CLOSE-UP: Hadiza Bala-Usman, BBOG campaigner, ‘daughter of poor lecturer’, first female MD of NPA

In April 2014, after nearly 300 girls were abducted from their secondary school in Chibok, Borno state, one woman was pushed into the limelight: Hadiza Bala-Usman.

She started a campaign — BringBackOurGirls (BBOG)— to force the Nigerian government to act in order that the girls be rescued.

“The girls were going through this terrible ordeal and it looked like the (president Goodluck Jonathan) was moving on with business as usual. He came out and said no to negotiations. And at the same time he said he was not going to use force. If you are not negotiating and using force, what are you doing,” she had said in an interview to buttress her angst with the manner the then administration handled the Chibok kidnap.

The campaign gained worldwide traction and her popularity began to soar.

This was probably her first foray as a public personae, and it was not without controversy.

Bala-Usman was greeted with several doubts about her intentions in establishing the BBOG campaign, not surprisingly, because she was also an active member of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

She served as the administrative secretary of the Buhari presidential campaign organisation, member secretary of APC elections planning committee, member of APC strategy committee, director of finance in the Nasir el-Rufai campaign organisation and later the Kaduna state APC campaign council.

First a woman before an APC member

These roles, to a large extent, caused several Nigerians and the ruling party at the time — the Peoples Democratic Party — to assume the movement was political, formed to discredit President Goodluck Jonathan.

Bala-Usman refused to be cowed and even more vehemently denied that her involvement with the group posed any major conflict of interest. She had said she would not be forced to choose between being a politician and being empathetic towards the plight of what she described as “our shared humanity”.

“I, Hadiza Bala-Usman, the Convener/Initiator of the #BringBackOurGirls movement, am a member of the APC, and there has been no time I have hidden this fact or tried to mask it. But let’s be clear, when I worked to mobilize women, men, and Nigerians at large to come out on April 30th to protest that the Government should intensify efforts to #BringBackOurGirls, I did so not as an APC member, but first as a HUMAN BEING, as a WOMAN, a MOTHER, a NIGERIAN and an AFRICAN,” she had said in a statement to clarify her stance.

“It was never about politics and/or my political affiliations; it was rather about our shared humanity as human beings. As a mother, I have experienced the trauma of not knowing where my child is for few minutes; does it then surprise many why I would be moved to act on behalf of mothers who are yet to see their daughters for 2 weeks (at the first instance) and now over 189 days after?”

El-Rufai’s most loyal aide

If her popularity was fostered by the BBOG protests, Nasir el-Rufai, governor of Kaduna state, will be the best person to speak about her credentials for public offices.

She has spent a lot of her career years with el-Rufai. She worked with him in the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) and when he became the minister of the federal capital territory in 2011, she became his special assistant on project implementation.

And in 2015, When el-Rufai became governor, she was appointed his chief of staff.

Like el-Rufai, Bala-Usman is defiant but she says she got it from her father, late Yusufu Bala Usman, who rebelled against his royal roots to become a social critic and a lecturer at the Ahmadu Bello University.

‘Daughter of a poor lecturer’

Once, she told Financial Times that her father used to say to her “you are not the daughter of a wealthy person, you are the daughter of a poor lecturer”.

Bala-Usman says she was very close to her dad who made her and her siblings conscious of injustices and oppression in the world. She said it was this consciousness that drove her to found the BBOG campaign.

The campaign that preceded her stealdy rise in politics and governance and her eventual emergence as the first female chief executive of a top tier federal government agency and the Nigeria Ports Authority.

She graduated from the Ahmadu Bello University in 2000 with a bachelors degree, obtained a masters degree from the University of Leeds in 2009.