President Bola Tinubu on Monday pledged to carry forward the governing ethos he ascribed to the late former President Muhammadu Buhari; discipline, integrity, security-first governance and social justice.

He said his truest tribute to the late Nigerian leader is to continue his legacy with results to show.

Speaking at the State House, Abuja, during the launch of From Soldier to Statesman: The Legacy of Muhammadu Buhari by Dr. Charles Omole, the President framed Buhari’s impact as a standard his administration will deliberately uphold.

“These are the pillars of his legacy. But a legacy is given greater meaning when those who follow choose to continue what has been started. That is my duty today,” he said.

Tinubu added: “President Buhari loved this country consistently, morning after morning, decision after decision, staying true to the oath he took.

“That is why even those who disagreed with him often acknowledged his honesty.”

In his remarks, the President paid respects to the Buhari family.

He described the former leader as one who “embodied quiet strength, discipline, and an enduring grace rooted in service,” and told Buhari’s widow, Aisha, her household that “the Buhari name will continue to inspire noble service for generations.”

Tinubu said the value of Buhari’s leadership is in the trust he left behind.

“The measure of a leader is not simply the offices he held or the motorcades that accompanied him.

“It is what persists when the sirens fall silent. President Muhammadu Buhari left behind a reputation for integrity, a spartan lifestyle, and the belief that public office is a trust and not a windfall,” he noted.

He reminisced on their political partnership that culminated in a watershed transition in 2015.

“Together, we built a broad coalition, campaigned across the country, and proved that Nigeria could chart a new course,” he noted, adding that their alliance “reshaped Nigeria’s political landscape” by unseating an incumbent.

“The coalition we built in 2014 is now the fastest-growing political party in Africa today. Its growth continues,” he said.

Tinubu welcomed the book’s intent to chronicle both the high points and imperfections of the Buhari persona.

“This book reinforces the public’s memory.

“It outlines achievements and flaws, as all honest histories should.

“It should motivate future leaders to learn lessons rather than repeat slogans, he stated.

The President distilled Buhari’s legacy into four pillars and tied each to current pursuits of his administration.

“First, humility. He believed that a leader must first discipline himself before he can discipline a system.

“He recognised that security is the foundation of citizenship and prosperity and pushed for reforms that endured beyond the headlines.

“Long-term thinking, constructing bridges, restoring railways, building roads, modernising our airports, and renewing critical infrastructure, while prioritising maintenance and sustainability,” said Tinubu.

On social justice, he said “targeted social investments to ensure that the state did not ignore the poor and vulnerable.”

Tinubu stressed that cooperation across divides is strength, not weakness.

“Our political journey together taught me that cooperation across differences is not weakness; it is wisdom.

“Nation-building demands that we compete passionately and govern responsibly.

“President Buhari understood that the contest ends when the oath begins,” he noted.

Tinubu urged a politics anchored on results and restraint, saying, “Nigeria is greater than any tribe, language, faith, or political party.

“This book reminds us that one life, lived with restraint and responsibility, can inspire a nation.

“True nation-building is the work not just of leaders but of the entire citizenry.”

He thanked the author “for enriching our collective memory,” expressing hope that the biography “reaches widely, into classrooms, libraries, and the quiet desks of young Nigerians as they decide what kind of leaders they wish to become.”

The President paid his personal respects to this immediate predecessor, saying, “To my dear brother, President Muhammadu Buhari: though you are no longer with us, your impact endures. We will honour and build upon your legacy, not just by invoking your name, but by delivering results with discipline, compassion, and resolve.”

Governor of Katsina State, Dr. Dikko Radda, applauded President Tinubu for standing by the Buhari family and the State following the demise of the former President, stating that Buhari epitomised discipline, prudence, patriotism and purposeful leadership.

Author and reviewer of the book, Dr Charles Omole, said the biography chronicles the life and times of President Buhari and provides answers to several questions. He explained that the writing involved speaking with people who witnessed Buhari’s birth and his death.

Former Service Chiefs and the Inspector General of Police who served under President Buhari testified to his self-discipline, integrity, and rare sense of duty.

Sharing his own experiences, Chairman/CEO of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, Brig. Gen. Buba Marwa (Retd.) enumerated several legacies of President Buhari, describing him as a disciplined officer who took a keen interest in his subordinates.

“Let me recall one important aspect of his character, which is encouraging his subordinates and appointees. The man whose legacy we celebrate today was a man of honour, a man of character, a man of integrity and a man of principle.

“An officer and a gentleman. A man who loved the masses and the masses loved him back. A soldier who fought for the territorial integrity of Nigeria,” Gen. Marwa stated.

Former Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Isiaka Amao, lauded the late President’s commitment to national service, both as a soldier and as a civilian President, saying: “Serving under him as Chief of Air Staff during a period of existential security challenges, I observed that he was not merely a Commander-in-Chief issuing orders but a statesman who understood that military powers must always serve democratic governance.”

Yusuf Magaji Bichi, former Director General of the Department of State Services under President Buhari, commended President Tinubu for continuing the legacies of commitment, purposeful leadership, democratic governance, and free and fair elections laid down by President Buhari, saying, “President Buhari will never rig an election.”

Chief of the Naval Staff under President Buhari’s administration, Vice Admiral Awwal Gambo (Retd), highlighted the late President’s concern for national maritime security and in the Gulf of Guinea, stating that, under President Buhari, “national security was significantly enhanced through strategic investment and strong leadership.”

Former IGP, Mohammed Abubakar, praised the former president for his integrity and commitment to the nation’s internal security.

“Under his administration, the Nigerian Police witnessed the most decisive reforms in recent decades. Late President Buhari believed that the modern police force must be anchored on professionalism, accountability and operational efficacy,” the former IGP said.

Daughter of the late Nigerian leader, Hadiza Buhari, thanked all guests on behalf of the Buhari family.

She expressed gratitude to President Tinubu for his support in their time of grief.

“We sincerely thank Mr President for his dedication to completing the National Armed Forces PTSD Centre Project in Abuja, which President Buhari started. This is a vital facility initiated by the Defence and Police Officers’ Wives Association,” she stated.

She urged Nigerians to learn from her father’s legacy and build a system of patience and integrity that can stand the test of time.

The President of The Gambia, Adama Barrow; Nigeria’s First Lady, Sen. Oluremi Tinubu; Governors of Kaduna, Jigawa, Plateau, Benue, and Borno States; the Deputy Governor of Kebbi State; and the Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, attended the event.

The family of late President Buhari, led by his widow, Aisha; the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu; former aides of the late President; the wife of the Vice President, Nana Shettima; traditional rulers, including the Sultan of Sokoto and the Olu of Warri, also attended the event.

One critical question that I have contended with for some time as a public service institutional reformer is, why has it been so very difficult to institute performance-oriented values and systems to alter the inherited ‘I am directed’ traditional public administration tradition in the civil service in Nigeria? Indeed, implementation of the performance management system has been largely rhetorical, entailing moving in circles since the Jerome Udoji Public Service Reform Commission reforms’ first attempt in 1974. Why is this so? One, civil servants generally take on their job as a career, largely because of job security. They, therefore, would generally resist any reform that threatens their jobs, even if such reforms are in the public interest. This attitude translates, for all practical purposes, into a general dislike for change and an unreflective defence of the status quo.

Two, civil servants are accustomed to a tradition of ‘wait for your turn’ to gain seniority within hierarchical structures, and, therefore, value the respect and authority that their positions carry jealously. This orientation contrasts with performance management’s need to reward individual initiatives, creativity, authority of knowledge, and proven expertise, while rewarding officers based on evidence of performance, usually measured as outputs, outcomes and impact within results-based management frameworks. Three, in any governance context and administrative environment where entitlement mentality prevails, where cultural practices of patronage and nepotism that would usually override merit on the altar of ethnic, religious and sectional parochialisms prevail. One where personal connections and loyalty influence appointments with brazen disregard for merit, as is common in our clime, it is usually difficult to achieve the flexibility that enables the fairness and objectivity required for a performance-based system to function effectively. Let us now proceed to put this set of theoretical statements in context, to explain how the failure to institute performance-based systems in Nigeria’s public administration system over the years has, in part, been responsible for Nigeria’s arrested development.

Let me start with an axiom that has guided my reform optimism about the Nigerian state and the unfinished business of institutional reform. That axiom is that there is definitely no shortage of development visions, blueprints, development ideas and paradigms, well-intended policies and programs, or even expert or professional advisory support. As a public service institutional reformer and policy implementation researcher, I recognise all these as the very first step in the trajectory of getting reform done. Thus, while consecutive Nigerian governments could be said to have a surfeit of the visions and ideas that ground institutional reforms with varying levels of impacts, the momentum that translates these visions, ideas and paradigms into efficient institutions and transformative development progress has been missing.

Unfortunately, the institutional and developmental impacts have been less than salutary because of the lack of political will that backstops the success of any reform effort. This is the second level of the reform business that unlocks the possibility of success. We can all agree, without prejudice, that many Nigerian governments have played bad politics with development programs. By this, I mean that Nigeria’s political orientation, from independence to date, has made it extremely difficult to achieve the right composition of elite nationalism that triggers national development. First, there is the problem of policy short-circuiting due to administrative discontinues—each government always desires to reinvent the political and administrative wheels rather than building on the foundations the previous administrations have laid. Most fundamental is the lack of any genuine ideological bases for political parties that connect to an overarching philosophical construct for rethinking national integration and national development. Since 1999, when Nigeria resumed its democratic experiment, politicking has been more about trivial issues of religion and ethnicity than that of issue-based discourse on taking Nigeria seriously.

In institutional reform terms, therefore, we have been witnessing political administrations that have been entrapped in the conception-reality gap in the sense that they have demonstrated some real passion for institutional reforms, given the availability of outstanding ideas, insights and blueprints. However, the passion lacked deep knowledge that could have enabled the governments to intimately and critically interrogate the binding constraints that limit and undermine institutional reforms in the public sector change space, as well as the institutional architecture that the space represents. This failure makes it very difficult for these governments to recognise the devils in the details of development policy execution. This conception-reality gap is further complicated by the ready default of the prebendal culture of primitive accumulation that colours elite nationalism. This makes it difficult for any successive administration in Nigeria to take a gamble on development by initiating development bargains around which the Nigerian Project could have taken off efficiently and with the right dose of political will to raise the possibility of success.

From an institutional reform perspective, many of Nigeria’s past governments have moved from electoral victory to administrative performance to unlock the dividends of democratic governance without a thorough knowledge of the binding constraints that require dismantling within the governance, administrative and institutional dynamics of the Nigerian state and its public service.

Thus, every effort to ignite structural and developmental transformation has remained futile. From the technical angle of policy and development management, therefore, Nigeria has been benchmarking failures through change management initiatives that have been marred by several limitations: poor policy and programme design; poor resource allocation; unstable macroeconomic climate not matched with required policy intelligence and analytics; lack of disciplined and performance managed development policy and programme execution; policy and programme discontinuity; low public service organisational intelligent quotient and sub-optimal institutional capability readiness; and the wide-ranging sociological and cultural issues generally summed up as the Nigerian factor.

However, when his administration was inaugurated, President Bola Tinubu wisely opted for performance management as the best means to manage the Renewed Hope Agenda. And to achieve this, the President compelled key policy players to sign a performance bond. The administration further appointed Hadiza Bala-Usman to oversee the structural nodal point for implementing and tracking the trajectory of institutional performance. Whatever the process is called—performance bond, agreement or contract—it signals a political willingness on the part of the government to achieve a measure of performance and productivity through a judicious attempt to get the best out of the people, infrastructure, financial and material resources deployed by the MDAs. This will be achieved through a systematic set of actions that link the Renewed Hope Agenda’s policy goals and national development objectives with the performance and productivity expectations from the MDAs in terms of sector strategies, performance budgeting, improvement plans, targets, data, workplans, key performance indicators, training and capacity development, etc. And to achieve the utmost productivity, corrective measures in terms of rewards and sanctions are equally put in place when performance improves or falls short.

By opting for the performance management system, the Tinubu administration has keyed into a global best practice. From Florence Nightingale’s effort, in 1861, to instigate the publication of medical statistics in London hospitals and the impact of this on the British civil service, to F.W. Taylor’s scientific management method that facilitated process improvements on factory floors, performance management has come a long way. By the time colonial rule was over, and Nigeria had keyed into the inherited administrative traditions of the British civil service system, Nigeria had adopted the formal personality-based assessment models, the most popular of which is the annual performance evaluation report form. Unfortunately, this template would soon degenerate into oblivion because of its flaws bordering on its subjective limitations. And high-performing civil service systems across the world would later revise and supplement it with other rating instruments and scales, including psychometrics, 360-degree peer review feedback, management by objectives, critical incident techniques, behaviorally anchored rating scales, assessment centres, project-based appraisals, self-assessments, competency-based reviews, narrative appraisals, and many more.

For the Nigerian civil service system, the Udoji Commission report recommended and introduced the planning, programming, budgeting system, which ensured that MDAs and their performances were framed in terms of programmes and strategies rather than line items. The commission also introduced the management by objectives, and later the zero-based budgeting. At the global level, and under the prodding of the new public management, performance management planning and implementation would soon be enriched and upgraded at many critical and technical points to demonstrate the complexity of measuring performance in an increasingly complex administrative world. The Kaplan and Norton Balanced Scorecard became significant in the public sector because of its revolutionary shifting of the performance scorecard away from the traditional focus on the very narrow financial considerations to a broader assessment founded on four variables—financial, customer, innovation/growth, and internal processes. This has been followed by other performance management features, from value for money audit and service delivery units to performance-based pay and sanctions and citizens’ charter.

Despite the perspicacity of the Tinubu administration in opting for the implementation of a performance management system, there is still a fundamental question an institutional reformer is forced to ask. Are the MDAs’ structural, procedural and institutional dynamics capable of readying themselves for the performance-oriented change process? Are they prepared to shoulder the burden of performance management? Why, despite our best reform efforts, has it appeared as if the civil service system is just gyrating on an axis without any appreciable progress? The performance management dynamic of the civil service system in Nigeria has been dominated by the fixation with the APER template and some underlying assumptions. These have to be deconstructed to even begin to reinvent the performance management system that will anchor the Renewed Hope Agenda. First, therefore, we need to make it very clear that the staff performance evaluation that the APER takes care of is not the same thing as performance management. The annual performance appraisal is merely a one-off evaluation criterion that barely adds any value to a staff member’s promotion score. It is therefore just a key but not too too-significant component of performance management.

On the contrary, performance transcends staff appraisal. It involves a continuous cycle of monitoring and reporting of performance against certain set targets, goals, and objectives. To foreground performance as the basis for evaluating the MDAs, the Renewed Hope Agenda has to concretize a performance system that instigate performance monitoring, evaluation and reporting based on (a) whether or not the MDA is doing what it is supposed to do in terms of outputs, impacts and outcomes; (b) articulate gap identification in the MDAs that enables them not only to evaluate and learn but also to improve their performance; and (c) institute a reward and sanction system as a basis for rewarding high performance, and sanctioning low performance.

As a paradigmatic shift away from the traditional Weberian and “I-am-directed” bureaucratic system, performance management transcends technical and technocratic design, roll-out and training, and speaks rather to the necessity of transforming work and workplace culture, behaviour and attitude in ways that emphasise outputs through the baselining of quality information and data system with the capacity to produce high-quality data promptly. This then enables the MDAs to develop strategic plans, like the medium-term sector strategy, which stipulate quantitatively measurable goals, objectives, performance indicators and how they are to be achieved.

To, therefore, concretise the firm resolve of the Tinubu administration to frog leap the civil service system into an efficient mode through the adoption of the performance management system, more is required. The performance system must first be squared with the existing dynamics of technology, capacity, governance and technology. It is not just sufficient to introduce the system in a discrete manner that fails to cohere with the existing overall civil service limitations and possibilities in terms of structures and institutions.

Here, the Offices of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation and state Heads of Service will need to play a crucial role as nodal points in coordinating the strengthening of the monitoring and compliance dimensions of the performance management system in the central personnel agencies. This will facilitate not only the institutionalisation of performance as an accountability tool but also the necessity of unifying its dynamics and procedures across the MDAs. The second most significant step in the institutionalisation of the performance management system is the need to integrate it with the existing and reformed components of the human resource management. This will be two-sided. On the one hand, it will involve the HR processes of recruitment, promotion, training and deployment that articulate the significance of leadership pipelining and talent management for the civil service. On the other hand, there is also the imperative of a consequence management system that regulates performances and challenges through, for instance, a performance bonus or the establishment of a challenge fund that motivates performance. This must also be coupled with a service-wide capacity-building workshop and training program, especially for supervisors, to determine a schedule for periodic impact assessment.

The Federal and States Ministries of Budget and Planning, OSGF/OSSGs, Bureau of Statistics, Civil Service Commissions, government training institutions, and, of course, the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on Policy and Coordination, etc., have pivotal roles in PMS implementation. Their roles are multi-layered and integral, making the PMS inter-ministerial partnership an irreducible critical success factor in its implementation to be explored in great detail. Exploration of the dimensions of the latter is beyond my mission in this contribution, as it is far more nuanced and technical.

The Renewed Hope Agenda has taken off to a good start. It is a declared intention to shun bad politics in the articulation of a governance framework that is founded on a solid institutional reform blueprint that will deliver the stated goals of the Tinubu administration. What I have done in this piece is to outline the structural and institutional components of the performance management system that will backstop the success of the agenda. It is the last mile towards good governance.

Prof. Olaopa, the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, writes from Abuja

The United States Embassy in Abuja has cautioned Nigerians on the serious consequences of visa fraud, emphasising that falsifying information or submitting fake documents can result in permanent visa bans.

In a post on X on Monday, the embassy stated: “Visa fraud has serious consequences. Lying or providing fake documents can lead to permanent visa bans under US immigration law. This means you will never go.”

The advisory coincided with a meeting between US Ambassador Richard Mills and Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar, where both officials discussed areas of cooperation between the two countries.

“The United States looks forward to continuing to work together with Nigeria on issues of mutual concern,” the embassy added.

The discussions come amid ongoing diplomatic attention on Nigeria’s internal security situation. In recent months, some US lawmakers have described attacks on communities, particularly in the North and Middle Belt, as serious violations of religious freedom, urging stronger collaboration between the US and Nigerian governments to protect vulnerable populations.