Upon completing the routine security check, we ascended to the impressive Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) complex in Abuja. Led to a spacious yet modest hall where an event was unfolding, we found seats beside a woman modestly dressed in a Muslim Hijab. She greeted us warmly and invited us to sit beside her. Her humility and warmth immediately put us at ease.

We initially assumed she was a guest or another participant at the briefing. However, as we discussed the media industry, she listened intently, nodding in agreement. When she finally spoke, her insightful comments on disruptive technologies and their impact on the communication industry left us in awe. Her deep knowledge spanned online streaming services, virtual events, and redefining audience engagement through innovation, leaving us with a profound respect for her expertise.

She elaborated on how blockchain, 5G networks, and artificial intelligence facilitate secure, faster connectivity and interactive experiences with enhanced royalty management. Beyond aiding in content generation and personalisation, she noted media production is becoming increasingly democratised. Moreover, she schooled us on the latest technological tools for fact-checking, cybersecurity, and digital journalismall without a trace of arrogance or pomposity.

As the event concluded, we offered our printed business cards. In response, she shared her digital business card. Scanning the QR code revealed her identity: Hajia Rakiya Shuaibu Mohammed, the Director of Information Technology at the Central Bank of Nigeria. This position speaks volumes about her expertise and influence in the field.

Curiosity drove me to search for her profile upon leaving. What I uncovered was astounding. Despite not being a celebrity tech expert paraded on social media or television, she is an extraordinary IT specialist. Former CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele described her as such, having promoted her from Head of Information Security Management after a rigorous selection process.

In his remarks at the eNaira Hackathon Grand Finale in Abuja in 2022, Emefiele, the then CBN Governor, credited the success of Africas first central bank digital currency partly to Hajiya Rakiya. He admitted to underestimating her suitability for the Director of Information Technology position, initially preferring a male candidate. He said, I must single her out. When she was considered for the director role, I initially doubted. I was thinking.. Im Sorry, ladies, please forgive me. I said a lady IT Director. I went back and began to read her CV. She is a First-Class computer science graduate, a brilliant erudite lady from Northern Nigeria, and a chartered accountant. I said you could not have a better person as head of IT for Central Bank of Nigeria.”

Her academic and professional accolades are extensive. Rakiya was the Head Girl of the Federal Government Girl College, Bakori, and the Best Graduating Student in 1982. She obtained a First-Class degree in Computer Science from Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University in 1987, followed by a Masters degree in Information Systems Engineering from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in 1994. She has also attended executive education programs at Harvard University and Oxford University.

Rakiya’s professional journey spans over 25 years across the financial, telecommunications, and technology sectors. Before her promotion to IT Director at the CBN, where she spearheaded and implemented the Industry Security Operation Centre (NFICERT) and Africa’s first Digital Currency, Rakiya had headed the System Services and Information Security Management (CISO) Division of the bank, where she modernised the IT infrastructure and introduced innovative solutions like video conferencing. She had developed and implemented robust information security strategies, maintaining ISO 27001 certification and ensuring zero major security incidents.
Previously, she was Head of Strategy and IT at Galaxy Backbone Plc (2009-2011), CIO at Premium Pension Limited (2005-2008), Deputy General Manager (IT) and CIO of NITEL (2003-2005), and Head of Branch Banking Systems in the Northern Region of Continental Merchant Bank (1988-1995).

She holds numerous certifications, including Lean Process Practitioner, Certified IT Business Manager, Certified Chief Information Security Officer (CCISO), Certified Enterprise and Solution Architect, Certified IT Governance Professional (COBIT, CGEIT), Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Chartered Accountant (ICAN) and Honorary member of the Certified Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (CIBN).

On May 16, 2024, she made an outstanding presentation to the CBN board on maximising the utility of current IT facilities. However, a week later, despite her impressive background, certifications, and contributions to the bank, Rakiya has become one of the victims of an inexplicable spate of officers retrenched by the current CBN Governor, Yemi Cardoso.

Here is a woman who has contributed immensely by ensuring increased revenue, reduced costs, and improved security in various organisations she had worked for and could just be retired due to political exigency.

It is perplexing to understand the rationale behind retrenching such highly qualified and integral personnel among several others in that bank, especially considering the ongoing appointments of external consultants. If retaining and promoting the best within the service is not prioritised, what justifies these replacements with outsiders?

Yushau A. Shuaib is the author of Award Winning Crisis Communication Strategies. yashuaib@yashuaib.com

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On May 1, 2018, while Nigerians were observing a work-free day for workers, a Staff Writer of an emerging media platform, the News Digest, spotted smoke rising from the Headquarters of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in Abuja.

The young journalist parked his car and started taking pictures and video of the incident. As an Editorial Adviser of the new media outlet which consists mainly of campus journalists, youth corpers and young graduates on internship, I was contacted for an appropriate caption and editorial angle for the story. I have mentored some of the young journalists and observed that they enjoy scooping fresh angles from reports on social media as they develop and convert trending issues into the news by engaging celebrities and newsmakers in interviews. With their handy smartphones, the major tools of their job, they take pictures, conduct interviews, record videos, edit stories and publish the reports at the click of the button.

I closely looked at the images of heavy smoke emanating from the CBN’s tallest complex in the District. Though I didn’t doubt the sincerity of the young journalist, I nevertheless nursed the fear that the photos and the videos could have been doctored and manipulated.

The young journalist insisted that he was still at the scene. I asked that we should engage in a live WhatsApp video chat to verify the authenticity of the claim. Behold, I watched the live transmitted video of heavy and thick smoke enveloping the building.

While it is conventional by social media standard to just post and publish the pictures without contacting relevant authorities, I volunteered to speak to the ever vibrant and responsive spokesperson of CBN, Mr. Isaac Okorafor on the incident. Several calls to his phone weren’t going while the young journalist was on my neck to get clearance to break the news with the pictures.

The pictures were immediately published with a story captioned: CBN Headquarters on Fire. The story went thus: “There was a fire outbreak at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) headquarters in Central Business District in Abuja. The News Digest reporter who was at the scene reports that Fire-fighters have controlled and quenched the fire from engulfing the tallest building in the area.”

Immediately after the news break, CBN unleashed one of the most exciting, timely and effective crisis communication strategies to counter negative narratives of the fire incident at its headquarters premises in Abuja.

Less than an hour after the news break, Okorofar who was outside the country then reached out to the media on the phone, especially through the WhatsApp (which is cheaper for foreign calls) to deny the fire-outbreak and insisted that it was smoke from a malfunctioned generating plant.

For a tactical reason and after realising the major platform used to share the fire incident story was WhatsApp, he dispatched an urgent press release using the same channel to reach the media contacts and relevant stakeholders. He continued to provide WhatsApp updates including pictures and video while maintaining other means of communication like email through his aides.

The spokesperson’s WhatsApp press release, which he rushed with few spelling mistakes, indicating that he typed it on phone and sent, read thus: “There Is No Fire at CBN Head Office. Reports that the Cenyral Bank of Nigeria (CBN) head office building is on fire are false. Passers-by who saw a pall of exhaust from the generator house far away from the building apparently mistook the exhaust for fire smoke.

“The CBN maintains a total security system that triggers safety alarms in the presence of smoke and so all fire engines and personnel received the alert only to discover that it was an unusual pall of exhaust. The affected generator has been rested and normal work has been uninterrupted, while the engineers are working to rectify the issues with the generator. We hereby assure the general public that there has been no fire at our building,” he concluded.

The release was widely shared on WhatsApp and other social media. By the following morning, most of the conventional and traditional media avoided the use of “FIRE” to describe the CBN’s incident in their publications and broadcast while other social and online media dropped their initial reports and updated their stories accordingly.

Isaac Okorafor as the CBN spokesperson was not only accessible for media enquiry through the period, his response was timely, and he demonstrated crisis communications tactics through effective coordination of his team, the sincerity of purpose, consistency and clarity of message that was terse and unambiguous.

Apart from having existing cordial media relationship, in crisis management, an experienced spokesperson can work with minimal supervision in taking critical and timely decisions when bureaucratic red-tapism could be dangerous.

Yushau A. Shuaib
www.yashuaib.com
Award-winning crisis communicator and Author of “An Encounter with the Spymaster”

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Speaker Bankole of NASS

The debate about corruption comes to the fore again at two different academic environments. Guest speakers at the separate universities are young personalities, key players in policy formulation and household names that hold sensitive public positions. Due to their backgrounds, utterances made by them at such fora are not only authoritative, but can become guides for development of national policies.

They are Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), who at the 8th Convocation Lecture of Igbinedion University, Okada, disclosed that the National Assembly (NASS) collects 25 per cent of the overheads of the Federal Government and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Dimeji Bankole, who at the pre-convocation lecture held at University of Lagos (UNILAG) Auditorium, stated that “civil servants are the most corrupt in the country”.

Majority of Nigerians agree with Sanusi’s assertion, which he stuck to even when he was summoned by the legislators to the National Assembly for obvious facts on how politicians have continued to milk the nation dry with their excessive expenditures and outlandish life-styles in the name of jumbo packages.

Nothing is more worrisome than the allegation of the Speaker, who, in an attempt to pick holes in Sanusi’s argument, went on to transfer his aggression by describing Nigeria’s civil servants as most corrupt in the country.

In his argument, which was quoted in the media, Bankole said corruption in Nigeria was perpetuated by corrupt and inept civil servants and not the political class. According to him, “in the past five years, an estimated N1 trillion was taken from the budget annually by civil servants and not returned to the treasury”. He went further to add that in 2008, when he became the Speaker, N21 billion was returned to the treasury from ministries. After probing and threatening of different people, they returned N350 billion as the unspent budget. The following year, he added, “they returned N350 billion and [in] 2010, they returned over N200 billion even though we extended the accounting year to March.”

Mr. Bankole probably forgot to realise that the heads of those agencies were not civil servants, but political office holders who were tenured and could be handpicked for such positions. He may also need to confirm how much the legislators returned within the same period since the alleged civil servants in the said ministries were at least magnanimous enough to return their unspent allocations.

While we all acknowledge the fact that corruption has permeated all sectors, including the traditional institutions, the media, spiritual houses and even schools, the most corrupt institution remains the legislative tier of government and by extension, the political class, which manipulates the electoral process and appointments of various officers.

We must try to define the role of players that guide and operate the public service. Civil servants are usually the best candidates employed in the service after going through rigorous screening exercises, even though those processes, in some cases have been bastardised by the political class which forces its candidates into public institutions by all means. Most of the civil servants including even drivers, messengers, clerks, and middle cadre officers, pass the screening for their competence. Some of them reach the level of directors through deserved promotions and just a fraction of that (about one percent), are promoted to the top level as Permanent Secretaries. A civil servant works on instruction and makes recommendations but the ultimate approval still lies with the political office holder.

One of the major criteria for selections or appointments into political/public offices is for the candidate to have an influential godfather or enough wealth to manipulate the process in order to achieve the desired positions. Apart from cases of certificate forgeries, some legislators got to the National assembly by being ‘Papa’s pikin’, and some got to their principal positions after the removal of their predecessors for corrupt practices. Check the National Assembly list.

The public is now aware of how elections are rigged and how unqualified and unscrupulous candidates are given political appointments, while the fate of civil servants is left in the hands of this calibre of public officers to determine who gets what in terms of political and financial patronage.

Corruption in the civil service is influenced by the political class. Bankole, probably needs to be reminded that the major suspects and culprits being prosecuted for financial and economic crimes are not the submissive civil servants but the political office holders that include members of the legislative and executive arms. Reeling out the names of such high-flying corrupt officers would not be possible due to space limitation.

The Speaker and those who look down on civil servants as nonentities and describe them in derogatory remarks, need to visit either, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) to see the records. It is well known how the oversight functions by legislators are turned into money-spinning ventures. We also cannot forget in a hurry, the antics of rabble rousers like former Chairman of the House Committee on Power, Ndudi Elumelu and his counterpart in the Senate, Senator Nicholas Ugbane, and other legislators who stage-managed a public hearing on the Independent Power Projects (IPP) probes, only to be involved in multi-billion Naira scam.

While this writer is not attempting to exonerate the civil service of corruption, those that soil the name of the institution are those that form the political class in collaboration with disgruntled, few corrupt officers in the service who are either cowed to submission for fear of losing their jobs and the greedy ones who could tolerate temptation to get a share of the national cake.

Is it not strange to every right thinking person that the same National Assembly that recently queried Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) for proposing an unnecessary and outrageous bill of N6 billion for SIM card registration approved same? The reversal of the rejection is not uncommon: it is just their usual threat meant for socio-political and economic extortions. By the way, have we forgotten serious allegations against principal officers of Bankole- House of Representatives by the Progressive group of the chamber led by Dino Melaye, who alleged that the Speaker, “Bankole, had not only ran a corrupt leadership since he assumed office in 2007, but through his style of leadership, generated a rift between the House and the Senate; displayed high-handedness and disrespect for members; and frequently breached the rules of the House”, as quoted?

We are eagerly hoping for the period to do away with leaders who are power- arrogant, and entice young ladies with their ill-gotten wealth into immoral affairs and executive prostitution. It is regrettable that not only are some of those officers engaged in treasury abuse, but also responsible for the bastardising of public infrastructures, including health and educational facilities by cunningly privatising our collective patrimonies to their cronies and providing private alternatives as latest investments.

The condition in Nigeria may force the cray-fish to bend, but not to the level of everyone losing semblance of integrity as most civil servants who are patiently looking forward to brighter future would never sell their conscience for pots of porridge.

This article by Yushau A. Shuaib has appeared in December 2010 in some of the national dailies including Daily Trust, Nigerian Tribune, Thisday, the Punch, Daily Independent, Leadership, Champion, the Sun and Peoples Daily.

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