Home Latest Insights | News Peter Obi Should Choose Abdul Samad Rabiu, Chairman of BUA Cement Plc; Lessons from Nigerian University System

Peter Obi Should Choose Abdul Samad Rabiu, Chairman of BUA Cement Plc; Lessons from Nigerian University System

Peter Obi Should Choose Abdul Samad Rabiu, Chairman of BUA Cement Plc; Lessons from Nigerian University System

Do you have any suggestions who Peter Obi can choose as a vice presidential partner? Yes: Abdul Samad Rabiu, CON. 

He is the Chairman of BUA Cement Plc. He is also the founder and Chairman of BUA International Limited! I understand that his shareholders will not be happy with my suggestion. But truth be told, it is time for Nigeria to get people who understand balance sheets into political leadership. Obi and Rabiu will be a new beginning for Nigeria.

One of the things I admire about the US university system is the magic that any person can be a president (yes, vice chancellor). Most times, they hire businessmen and women as “vice chancellors” to build the university. That they have not taught a day in a classroom is not a problem: they are there as managers, not as academics.

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But in Nigeria, only professors can lead a university and just like that a man who studied crop science and has no clue on what a balance sheet is, is tasked to manage a budget. That budget could have more than 3,000 workers! What does he do? He struggles because you cannot promote a baby to become a CEO overnight. 

A university is a big business and someone with no business experience should not run one, whether he has published journal papers or not.

Peter Obi, leave the politicians and get someone that can rebuild the economy. Of course, this is a wishful illusion for me as that will not happen. (Labour Party politicians will strike for that.)


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2 THOUGHTS ON Peter Obi Should Choose Abdul Samad Rabiu, Chairman of BUA Cement Plc; Lessons from Nigerian University System

  1. It’s not only the universities that are having that challenge, the health sector too; the same way we convinced ourselves that classroom teachers are great managers of human and material resources, we did same with medical doctors. Check the performance of both sectors, the results speak. Both sectors always talk about funding challenge, complaining that government isn’t funding the critical sectors well. But nobody cares to interrogate how the people we perpetually imposed on these two sectors as their CEOs, what their performance metrics read.

    Those two sectors will continue to have funding challenges, because no government will ever be able to provide enough funds to run them sustainably here, even with best of intentions, until we reorganize and make who becomes their CEOs open to all professionals. But anyone who thinks it’s difficult here should calm down, the private arms in those two sectors will lead the renaissance, and the work is already in progress.

    Rabiu will not become running mate to Peter Obi, not because Labour Party members will riot, but rather our people value winning elections more than governance, and that is why once elections are won, the disappointment and miseries return, because nothing else happens.

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