You have a private sector background. How would you compare your experience working in the private and public sector?

There is some interesting contrast. I mean the automatic reaction of many people is that don’t work for Government. It is inefficient, corrupt, bureaucratic and frustrating. To an extent I can see where elements of that come from. I tend to try to see positives when possible. One thing I discovered very quickly was that the bureaucracy takes on the character of the leader. If you have a corrupt, lazy or inefficient leader, who doesn’t care what anybody is getting on to; human beings will be human beings. If you have a driven leader, who is not encouraging misbehavior, people tend to wake up and almost with a sense of relief; I think everybody wants a bit of direction and purpose in life. So people come to work and sit-down, get bored, play cards, watch TV, read papers, and then suddenly somebody comes and gives them a mission and you should see the change in people. Our Governor is so active and so forceful and he has a vision to rebuild the state, so people wake up and they begin to say my job is part of delivering this mandate, so you suddenly see change in human behavior. Of course it’s all about percentages, there is still the irredeemably lazy or completely misguided, but what I am really saying is that a lot of the things that happen in the civil service or in government will depend on the leader. If you have a good or driven leader, people will respond and start to deliver. The second thing is that that process now brings out those who you can work with. So if you come in and say I am from the private sector – I am result oriented, am system driven and you start trying to get things done. There will always be people saying; Is he the first person to come here? Is it his father’s business? He will soon get tired or will soon go and leave us in peace. But for every one of those you get, you probably get two or three; they come running in with ideas. It was very rewarding for me when one or two people started coming to me of their own accord. You have mentioned something in a meeting or said we are going to do something soon, and suddenly they just come to the office, knock on the door and say I want to talk to you about something and they say that thing you said…… and they will have taken it to the next few steps and they have thought about it on your behalf. So you note that person, and say good, that’s somebody with a bit of initiative, that’s somebody who wants to work. Once you start doing that you will find enough people within any given ministry or department to work with. So basically, one of the things I had to decide early on is this is a massive organization. If you decide you are going to face management, you have to motivate people, you have to supervise them, but if you decide that your job is to turn the ministry into a performing unit, like a manager in the private sector. Don’t forget that civil service has their own systems for appraisal, for promotion, for incentives, for training. So you start wading into that and say am turning this place around. You will get into trouble, so you have to be careful, just work with the system, motivate people, get them to buy into the vision and then work with people you can work with and don’t spend too much energy, saying I can turn this place into a private sector type of efficient, systems driven, result oriented outfit. Find the good people, it is you who will give them the vision and tell them what is exiting you or what your priorities are or what you want to do – these are people you want to wake up, they won’t hear the message or wakeup, unless you get the message across. You spot the good people and you work with them. I also found that compared to the private sector, there are people here who perform better than many I have met and worked with in the private sector, who get paid good money, wear shiny suits and drive flashy cars. Some of them are just posing. They are just as inefficient and not focused as the next person. I don’t buy into that. When I was coming here, people said beware of the ‘evil servants’ they will deal with you. They deal with people because people get into fights. They come in and decide they are going to evangelize and revolutionize or they come with a pre-determined way they look at people and naturally you get a bad response if every civil servant you look at you are thinking, ah this is one of the enemy, they are going to finish me. I must be careful. I must start plotting, planning, spying and operating with a heavy hand. But if you do it the other way round and you assume that somewhere in there you got some good people to work with, you will find them, they will come out and you will deliver.

What would you describe as your greatest challenge so far?

Ah, I don’t know whether I read it somewhere, or whether I just came up with this phrase, but governance at my level is a constant battle for the access to scarce resources; that is how I see it. My fellow commissioners are my competitors and we are all competing for the same inadequate pot of money. If there was enough money to do everything we wanted to do, Ogun State will be revolutionized overnight. So the Governor has to set priorities and then look at what different sectors are planning to do, in terms of implementing his vision and then he has to give out bit here, bit there. So you find that you are in a constant situation of this needs doing, but there is not enough money. Of course there is money coming out, and you are therefore able to buy this equipment or do this training or refurbish this clinic or hospital. So there is always something going but at the same time there are always a hundred and one things that need doing. By the way that is the other thing that I wanted to point out- the difference between government and private sector. Very often private sector targets jobs or responsibilities. A company knows what he needs to do and is going about and doing it. In contrast, the responsibilities of government are never ending. So there is not only never enough money but there is never enough time. So for instance, if I want to set a meeting with a colleague and we are looking at our diaries, that meeting probably can’t happen before two weeks ends. I phoned up my colleague the other day and said we need to meet oh. I think it was two and half weeks before we could find a space that we could all meet. If you are somebody from outside and are waiting for the result of that meeting, you will probably say what are they doing? I went to see them two and a half weeks ago and they have not even met. It is not because we are lazy and unmotivated, it is because government at any given time is handling a million and one responsibilities, so people forget that the reason government is slow is that at a given time they are parallel processing so many tasks and by the time you face one move it along a bit and then you face the next one move it along and then you keep going down the line before you come back to make follow up on that first one with the best people in the world, you are going to have spent more time than somebody outside can really understand. That is something I have been educated about since I came in. One of the things you do when you are struggling to cope with time is that you delegate and if you can’t delegate to your own people you outsource to the private sector. There are many things that government takes on that it shouldn’t be taking on e.g. we are not event organizers. So really, every event we do, we should get an event organizer; let them cope with logistics of hall decorations, catering, sending out invitations and arranging venues. But at the end of the day, if you did that, you spend money you don’t have, so half your people have become professional event organizers, because in a ministry as wide as health, there is no week that one event or the other is not happening. For example after this interview, we are going straight to an event. A foundation is handing over a vehicle - Corporate Social Responsibility. CSR must be recognized. We owe it to them to make a bit of a ceremony out of receiving it, and keep it visible. We got it for free and that is the least we can do.

What would make you feel fulfilled when you eventually leave office?

When I was appointed, well-wishers called and many people gave me advice, saying look o! Don’t go there and try and do everything, pick one or two things and focus on delivering few things, so that when you leave, you can point to it. It is good advice except that I will modify it slightly. I would say you can still try and do everything, but you will not succeed in doing everything, and what will inevitably happen is that, at the end, you will point to one or two things that you can say you did. But people will know there are about one hundred other things that you improved slightly or significantly, but it not just very visible. There are so many things in public health that are not visible and that can be frustrating when you are operating in a political arena. Because you can spend your time working your socks off and the whole department or ministry is working on it, and you make this change and something works better than it was ever working before, people may not know. There are things we do like training to improve the quality of people. There is something that we have been doing for two years with the whole issue of drug procurement, storage, distribution and all that. And it is just quietly going on in the background. I don’t need any exaggeration to say we are revolutionizing how things are done. But by the time it is all finished, actually people will notice the difference, but they won’t know where it came from. They would not know the depth of different processes and functions that changed to make this little change that they see at the end. They will have no idea, but that doesn’t stop you doing it. So that’s an example of something that I might quietly sit back and say I am glad I did that. I had also wanted to know why things were done this way. I got there and saw that it was not a good way, managed to get it changed and now it is changed and staying changed. I know it is good for those who are in the system. The general public will get the benefit but it’s about ascribing that benefit or it being the size of the benefit for the individual. It’s like a small benefit for millions of people. It is still big but for each individual they want to see how fundamental a change had happened. I see them in two ways there are things I know I did and I will feel satisfied and there will be things you want people to clap for you. We are all human we all want recognition. Also you must sow the seeds of sustainability. If you do something which is good and they clap for you and you go and a year later they have allowed it to sink you will feel bad.

You have a Masters in Business Administration (MBA). To what extent has it helped you in your role as the Honourable Commissioner of Health?

Well it’s been fantastic. I had an idea that going into medicine and health had made me miss out on some things that I really felt were important to a working life in whatever field you are in. That is why I did the MBA. I didn’t do the, MBA because I wanted to leave medicine. I just felt that there is this gap and that going into medicine had left me ignorant about important things like organizing yourself, managing people, financial issues, understanding economics, understanding human resources, marketing and promotion. These are things which I use on day to day basis here. I am managing a lot of people in the ministry. I have to always think about finances and how to always make things better. I have to think about visibility in healthcare. A lot of prevention is communication. Our job is to pass information to people to enable them make healthy decisions in life. There is no facet that the MBA has not helped. A lot of people think it is all about business but what we forget is how much positive the business can influence what goes on in the public sector or ministry. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. In an MBA you have the flexibility to choose things that are still related. Any project or any essay we had to write, I would find the business aspect of health to write about. I turned it into a health related M.B.A.

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