Phillip Asiodu is a Nigerian diplomat, bureaucrat, a former Minister of Petroleum and a presidential candidate on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 1999. Before serving as a minister, Asiodu rose through the ranks in the civil service and became a federal permanent secretary. In this interview with Trust TV monitored by Daily Trust on Sunday, he reminisces about his life. Excerpts:
By Kabiru A. Yusuf
Why were some permanent secretaries during your time referred to as super permanent secretaries?
Permanent secretaries were the coordinators of ministries; giving advice to the ministers. The ministers then took memoranda to the federal government for approval.
When we moved from the colonial government where executive council members were civil servants to when we had a responsible government with a council of ministers, the Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, got people from England to advice on the transition to a ministerial government; with the permanent secretaries as the coordinators of all advice to the ministers.
Then, like in the Ministry of Works, there was a permanent secretary, but there was a Director of Ministry whose salary was a bit higher than that of the permanent secretary. In the Ministry of Health, there was a Chief Medical Adviser whose salary was a bit higher than that of the permanent secretary. But even with the salary disparities, the administrative officer, who was the permanent secretary, whose job cut across all sectors and divisions – he was a generalist – coordinated submissions from all the specialist directors and submitted to the minister.
So, Balewa brought one Mr Mynes from the British Civil Service to advice. Mr Mynes submitted a report which recommended a transition from residencies to provinces and a Chief Administrative Officer for Lagos. Before then the residents reported to the deputy governor-general who reported to the governor-general.
How did you acquire the sobriquet super permanent secretaries?
The super permanent secretary thing was after the military coup of January 15, 1966. The military wanted permanent secretaries to become ministers, but we said no, we were not there permanently, so we could not be.
In fact, we advised them that it was better they brought in known political leaders to advise them so that the world would take us serious.
The Head of State, Gen Aguiyi Ironsi, did not implement that and there was a counter-coup in which he was assassinated and replaced by Lt-Col Yakubu Gowon. Even under Gowon, we maintained the same advice.
Now, under Gowon, we found out that he was a very good man; very careful and listened to people, but sometimes we felt that he was slow in taking decisions. I for instance became a permanent secretary under Balewa and there were more senior permanent secretaries like Abdulaziz Attah, M. A. Ejueyitchie, C O Lawson, Tokunbo and Ani.
But some of us felt that although we had been brought up in the tradition that you gave advice, non-partisan advice secretly to the minister, and when the minister agreed on what he wanted to do, you produced the memorandum which he took to cabinet and it became a policy, but when there were no more ministers we felt there was something missing in terms of policy formulation.
Under Gowon, we felt that with the political crisis escalating there were decisions which had to be taken quickly. There were no ministers, it was just the Supreme Military Council (SMC) and permanent secretaries. We presented memoranda and papers to the SMC and when decisions were made it was the permanent secretaries who implemented them.
Now, there were older permanent secretaries like Lawson, Abdulaziz Attah, Tokunbo and Ani who did not think this was the function of permanent secretaries, but a few of us thought we could not allow the country we had sworn to protect to derail. And so a few of us would gather and formulate ideas and go to the Head of Service and say, “Look, we cannot continue this way. You must take decisions.”
Was this after the civil war?
No; before the civil war when the crisis was escalating after the second coup with Gowon now as head of the federal military government.
So the head of the civil service and secretary to the government, M. A. Ejueyitchie, saw the importance of this and allowed us to present things to him and he would then arrange for us to go with him and meet Gowon and decisions would be taken, policies formulated and implemented.
When Ejueyitchie retired he was succeeded by Abdulaziz Attah, who at first thought that things were like under Balewa when once you formulated a policy you had to wait for the head of government to take a decision.
I think he found out that decisions were not forthcoming and he was wise enough to allow what they as senior permanent secretaries did not like before, like this pressure group of permanent secretaries coming and saying ABCD should be done. So, under Attah we continued the process of going to Gowon and saying action must be taken on ABCD and these are our recommendations. Now it was that group which became known as super permanent secretaries.
Also, when the crisis escalated into a Civil War, three of us, Ahmed Joda, Allison Ayida and myself, travelled more than 10,000 miles every month going abroad, trying to explain what the federal government was doing about this and that; that it was not a war between Christians and Muslims and what winning the war meant for Nigeria’s unity.
So it was not in admiration, it was more in criticism that we were tagged “super permanent secretaries” by the media. But later on, it became a bit more positive.
Why could you not help Gen Gowon; I mean after the civil war there was the oil boom, with a lot of money to spend, but the government floundered and was thrown out through a coup?
In all fairness, the civil service under Gowon was allowed to function with all its powers and prestige. In fact, before the civil war, the Nigerian Army (NA) was only 10,000 people. It was the civil service that was able to organise the logistics and support to enable the army to grow to 250,000 in order to successfully execute the war.
It was the civil service which was able to do this without the need to borrow and be frustrated, because if we disintegrated, the outside world would say fine, it was not their business.
So, the civil service under Gowon was functional. In many ways it wasn’t that the military were not, but we kept urging them that it was not our function to take memos to council.
The media for one reason or the other thought that permanent secretaries had become a bit too powerful, that was why when the coup now happened against Gowon, the civil service was severely dealt with and we are still suffering the consequences.
Before we get to that, one of the criticisms against the civil service was the mismanagement of the oil boom. There was this notion that the country had too much money to spend and did not know how to spend it?
That is purely untrue; because one of the justifications which Gowon gave, and this had nothing to do with the civil service, for postponing the date when he was supposed to hand over to civilians was that they wanted to implement the 1975-1980 Plan.
The introduction of the 1975-80 Plan clearly stated that oil was a wasting asset because it would run out, hence that we should use the oil revenue to make sure that renewable and sustainable industries were established. The first priority in the 1975-80 Plan, as in the 1970-74 Plan, was agro-allied industries; and this is still our first priority, because there is no state in Nigeria which doesn’t produce agricultural goods; which if properly processed could be sold internationally and would generate enough jobs and taxable individuals to make the state sustainable. All these were in the plan.
Even during the war, in 1969, we had a conference in which we had all Nigerians, ex-politicians, journalists, students, civil servants, politicians and people from abroad under the chairmanship of Simeon Adebo where we elaborated what went into the 70-74 Plan. And not only that; from 1970 at the end of the civil war till 75 when they did the coup against Gowon, the Nigerian economy was growing per annum at an average of 11.75 per cent. 10 more years of that, Nigeria would have exited from poverty.
So, what went wrong?
People who wanted to be governors decided to remove Gowon. When they did so, unfortunately, they abandoned the plan.
Your career seems to have stopped in 1975 as a civil servant and you criticised the system thereafter. Was this a personal thing?
What happened was that Gen Murtala Mohammed’s regime decided to attack the civil service and all the other public services and 10,000 people were retired in two months “with immediate effect”. The first two military regimes, Ironsi and Gowon, did not attack the civil service.
Including you?
Including me; I was the number one civilian to go, but in fairness even though I was retired before they started announcing, they came to my place. I was then in South West Ikoyi. I had moved out of government quarters. Luckily, I had built a bungalow in the previous regime, and they said there was nothing against me but that I could not fit into the new image of permanent secretaries, and two weeks later they started announcing those things.
You people speak much better English than myself, so I have never been able to understand the phrase “retired with immediate effect”. You can explain that, it must have sounded nice.
I think they were in a hurry to perform, bring about changes and you seemed to think that this was…?
But what did they conceive as change? Was it conceived properly? When you want to change, you should have a vision and a programme of what you want to do different. That was what went wrong.
What happened was that they were threatened and could not look some of us in the face, because some of us used to be saluted by some of them who took over in 1975. They did not want people to say “you can’t do this, you can’t do that”, and in those days when we had the First Republic, these were ministers, some had been teachers, some had been lawyers, some had been doctors and some had been businessmen.
In 1975 you were in your early 40s and prematurely retired from the civil service, what was life like for you from that point?
That was the pity. As I told you, in 1961 I was in the foreign service in New York when they were doing ballot for plots in South West Ikoyi. Our colleagues, things were disciplined at that time, sent the papers to us and I filled in my name and that was the one ballot I ever succeeded. I got a plot and this plot was one of the biggest in South West Ikoyi.
I did not come back to Lagos till 1963. But nobody took the plot, nobody changed it, can you imagine that these days? And I came back and the plot was given to me, and then I became deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry of Lagos Affairs. A board member of the African Loan Scheme facilitated a loan for me and I developed the place. I did not give myself a loan. But you could borrow money from the bank to do the foundation and then you could commercially get a loan for 12.5 per cent to build, which I did.
So, you had a house, what else were you doing after that?
Luckily, I had a house I could move into. I was just explaining this to you because there were people who had been working honestly in the civil service looking forward to their retirement. They were building houses, then suddenly “with immediate effect” their names were announced. They had to find plots or rent houses in distant places like Ikota.
Luckily for me, even if I did not have that house in Ikoyi, my father had two houses in Yaba. He had been in the customs.
Are you saying that because of the events of 1975 Nigeria could not shake out of the issue of corruption; and is it still the same thing holding us back?
That in fact destroyed all the restraints, because human beings are what they are. If there are clear sanctions, many people will behave. You remember under the military administration of Maj Gen Muhammadu Buhari, many Nigerians were queuing up because they knew there was a major general at that time with a koboko who would lash them. Once there are sanctions being applied without discrimination, people will perform.
If there are no such sanctions, seven out of 10 people will be corrupt. If we have had more than 40 years of this degradation, then it is very serious, and so we must get out of it. I have made private and public recommendations.
Can we get your solutions to how we can get out; a lot of people are talking about restructuring. What is your solution?
When you ask them what they mean, do they say the same thing? Some are talking about using the zones as the pillars of the federation, how many governors are going to agree, six governors per zone, five in the South East. They will now lose their powers while others are talking about devolution.
So I am of the opinion that when you ask the average man, what does he really want, he wants food, security, shelter, possibility for his children to go to school and be better and he wants good health programmes; anybody who can deliver that to you, you are not bothered where they come from.
The tragedy is that the coup of 1975 prevented us from successfully implementing the Universal Basic Education (UBE) which was started on “build schools, train teachers” and all that.
Obasanjo introduced UBE…?
That is what I am saying, you have to train the teachers, you have to build the schools, and my late friend, Joda, as permanent secretary of education, was not able. He kept fighting to see money voted for this purpose.
If we had done those things, would you have the number of 14 million people out of school? Would you have this level of illiteracy? No, we didn’t because we did not have the civil service; it was sacked.
When you have a good policy, you must have the people who are capable of doing implementing it. But the civil service was destabilised.
You seem to be arguing that what matters is delivering to the common people all the basic necessities of life; but what I hear people saying is important is zoning power for equity and justice…?
As far as I’m concerned there is no section of this country which hasn’t got talented people. If we all went and obliged to have good quality education, which is also functional, and empowering, if we insisted on the priorities in our development and we all went to the same types of schools, within five, six years of that trajectory, you do not have to rely on simplistic arithmetic quota, that is one.
I believe that with education, which we would have pursued, and also, on the back of the initial success of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), people like me were insisting on introducing a language programme, which probably would have gone through in 1977. If we had that, within five to 10 years, like Switzerland, I still urge that it is like when wherever you are growing up, you start school there, you learn the language in school; a regional language. By the time you get to SS1, if you are in the North, choose one Southern language. If you are in the South, choose one Northern language.
Is that your solution to the issue?
The point is that within 10 years, like Switzerland today, whether you are French Swiss, Italian Swiss or German Swiss, you speak English as an extra language, and then you speak one or two other languages.
When you go to qualitative schools, you will have these languages in common, play the same sorts of games, and luckily, we are one race, we are not like South Africans – white people and black people.
If we had that we would not have been in this problem today? We would have exited poverty if we continued the planning by 1999 maximum. We would have done for the black race what Japan did for the yellow race.
The point I am making is that if you insist on the creation of states and all that, tomorrow you have to create this street as a state. If basic things like education, food security, infrastructure, communications and transport are not there, you will get nowhere.
Two, and this is very important, if we continue like now going into politics as a way of going into the Forbes list of rich people, we will end up with a gang of robbers seeking to rule us.
For instance, why did the Sardauna live in Sokoto, why did Okpara live in Umuahia, why did Zik live in Onitsha, even Awolowo? The point is that we must go back to politics not as a means of self-enrichment, and to make that possible, two things are necessary:
One, like in advanced democracies, limit the amount of money any individual can contribute to a party in one year as it is done in America, Germany and all those places. Two, limit the amount of money which a party can spend on elections. If you do that, the young people, by that I mean 25 to 67 years, will be able to unite under one person or two, maximum; not like before. They must unite with a vision. A 20, 25 years vision of where will Nigeria be? And my vision is that by that projected period we should be of first world status.
You are 87, one wonders, of all the super permanent secretaries, maybe you are the only one alive, what do you miss about that period of your life and how do you cope now?
All I have told you is the destruction of all that process, and I am sorry about it, because if that had not happened, if even after removing Gowon and the two principal figures in the post-Gowon Era—Murtala Mohammed and Olusegun Obasanjo, who were ministers under Gowon when we approved the 75-80 Plan, but they jettisoned it.
If they had kept to the plan, with emphasis on agro-allied goods, value added chemicals, backward integration in textile and expansion, spare parts and the metallurgical plant I initiated, but I am disappointed. You know I went back to government in 1999-2001.
In 2000, we visited Germany with Obasanjo. The Ukrainians have built the same type of plant in Eastern Germany as we were doing in Ajaokuta and that plant was successfully supplying metallurgical products to an integrated Germany which is part of the EU. We did not pursue Ajaokuta; we should have.
Two, we started assembling cars before Korea; we are now importing cars from Korea, why, because we abandoned the agreements with Peugeot and Volkswagen.
I still think God has blessed Nigeria with resources of all kinds, basic minerals, precious minerals, arable land, fossil energy, renewable energy, big shoreline and so on and brilliant people everywhere.
So I am still full of hope that with these two basic things I suggested, and I have suggested salaries – President N35m, and from there we go down, because if the least worker has N1m and a half to spend in a month, it is not bad in Nigeria today.
But today, a Nigerian Senator is getting about N212m. This was what we found out when I was in the presidential committee. N212m as package, constituency expenditure and all that, but the American senator took $175,000 the last time I looked.
Minimum wage is N30,000. On the basis of our GDP, there is no rational basis to abandon the recommendations of RMAC and do what they did; which Obasanjo can explain.
Two, one of my biggest failures was failure to beg Obasanjo that we should continue implementing Vision 2010 which had been started by Gen Sani Abacha. Abacha might have read one or two paragraphs; not more, but he allowed the Ernest Shonekan Economic Summit Group to continue for two years. Sultan Maccido was a member, and Kambo, everybody, students were there, journalists were there, politicians, and we also had Vision 2010.
How do you live now at 87, how is your typical day like?
I’m active in conservation; I have resigned from all my companies, I did that in 1999. I’m only praying that these young people and I belong to a group of elders across the country. We could get only 12 people in each state across, unite and have a demography. We must unite with a vision.
As I told you, how we will take Nigerians into first world status and global significance in 2040 or 2050 so that there is continuity and discipline; this is more important than anything else.
And I hope we will remain a secular state, and if God who is omnipotent, omniscient wanted everybody to speak the same language, He would have made it so, if He wanted them in the same religion, He would have made it so, let us not quarrel with God.
Nobody gave Nigeria a chance when the civil war came, but God pulled us back from the brink. I’m hoping He will do the same and enable us get a group of good politicians who are less self-centred, less greedy, less visionless and have these other qualities—merit, competence, strict integrity and patriotism, so that we may do for Africa what the Japanese did for the yellow race.
