks had organized public offers with which they raised funds to buy up more property and establish more branches. Banks borrowed from each other to shore up their profit margins at the end of their financial years. Ultimately, it was revealed that they had been using depositors’ funds to hike their stock prices by lending to corporations and individuals who, in turn, invested in their banks’ shares._
This edifice of fraud collapsed in 2008 in the wake of the global financial crisis revealing that financial institutions were led to the brink of terminal bankruptcy by thieving executives. In the ensuing reforms, several CEOs were removed by the new Central Bank leadership and subsequently charged to court for financial crimes. A number of Nigeria’s hitherto highly rated banks were left in need of multibillion naira bailout by the federal government to guarantee their survival. The financial journalist Ijeoma Nwogwugwu, observed that Nigeria’s financial crisis was caused by self-inflicted factors, namely, greed and regulatory failure._
There is a link between the conduct of some of the Bank executives, for example, cavalierly playing fast and loose with depositors’ funds and the nonchalant attitude of some public functionaries towards public funds. Both traits belong to the same spectrum of elite irresponsibility. We find the same broad plagues of leadership failure in both the public sector and the private sector.
Between the Private Sector and the Public Sector: Comparative Perspectives on Leadership Failure
If Nigeria were to be a private company, the mismanagement we have witnessed over the last years would have made us bankrupt. The symptoms of sovereign bankruptcy are however not merely economic. They are reflected in the wide-ranging dysfunction of institutions, rampant graft and social unrest - from the militancy in the Niger Delta and the terrorist insurgency of Boko Haram in the North East to the various formats of violence essayed by hostile non-state actors. All these plagues emanate from a failure of public sector leadership.
In my view, the greatest expression of the failure of public sector governance is the creation of extreme poverty and inequality in the society. The defining contradiction of Nigeria is that it is a country characterized by widespread poverty in the midst of plenty. The statistics are stark. With a maximum crude oil production capacity of 2.5 million barrels per day, Nigeria ranks as Africa's largest producer of oil and the sixth largest oil producing country in the world._ In the last fifty years, Nigeria has earned over $800 billion as revenue from oil._ The giant of Africa has proven reserves of 180 trillion cubic feet of natural gas – the largest on the continent. In recent years, she has recorded an average growth of 7.4 percent, which according to the World Bank is one of the highest in the world; and an aggressive monetary policy has helped restrict inflation to single digit levels._ Judging from all these indices, Nigeria ought to be an economic super power, a prime player in the world league of dominant economies. She is not.
A staggering 70 percent of our population or about 112.5 million Nigerians live in abject poverty – below $2 per day. Poverty greatly curtails the access of millions of Nigerians to the elementary things of life – good health care, a decent education and a broad spectrum of social and economic opportunities, not to mention a decent quality of life - things that they should rightly expect as citizens of such a wealthy country.
Nigeria has one of the world’s highest rates of child mortality. Over 3.9 million children have died between 2009 and 2014. Nigeria has the second highest maternal mortality rate in the world. 55,000 women die annually during childbirth. The fact that the majority of our people are poor means that most people cannot afford healthcare. Only 1.5 percent of Nigerians have health insurance coverage and 75 percent of Nigerians have no access to primary health care. A 2013 Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring report ranks Nigeria as one of the countries with the highest level of illiteracy. The report states that the number of illiterate adults in Nigeria has increased by 10 million over the past two decades, to reach 35 million. It also states that 10.5 million Nigerian children of primary school age are out of school. 59.2 percent of Nigerian households live in single rooms and it is projected that 24.4 million Nigerians will be homeless by 2015. Only 40 percent of Nigerians have access to electricity. Broadband penetration is 6.9 percent while life expectancy stands at 52 years. Nigeria, for all her natural wealth and much vaunted economic potential, is ranked as the 33rd poorest nation in the world.
What makes our paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty even more bizarre is that Nigeria is officially the largest economy in Africa. The big question is why despite these healthy figures which apparently show an economy in good health, do millions of Nigerians, in fact the majority of our compatriots, still live in desperate conditions? In other words, how is it that these figures have failed to translate into food on the tables, roofs over the heads and access to functional social services for the majority of Nigerians?
The Challenge of Extreme Poverty and Inequality
According to the Nobel Laureate, Muhammed Yunus, “Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society”._ Poverty and unemployment inevitably lead to social unrest and instability. There is a clear link between socioeconomic conditions and our national security challenges amongst other portents.
We cannot sustain a country that exists with two different realities prevailing coterminously. One in which a select few have more than their fair share while others wallow in indigence. We cannot continue to speak of a housing deficit for the majority of our people when vast overpriced real estate in our major cities are unoccupied. We cannot keep up with a broken educational system yet Nigerians as international students deploy our commonwealth to fund the functionality of education systems in other countries, ditto our healthcare industry. A research company, Euromonitor forecasts that champagne consumption in Nigeria will reach 1.1 million litres or $105million annually by 2017, with 2012 consumption figures at almost $59million, yet a large majority of our people lack access to pipe borne water. _
The questions we should ask ourselves in designing developmental policies and programmes for Nigeria, either as government, corporate social responsibility actors or development facilitators is “how many people will be liberated from the bracket of abject poverty”?, “how will this create greater access to economic opportunities for Nigerians”. We need to close the gaps, and create a society where everyone, regardless of age, sex, religion, physical ability or any other social markers has access to equal opportunities to lead a full and productive life.
In other words, in applying the metaphor of Nigeria as a corporate institution, we might say that Nigeria is not a for-profit enterprise. It is a for-people enterprise. To think of Nigeria as a corporation is to insist that it cannot simply exist for the benefit of a well placed and well connected minority. It must exist for the profit of all our people. This is why the ability of the nation-state to ensure mutual prosperity is the key to internal coherence and successful common citizenship.
Problems and Prospects of Corporate Governance and Public Sector Leadership
As discussed earlier, the Nigerian Financial banking scandals of the 1990s and the mid 2000s exposed the wanton violation of business ethics and corporate governance codes by entrepreneurs who recognized no fidelity to their customers or duty to society at large. There was no sense that the pursuit of wealth cannot be conducted at the expense of the society. Indeed, these bankers have been likened to corrupt politicians and public servants in their conduct. Among the many lessons to be learned from the banking crisis is the fact that the public sector has no monopoly of corruption neither is the private sector populated by saints. The discourse that depicts the public sector as a bastion of official sleaze ranged against a private sector that is a paragon of probity, efficiency and effectiveness is simplistic and is, in fact, a false debate. What is at issue is the conduct of our elites.
Abuse of power and impunity are as much a reality of leadership in the private sector as it is in the public sector. In a society that esteems opulence and exalts the big man, it is no surprise that the very concept of leadership has been debased. This is apparent when we survey the signs and symbols of power in our land: the pomp and pageantry, the long motorcades, the sirens, the circus-like atmospherics surrounding leadership, the retinue of idle “aides” and the inevitable flock of hangers-on, praise-singers and sycophants. Some of these idiosyncrasies which surround leadership in Nigeria derive from the legacy of colonialism and military dictatorship. In those forms of government, leadership was always imposed from the top and was therefore an alien imposition on society and an intrusion on our peace. The semiotics of power tended to be bullying, loud, garish, oppressive and violent. This has become installed as part of our leadership culture and has carried over into our democracy. But this pathology is clearly evident in some private sector institutions where the boss is virtually worshipped as god and maintains a vulgar ostentatious lifestyle that is often at variance with and at the expense of the fiscal health of the corporation.
For the next generation of private sector leaders therefore, it is essential that we recognize that one does not need a political office or title to become an exemplar of higher values. Ethical leadership is needed as much in the public sector as much as it is required in the private sector. In the province of Nigerian business names like Gamaliel Onosode of blessed memory, Felix Ohiwerei, Pascal Dozie, Umaru Muttalab, Christopher Kolade and Fola Adeola – indeed, Akintola Williams, to mention a few, have become synonymous with ethical enterprise, we similarly have their counterparts in public sector leadership, we therefore have a rich repertoire of good examples to build on in envisioning values-based leadership in both the private and public sectors.
Succession Planning and Strategic Long-term Visioning
The failure of corporate governance in ensuring the long term sustainability of corporations accounts for why there is hardly any large indigenous corporation in Nigeria that is up to 100 years old. Few Nigerian companies have outlived their founders. It is therefore heartening to note that in recent decades, the tides have turned with several new corporations having been founded by visionary Nigerians who appear to have punctured this trajectory and departed from the norm, establishing solid companies on the foundations of sound corporate governance codes. These companies are a pride to Nigeria and indeed Africa and hold the promise for long term economic growth as they shine the light as good examples for other corporations to follow. In keeping with global best practices, they have demonstrated that very careful thought has gone into succession planning and long term vision considering the enviable manner successive generations of chief executives have passed on the baton of leadership without negative impacts on neither the quality of the company’s service offerings nor its prospects of surviving profitably.
These corporations shouldn’t only inspire their peers in the private sector to run their businesses ethically and sustainably, they should also inspire public sector leaders to borrow a leaf and be more strategic in the way government is run. The failure of long term visioning and succession planning is a key public sector leadership deficit that is traceable to the dominant model of leadership in our institutions and the disappearance of ethical values in the promotion of the cult of personality over institution. The dominant cultural and institutional models of public leadership have been typically defined by the exercise of raw power. This authoritarian paradigm has become a template for leadership in virtually all our institutions. Herein lies one of the characteristics of dysfunctional organizations – leadership is seen as being vested in a single authority figure rather than as a function diffused among several empowered actors. Because of their overwhelming personalization of power and the centralization of authority, leaders in this mould who also tend to be psychologically insecure are simply unable or unwilling to mentor and empower their subordinates. Under these circumstances, young potential leaders are not being prepared to undertake greater responsibility.
Any country that fails to plan for succession also plans to fail the leadership test – and much more. Embracing strategic thinking also means jettisoning our institutional and cultural predilection for short termism. Successful development planning like succession planning is a long term endeavour. Indeed, development planning cannot be separated from succession planning. The economic miracle of Southeast Asian nations was built on the back of long term planning. China’s emergence which is perhaps the most talked about and analyzed development story of recent time was nurtured over the course of thirty years. These are the countries we want to emulate. There is a valid debate over the possibilities of long term strategic planning in a democracy with defined term limits. It is said that the problem with democratic environments is that cycles of regular electioneering impose short term timelines which are not really conducive to long term strategizing. Electorates tend to want immediate and tangible dividends to validate their confidence in their elected governments. Politicians, especially in our clime, are prone to crude populism often making wild promises to perform immediate miracles once they are voted into office. The result is often mutual disappointment.
What we therefore need is the strengthening of institutionalized long term strategic planning that is not susceptible to the impulses of political cycles or political actors. We simply cannot afford to legitimize the reasons given by some of our African leaders for perpetuating themselves in power indefinitely. In this regard, it has to be said that Africa’s legacy of developmental underachievement has something to do with lack of careful succession planning. What we see in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi today in terms of the pursuit of perpetuation of power clearly attests to this. The fact that of the 10 current longest ruling non-royal national leaders of independent countries in the world today, six of them are Africans, with the top three being Paul Biya of Cameroon (Over 40 years), Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea (Over 36 years) and José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola (Over 36 years) cannot be unconnected with the slow pace of development in these resource rich countries._ Sadly, longevity has not resulted in the transformation of their economies for the better. For the most part, progress has actually been hobbled by longevity.
Necessary Paradigm Shifts
Transparency and Accountability
In these days of shareholder democracy and activist shareholders, there is a greater demand for accountability from companies. Now, accountability is not only demanded of the financial bottom line, there is now what we call the Triple ‘P’ Bottom Line reporting, which is an accounting framework with three parts: social, environmental (or ecological) and financial. These three divisions are also called the three Ps: people, planet and profit, or the "three pillars of sustainability". Interest in triple bottom line accounting has been growing in both for-profit, nonprofit and government sectors. Many organizations have adopted the TBL framework to evaluate their performance in a broader context. The term was coined by John Elkington in 1994. In traditional business accounting and common usage, the "bottom line" refers to either the "profit" or "loss", which is usually recorded at the very bottom line on a statement of revenue and expenses. Over the last 50 years, environmentalists and "social justice" advocates have struggled to bring a broader definition of the bottom line into public consciousness by introducing full cost accounting._
As democratization deepens in Nigeria, issues of transparency and accountability have also become even more salient. In 2013, the National Assembly passed the Freedom of Information Act. The FOIA is a significant milestone in our national journey precisely because it signifies the opening up of governance, traditionally seen as the opaque preserve of a few initiates, to greater public scrutiny. Both the 7TH Senate and former President Goodluck Jonathan deserve credit for enacting this breakthrough legislation. During my tenure as governor, Ekiti State was the first to domesticate the FoI law in Nigeria. We should however highlight that till this day only a few states have passed the law and there are still major issues regarding the effectual implementation of the law.
The new administration is however paying more than lip service to the issue of transparency considering that the NNPC for the first time in many years has published details of their earnings. This has always been an issue of acrimony between the federal government and the state governors because of the secrecy that had hitherto characterized the regime of income generation from the oil and gas industry. These are some of the transformational acts that signify a new dawn in the relational dynamic between leaders and those that are led. We can expect that with the President Buhari administration, we will see a renewed emphasis on probity, transparency and playing by the rules by this administration both in the precincts of the private sector and in the public sector.
Paradigm Shifts
Managing Diversity
Managing diversity and ensuring Inclusion is a factor of growth that has become very important to leadership in the business environment and in the public sector. In the world today, every serious organization has a charter that addresses non-discrimination on the basis of gender, age, sex, tribe, religion, physical ability, health status or any other social markers. Some companies even go a step further to ensure a certain percentage of their board and staff is constituted by minorities.
Consequently, it is not at all strange there is a renewed drive in corporations and governments to create more gender-diverse environments. Women constitute 50 percent of the workforce and any system that excludes women actually eliminates 50 percent of productive potential – a disruption that militates against growth and profits. Thus, we need to keep our eyes on the inclusion of more women over the long term through girl child education; access to equal opportunities and affirmative action as a key development factor.
Gender however is not the only area in which we must pursue greater inclusion. Nigeria is a vastly plural society with a population of about 180million making up over 250 distinct ethnic nationalities, spread across an extensive land mass of about 910,770sq.km._ In the emerging global economic order, our greatest strength ought to be the size and diversity of our population. Sadly, 55 years after independence and over a century since we have been together as a country, we are yet to achieve sustainable peace among our divergent ethnic groups.
In Nigeria the pursuit of equal opportunity is essentially guided by the objective to share the much touted national cake within the context of a political economy based on rentier dynamics. The prebendal conception of public office is a major factor that explains the endemic levels of graft in Nigeria. Rather than harnessing our diversities towards viable national development, we have become slaves to our ethnic origins to which our allegiance is largely focused to the detriment of nation building. Fanatical ethnic consciousness has resulted into ethnic prejudice and mistrust, religious and political problems, and socio-cultural conflicts. These vices have pervaded all spheres of life in Nigeria, be it employment, education, religion and admission into federal Institutions._ In order to achieve sustainable peace and productivity we have to adjust our national psyche by doing away with the thinking that has done nothing but stunt our growth and make us lazy, and start thinking of how to make our diversity and population size work for us. There is a key lesson that contemporary codes of corporate governance holds for public sector leadership as regards leadership recruitment.
Integrity and Competence as Key Factors for Leadership Recruitment
In the public sector, the pursuit of equal opportunity in the form of a representative bureaucracy has been conducted in such a way that it has negated merit as a factor in recruitment. In many cases recruitment parameters are circumscribed almost entirely by questions of identity i.e. the ethnicity, state of origin or religion of the prospective public servant. One of the main reasons for the gulf between policy conception and execution is the scant attention paid to the proficiency and integrity of the people who are actually charged with executing.
This is in sharp contrast to the widely practiced corporate governance principles in the private sector that prescribes rigorous recruitment procedures in ensuring only the most qualified in character and competence are employed. Career progression is also conducted in the same spirit as the performances of candidates for promotion are judged against pre-agreed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Public sector leaders need to take this cue and enhance capacity in the institutions they lead. Given the problems of our society, the stakes involved in meeting development targets could not be higher – sadly, the fact is that many public sector organisations simply lack the institutional capacity to execute and pursue their developmental goals.
Our onerous development challenges are not for want of brilliant policies and programmes or even dedicated leadership. The dilemma therefore for political leaders is that it is not even enough to have great ideas and programmes that will help the people. We must develop the delivery capacity within the service that takes a proposal and translates from a bright idea into a truly tangibly transformative policy with material consequences.
The nature of recruitments into our public services is of paramount importance. 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. Only such a meritocratic system can deliver excellence.
Revitalizing public service goes beyond issues of working conditions and morale. These are, of course, important but they are only a tip of the iceberg. The real key is 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.
Public Sector leadership must learn and adopt the modus from the private sector where there is a great demand on individuals to be high performers in order to attain upward mobility in his/her career. There is greater emphasis on Competence over Charisma; Substance over Style; and Results over Rhetoric which augurs well for productivity and sustainability.
CONCLUSION
The key is in achieving equilibrium of right relationship between both spheres. Since the mid-1980s, successive regimes have adopted privatization virtually as the sole direction and design of all government economic policy. The predominant understanding of this view is that the goals of growth and development that we seek are best pursued by unshackling free enterprise and allowing the market to generate these outcomes. It has become a kind of governmental orthodoxy. The mantra of private sector-led growth has been articulated in such a way as to suggest that the public sector is irrelevant to the quest for national prosperity.
By devaluing the public sector in the name of promoting private sector-driven growth, we have failed to realize that a buoyant economy requires not only an exuberant private sector but also a virile public sector. A public service alive to its regulatory responsibilities and healthy enough to modulate the tension between the market and society is absolutely vital. Without it, primitive capitalism and unhinged profiteering will take root. Corporations and service providers, unencumbered by regulatory oversight and the necessary pressure to comply with global best practices, will simply fleece their customers. Consumers will not receive value for money because the market is being poorly refereed. In short, where the public sector is certifiably dysfunctional, private sector-led growth will be marked by fraud, graft and corporate malfeasance that are possible because of inadequate policing. If the corruption scandals in the government and in the private sector teach us anything it is that without proper policing and institutional oversight, actors, whether they are in the private sector or public service, will be corrupt and self-aggrandizing. Only a healthy and self-confident public service operating optimally functioning institutions can create a climate in which elites in the private and public realms behave appropriately.
The global financial crisis that plunged the world into recession in 2008 which we touched on earlier has been described in many quarters as a consequence of the devaluation of the public sector in favour of unfettered markets. The markets failed to regulate themselves. Bankers and financial sector operatives saw opportunities for profiteering and duly took bad risks in pursuit of such opportunities. But it was also the failure of several governments to regulate the financial institutions, corporations and credit ratings agencies. All had fallen for the conventional wisdom that markets are inherently self-regulating and that government performing its normal role as the guarantor of public order is a nuisance that impedes markets.
However, when several financial institutions teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and the world faced the reality of an economic depression, it was to the much maligned public service that nations turned. Governments, even those that had preached laissez faire doctrines, rushed to bail out banks that were about to go under. According to the doctrines of free market orthodoxy, the ailing institutions should have been left to go under. But that outcome would have meant unprecedented job losses, severe socio-economic dislocation with the possibility of a wide-ranging destabilization of the social order. Recognizing the perils of permitting such an apocalyptic outcome, western bureaucrats hurriedly dispensed with conventional wisdom and governments acted as they should to protect the society. This is what public service is all about.
The fact is that no matter how private sector-driven we aspire to be, authentic economic growth is impossible without a competent public sector. There are spaces that can only be administered by a functional public service. Not everything can be privatized nor should every area of society be surrendered to the whims and caprices of market forces. Indeed, the calling of public service is to see that the pursuit of profits is submitted to the higher imperatives of the common good. There is no reason why our business interests cannot harmonize an aptitude for profit-making with a high estimation of the common good. This is the idea behind good corporate citizenship – the perception that the business enterprise while a profit-making endeavour cannot sustainably exist solely to make profit. It must take cognizance of the society within which it operates and factor in the common good of that society into its operational ethos. In other words, the business enterprise, insofar as it is constituted by people who are social animals, is itself a social organism operating within a social context. There are social benefits it must consider that are not necessarily captured in the bottom line.
There are clearly strengths native to the private and public sector that we can harness and synthesize to drive national progress. One trend that could assist this process would be to have a more seamless transition of professionals from the private to the public sectors and vice versa at anytime in one’s career as a means to enriching both. Such cross-pollination of personnel would only beneficially impact both sectors. The ideal Nigerian personality would be one that is able to balance the passion, sensitivity and humane nature you gain from public service with the drive and bullishness of the private sector. If we can nurture and train such hybrid personalities, the locomotive of Nigeria’s growth and prosperity would become truly unstoppable.
In Chief Akintola Williams we find such a Nigerian who has given full expression to his talents and pristine character by blessing us with corporations that stand as glowing tributes to the fact that with integrity, excellence, and professionalism, the sky is just the stepping stone, yet he is unrelenting. He has served both the public and private sectors without blemish showing us that indeed the same values of professionalism and integrity commend the diligent to greatness. He has shown us we can win by righteousness; and for all those who see a new Nigeria on the horizon, and are working honestly and passionately to see it come through, the legacy of our living legend, Chief Akintola Williams remains a bulwark of encouragement along our way.
Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for listening.
J. ’Kayode Fayemi
Lagos, Nigeria
