Tunji Olaopa
The world recently lost a colossal intellectual figure. The name of Professor Adebayo Adedeji resounds in critical places across the globe where issues of regionalism, economic ideologies, engaged public administration and national and continental development constitute discourses that affect and transform lives, especially if these lives are Africans and Nigerians. In this sense, the whole of the African continent is left to mourn at a different level of loss.
This is so because in the late Professor Adedeji, Africa had one solid pan-Africanist whose thinking and activities were even more solidly tied in with the postcolonial predicament and promises of the continent. Professor Adebayo Adedeji was an intellectual of many parts. He was also a Nigerian, and this was demonstrated in the seamless ways in which he was able to articulate the Nigerian economic predicament through an understanding of the larger continental debacle. This is one of the few scholars who were able to tie together the national in the regional. It is in this sense that he was both an African and a Nigerian, without any sense of contradiction involved in his fight for the economic betterment of both.
I share a sense of loss too, at a more personal and professional level. Let me put it on record that it was Professor Adedeji that discovered my potential as a public administration scholar. The year was 2000, and I was then the head of the policy division at the Federal Ministry of Education who was also struggling to make headway with my doctoral programme at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Professor Adedeji was also at that time coordinating the Federal Government’s orientation programme for federal officers. Providence initiated our meeting when it was my turn to partake of the weeklong orientation seminar. On the first day, during the seminar, I stood to make a contribution, and his response was to ask for my name.
I made another contribution on the second day, and his question to me was, “Tunji, are you truly a career civil servant or you are here on sabbatical?” At that point, the orientation took on a renewed interest for me. The erudite professor would generate several administrative issues and asked for my opinion. By the third day of the seminar, he had already gone to meet the then head of service, Mr Abu Obe, to inquire more about me. His flattering thought was that it was really confounding to think that the civil service could still have something to teach him.
By the end of my set’s participation in the orientation seminar, I had been appointed to a technical team. Professor Adedeji also delivered to me a letter to be the guest speaker at his 70th birthday that was to happen a week after the orientation programme. But the most far reaching of his efforts on behalf of my scholarship and career was that he put in a word for me with Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and Professor Akin Mabogunje. Chief Obasanjo took up his high recommendation and I was subsequently appointed as the technical head of the team that developed the 2003 national public service reform strategic at the Management Services Office at the Presidency. No one should therefore wonder why this tribute is not just another tribute for me. The late Professor Adedeji was critical to my scholarship and strategic placement within the civil service system in Nigeria.
And this leads me to my second point. Professor Adebayo Adedeji’s public administration credential stands as a critical signpost for every aspiring Nigerian, and indeed African, public administration scholar and professional. Any significant effort to tease his contribution to public administration must be prepared to adequately rewrite a large portion of that contribution as a unique addition to the discourse and practice of public administration in Africa. Adebayo Adedeji embodies an essential legacy of administrative thinking that was motivated by the true essence of service. The trajectory of his scholarship and professional career makes for an interesting dissertation on patriotic public administration. And this is in a country where it is very difficult to be a patriot.
There are at least three crucial levels at which his contribution to public administration could be highlighted. The first is the level of professional service at the national level. This is where the Professor first cut his professional administrative teeth, and eventually laid the foundation of his engagement with development economics and national development planning. By the time he had finished deploying his significant knowledge to the problematic of post-war reconstruction efforts under the Gowon regime, Professor Adedeji had earned himself the sobriquet of “The Professor of National Development Plan.” Appointed as the Federal Commissioner for Economic Development and Reconstruction, the then freshly minted Harvard University graduate was tasked with the onerous responsibility of mapping the economically messy terrain of post-war Nigeria. He definitely benefitted from the First National Development Planning (1962-1968).
But the challenges involved in this cannot be compared with the post-war national planning that had to go into the second and the third national planning, especially for a 36 year old fresh graduate who had to piece together the fundamentals of economically designing a blueprint that will enable the government make sense of an ethnically divided nation. From the second to the third development plans, the young professor at the Obafemi Awolowo University had the brilliant collaboration of sound minds, from Chief Olu Falae to Chief Ime Ebong.
But Professor Adedeji had his eyes on more intellectual challenges. And this is to be expected as the first professor of public administration in Nigeria. The establishment of the University of Ife Institute of Administration marked a significant turning point for the domestication and further transformation of the study of public administration in Nigeria. It came at a very critical point because Nigeria had just gained independence, and the administration of the country was already an issue.
Continued next week