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Hadiza Bala Usman is the woman upon whose very feminine, young but strong shoulders, the executive management of Nigerian sea ports, via the Nigerian Ports Authority, now rests. She was appointed last month in what was definitively a break from the past in appointments at that level. She is sitting just a couple of feet away when I meet her. I had come into the room where the meeting was scheduled some ten minutes later than my appointment, no thanks to the usual unpredictable Lagos traffics. My host offers me this vantage position, which provided me with an opportunity to sit so close and it meets with my welcome because I needed to be up close to enable me to read and interpret her body language as she speaks and answers questions. I have a huge general mistrust for Nigerian politicians and some of those who are given appointments requiring expert, business and executive management knowledge. But if you are a student of body language you can see through them when you watch them speak. So, I was interested in what she was going to say, but much more, how she was going to say it. I needed to read her, besides listening to her.
This meeting was initially scheduled to hold a week ago but I was away in London and rued missing the opportunity. By some providence, however, someone involved in setting up the meeting, realizing something, said jokingly, “How could we hold it when the King of Business Journalism wasn’t in town.” He was referring to BusinessDay, of course, not me as an individual, because the Nigerian Ports Authority, ports business and ports management are serious business and I suppose Hadiza’s handlers knew BusinessDay had to be there, because this is its turf. I felt that to be wonderful compliment. Hadiza is the daughter of the feisty intellectual and historian, Bala Usman, one of my beloved Nigerian intellectuals whom I followed as a high school newspaper reader. Her father lived in an era when Wole Soyinka and the enigmatic, cerebral and iconoclastic intellectual Chinwezu, the writer whose one-line poem in Professor Donatus Ibe Nwoga’s poetry anthology made a defining impact on me upon encountering it in my freshman year at university, engaged in what someone termed the bole ka ja (Yoruba language for, “come down, let’s fight”) intellectual disputations of the 1980s.
Hadiza is the popular activist behind the now globally acclaimed protest movement, BringBackOurGirls, which she established following the kidnap of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram in 2014. You would have expected nothing less from the daughter of Bala Usman. Her appointment as managing director of the Nigerian Ports Authority caused a stir in business and industry, not the least because she was coming from a completely different background to a job that has historically been entrenched in establishment types. But she comes into the job with a number of business and strategy responsibilities under her belt; and these can be traced back to her time at the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), her role as Special Assistant on Project Implementation to the then Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, the current Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufia, Director of Strategy for the Good Governance Group, and lately as Chief of Staff to the Kaduna State Governor.
So, as she sits just a foot and a half away from me and begins to speak, she looks straight and maintains eye contact, a body language posture that is often interpreted to mean, “See, I am not going to hide anything from you. I am going to say it as it is.” She talks about being at the NPA to run an efficient ports administration in Nigeria. “Sometimes you need fresh eyes to come from outside to be able to see what is wrong with an organisation,” she tells me. “We have seen many things here that are not right, and sometimes they are shocking, especially the way that certain contracts have been drawn that tend to shortchange the NPA and the country, who the other parties are supposed to be working for.” She is pensive when she says this and you could almost feel she carries a burden put in her heart by the unholy discoveries that she and her new team have made since taking over. When you look at her frame, you are tempted to feel sorry for her wondering how she will deal with this heavy load that the NPA represents in the years of government agency mismanagement framework.
“We are going to look at everything. Once there was no political will. Now, there is and we have the mandate to make the NPA work as it should and make contributions to the economy and to the Nigerian treasury,” she says to me, clearly betraying the fighter in her. She is clear about the way she wants to see the NPA function.
Hadiza uses the phrase ‘our customers’ and immediately comes across as someone who recognises that government agencies have customers who are to be treated with respect. “We will listen to our customers, importers, exporters and other agencies working in the Ports to improve on our service delivery to the nation. Anything less than world-class services is simply not acceptable; attaining such heights is a mission to which I am certain we can all subscribe,” she reiterated. Hadiza sees the ports as having a major role to play in the economic diversification agenda of the central government, describing them as a “critical artery of the economy, and it is our duty to ensure that the operators deliver port services at the standards that our businesses deserve in the 21st century.”
She talks about the benefit of belonging to a system in which she could leverage on her relationships to deliver an efficient NPA to the Nigerian people. “The good thing is that I belong to a system in which I have relationships with people who can provide synergy that I can tap into to make things work,” she says in a way that tells me that she is determined to succeed in her new role. Hadiza knows that things that would work have to be tangible things.
Since assuming the position she and her team have been outlining these tangible things that she would want to see delivered. She is resolute about delivery an efficient, modern ports system for Nigeria. “We have begun work to see that we have an efficient modern ports system,” she says, noting that there is a five pillar framework of activities that she is focusing on to see that Nigeria has a ports authority that works for users, for Nigeria and for Nigerians.
“On getting here and taking a good look at what’s on ground, we realized that we have got to move away from the old ways of doing things. We have seen that there is a deficiency in the organizational structure. So we are doing a review of the organizational structure of the NPA. We know that we have an aging workforce, especially at the top where many are due to retire soon. We are embarking on recruiting new workers to meet our desire to deliver modern and efficient services at the ports,” she tells me. This will also involve putting in place clear and workable succession plan.
Hadiza has good experience in project management and is a scenario planning executive. She tells me that there is a 25-year ports development master plan that she and her team are taking a deep look at to review, update and then implement as part of meeting the objective of delivering an efficient and modern ports system.
One thing that eats at her heart, her body language revealed, is the massive revenue leakage that they have found since settling down to work. “We are working to plug the revenue leakages that we have seen. In order for the NPA to do this, we will embark on a massive review of concession agreements, service agreements, lease agreements with a view to determining the international best practice on financial models, tariff regimes and business models,” she further says. As if validating her assertion that fresh eyes have a better way to see rot in a system, Hadiza is the first NPA chief executive to admit that there is something wrong with these agreements that do not favour the country.
She will be working also to improve operational efficiency, including ease of doing business at the ports, enthroning a ports community system, and looking at putting in place single window, single bill system for ports users.
“We are also interested in looking at the road infrastructure into the ports. “I do not feel that we should not be interested in ensuring that the roads into the ports are in good condition. I know that we have a responsibility in this regard and I intend to be involved to see what we can do because our quest for efficiency will not be possible if the road infrastructure in and out of the ports is in bad shape,” she tells me, just before the session came to a close.
PHILLIP ISAKPA
