Wimpey and my last few weeks of national youth service turned out to be in animated suspension,
during which I was active in my private consulting work. I still got my certificate of service without
any problem, but got no commendations.
I was 21 at the time and I had developed this activist mentality that certain sort of behaviour is wrong
and must be challenged. Now that I am older, I understand clearly what they were doing and part of
the money was going to government officials, maybe some of it went to the consultants, but it was a
whole structure of monthly payoffs. I did not know it then because no one taught us that in our quantity
surveying curriculum, and I did not believe that people did that kind of stuff. Once I started practising
as a QS consultant and started getting offers from people, I then fully realized what was going on with
Wimpey and I was just too naïve at the time to understand it. Little did I know, the scheme I
uncovered there was only the first of many that I would encounter both while working in the private
sector and years later in public service – on a grander scale.
Chapter Two
The Calm Before the Storm
“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle
When I returned to Kaduna in August 1981, I had three job offers. One was to work for the French
construction giant, Fougerolle on another hydroelectric dam project, the Jebba Dam; another was with
a Kano-based professional quantity surveying firm that I had interned with while in university, then
known as Murt-Lamy Associates; and the third was with the Kaduna-based, NNDC[23] affiliate, the
New Nigeria Construction Company Ltd. Since Sani Maikudi and I were then planning to establish a
construction company to build homes, factories and roads and such, I decided to take the job with the
New Nigeria Construction Company and was assigned to a teaching hospital project site in nearby
Zaria. In this job, I learned the risks of being involved in an office romance. The job of Site Quantity
Surveyor with the New Nigeria Construction Company ended after six months due to a conflict with
the financial controller of the company involving a mutual romantic interest. Essentially, we were
both dating his secretary at the same time and for a while I was the only one in the company who did
not know that. As a more senior officer he was in a position to target me, make my life miserable in
several ways and he did. After six months of employment, I resigned and returned to Kaduna and
began thinking of impromptu ways to start our own business.
While waiting to get the business started, I worked for various firms in an individual consultant
capacity that enabled me visit the future capital, Abuja, for the very first time. We went on a project
visit while I was on the team working with a planning consulting firm called Environment Seven from
Chicago, USA. The firm came to Nigeria to prepare a master plan for one of the satellite towns of
Abuja, a new town called Karu, in association with a Nigerian subsidiary, Environment Seven (E7)
Nigeria Ltd., led by an architect and ABU alumnus, Ibrahim Mahmood. Others I met and worked with
at the time include architects Greg Icha, Ahmed Dantata (deceased), and a town planner, Dr.
Mohammed Sani Abdu – developing friendships that endured even after we all went our separate
professional ways.
At that time, Abuja was basically just savannah, a few huts and trees here and there and nothing else.
The airport had just been constructed and the express-road had been built from the airport to the city,
and nothing more. The Hilton hotel was then under construction, the ‘Shagari’ presidential complex
was being built, but nothing more. So we took the old Keffi Road, through what is now Millennium
Park, and went to Karu and looked around with the American team and their Nigerian counterparts
that were working on the master plan for the new town.
This was in 1982, six years after the decision was made to move the capital from Lagos to Abuja
within a 25 year timeframe. Honestly, my first impression upon finally seeing the city site was that
Abuja was a dream that would never happen in my lifetime, and that it was impossible for this jungle,
this bush, to ever be the capital of Nigeria in the next 25 years. Fifty was the more likely scenario in
my estimation. Even as late as in 1988, when my partners and I debated whether we should move the
headquarters of our consulting business from Kaduna to Abuja, the pessimism about Abuja remained.
Three out of four of us voted against relocating to Abuja because we did not believe it would ever
turn out to be what it became by the mid-1990s. When I bought my first house that year, I had the
option to buy or build in Abuja and I decided in favour of Kaduna, which was clearly, with the
benefit of hindsight, perhaps the worst investment decision I ever made. If I had built that same house
in Abuja, I could sell it today for over a billion naira, the equivalent of nearly ten million dollars. In
Kaduna, I could not get more than a couple of hundred million naira or the equivalent of one or two
million dollars today. The way Abuja grew and became a viable capital is nothing short of
miraculous, really. It is one of the decisions that former President Ibrahim Babangida deserves all
credit for taking, because his administration did it nearly single-handedly. He is without a doubt, not
only largely responsible for building the future city’s core infrastructure but also for accelerating
Abuja’s growth when he relocated the seat of government from Lagos in December 1991.
In any event, my private sector experience exposed me to many people very early in my life, so I
gained a lot of experience in dealing with people. I learned to be more patient because as a
construction consultant I had to be not only professional, but courteous to prospective clients to get
appointed as consultant to certain projects. I registered a quantity surveying consulting firm in 1982
and started operating out of the bungalow which I shared with my closest friend at the time, Abba
Bello Ingawa. Our very first income-earning job was the First Bank Sokoto Branch, which pre-
contract functions we completed in late 1982, for a gross fee then of twelve thousand naira which was
the equivalent of about $15,000. We then applied the proceeds to purchase our first Sharp photocopy
machine and Olivetti electronic typewriter, and that was pretty much how we got started. Abba
Bello’s day job was working for Conital, an Italian construction company at the time, while assisting
me during weekends. I worked full-time for our own QS consulting firm which after several
metamorphoses became three firms, Design Cost Associates (Project Management), El-Rufai
&Partners (Chartered Quantity Surveyors) and Proquest Consultants (Procurement Advisory). Since
there were just about a dozen chartered quantity surveyors in Nigeria at the time, to use the
prestigious and more distinctive "Chartered" appellation, the firm was required by the rules of the
RICS to carry my name as the only person so qualified. Since then, many of our staff and partners
have acquired the qualification and I have not been involved in the firms' day-to-day operations since
1998, but they have chosen to keep the name. So to sum up, eighteen months after graduating from
universi
ty, and six months after completing national youth service, circumstances compelled me to be
my own boss and a small business owner. Apart from national service, I had worked for someone
else for all of six months, did not get to like that idea, and was forced by unplanned chain of events to
start our own consulting business with initially dormant partners.
The Early Days of Private Practice
In short order, we had a lot of new business rolling in and with that, came a lot of money at a very
young age. The first time we made our first million naira - the equivalent of more than a million
dollars then - was around 1986, in our mid-twenties. What having money early showed me was that
money was not particularly important to one's happiness. In the beginning we partied, bought things
we have always wanted and gifts for relations and friends and it was fun, no doubt. During that
period, many close friends began to change the way they interacted with us. They became more
respectful and started deferring to me and Abba. Personally, after the initial euphoria, the deference
got me worried and in one or two instances scared me. I began to feel increasingly isolated, lonely
and unhappy. Suddenly, government economic policy changed that state of affairs.
We woke up one morning to learn that the naira had lost half of its value overnight. Nigeria was going
through an IMF-type structural adjustment programme at the time that involved devaluing the currency
every week in an auction and within a year we were nearly broke. In 1986, we had a million dollars
or so each to our names; by the end of 1987, we were down to almost nothing, thanks to Babangida's
economic programme – the structural adjustment programme (appropriately called SAP), and Nigeria
has never been the same since then, and in the view of many people, mostly not for the better. So
when we went nearly broke, our friends reverted to the normal relationship we were accustomed to.
They stopped being too deferential and resumed treating us like buddies.
For me that was a huge lesson. I also realized that one did not need a lot of money to live a good life
and that too much money can even distort the reality of one’s relationships with people. In short, it
sounds like a cliché, but it is true: money can be the root of all evil. If a man has a lot of money and
sees a beautiful girl he likes, and he has a nice car and looks rich, he cannot be sure if she truly likes
him when he asks her for a date because she is likely to say yes anyway. The same applies to a rich
madam who drives along the street and sees a young man whom she likes – you can fill in the gap! So
with this experience, I made up my mind that based on the legitimate income from my profession and
the blessings of God, I could live a comfortable life without having to do anything dishonest. Seeking
for anything more, dishonestly, would only damage one's humanity and affect a person’s dignity, and
was therefore not really worth it. This became etched in my mental architecture very early in my
professional life.
I have also been privileged to meet several professionals in the course of my career that assisted me
and nurtured my innate talents. Shehu Lawal Giwa was in many ways a quantity surveying pioneer.
He graduated at the top of his class both at Barewa College and Ahmadu Bello University, and
established a firm in the mid-1970s that enabled many young northerners to believe they could do the
same and not starve in the process. Though he spent all his professional life in the private sector, he
was the quintessential public servant, who drove from Kaduna to Zaria every Sunday to teach us
Advanced Building Quantities for many, many years. It was this example that encouraged me to do the
same for 17 years, at various times, teaching Cost Control, Professional Practice and Procedure, as
well as Advanced Building Quantities to final year QS undergraduate students. I became an active
member of our local professional body, the Nigerian Institute of Quantity Surveyors (NIQS) and got
elected as Assistant General Secretary, and at some point the Vice Chairman of the Professional
Examinations Board. I was privileged again to serve alongside distinguished professionals like
Abdulkadir Kawu, the late Chief O W E Owete and Chief Ezugo Isiadinso. They encouraged me and
assigned responsibilities that deepened and broadened my perspectives about the QS profession,
public service and our unity in diversity as a country. I made acquaintances and developed close
friendships with Godson Moneke, for many years the NIQS Executive Secretary and near
contemporaries like Segun Ajanlekoko, Felix Okereke-Onyieri and Alex Nwosisi. Working with
these people convinced me that Nigeria's greatness is achievable if good people from every part of
the nation come together to work as teams pulling in the same direction. I appreciate these fine people
for their roles in contributing to the richness of my professional life. I remain grateful to God for these
early blessings.
Our active participation in NIQS activities encouraged others around Kaduna to join. My partner,
Husaini Dikko was a reluctant convert, but rose to be the president of the institute and currently heads
the professional regulatory body, the QS Registration Board of Nigeria. We established state chapters
in virtually every state of the federation and made the examination and professional entry paths more
participation in engineering as well as oil and gas projects. These experiences and exposure all came
handy later in public service.
Marriage and Challenges of Family Life
I met my first wife, Hadiza Isma, one pleasant August evening at Queen Amina Hall of the Ahmadu
Bello University, Zaria, in 1976. I knew the moment I saw her that she was the girl for me, but thought
it best to hang around and wait for the right moment to make the move. We became friends and got
closer over time, and supported each other through our various romantic experiments until about 1983
when we began dating for real. We got married in Kano on the 17th of August, 1985 and moved into
our first home three months later – a rented three bedroom bungalow along Dawaki Road (now Isa
Kaita Road) in Kaduna GRA. Shortly after the wedding, we sought to answer the question of where
would we build our marital life together. We considered this question along with our choice of
honeymoon destination: London.
The first time I had visited the UK was in 1982, after I qualified as a certified quantity surveyor. I
took the qualifying examinations of the Institute of Quantity Surveyors of the UK in 1981 during my
national youth service year and passed. I then had to go to the UK to fill out some forms and go
through the formalities required to be qualified and recognized as an associate of the UK Institute of
Quantity Surveyors (AIQS). Nigerians did not need a visa then to visit the UK. You got a six-month
entry stamp at the airport! It was a quick visit to formalize my licensing and get properly admitted into
the Quantity Surveying profession.
My next time back in the UK was in 1985 for our honeymoon. Hadiza had been to Europe and
America long before me as she was from an affluent middle class family, and they were vacationing
abroad while we were in secondary school and university. When we went for the honeymoon in
1985, I wa
s also going to be interviewed for a job. Since we had both trained to be professionals in
the construction industry – she as an architect and I as a quantity surveyor – we thought that given the
economic situation Nigeria faced at the time, it might make sense to explore relocating to the UK to
make a living there. In 1982, the Shagari civilian government declared austerity measures when oil
prices collapsed. The elections in 1983 were a farce, and became violent with riots and post-election
killings in Ondo State. Most Nigerians were not shocked when, on December 31st, 1983, the military
took power once again, with Major-General Muhammadu Buhari emerging as Head of State. Buhari
inherited a near-empty treasury and huge trade arrears accumulated during years of reckless spending.
Cutbacks in capital spending were inevitable and the construction industry was the first to feel the
recession. In 1984, Nigeria looked like a hopeless place to be for young construction professionals.
The military had returned without mentioning a hand-over date, oil prices had collapsed and there
were very few new construction projects happening anywhere. The only consolation was that the
regime was essentially honest, imposed discipline and was intent on repaying our debts instead of
submitting to an IMF-imposed austerity programme! As a young couple, we explored every option.
I sent my resume to the Property Services Agency, an agency of the central government in the UK, and
was invited to be interviewed for a job as quantity surveyor. The agency ended up offering me the
position, with a salary of 12,000 pounds per annum. After making enquiries as to how much money
that really was in concrete terms, after deducting taxes and basic living expenses, we both decided
that the job was not worth the sacrifice of leaving our country. There was no point emigrating if the
most we could save was some 200 pounds a month – at the end of one year, we would have saved
2,400 British pounds, which was about the money we could save working hard in Nigeria over the