Shubham Chaudhuri: How to achieve excellence in public service

Shubham Chaudhuri, World Bank’s country director for Nigeria, says four key traits helped Waziri Adio achieve excellence while serving as executive secretary of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI).

Chaudhuri said the traits were spelt out in Adio’s memoir, ‘The Arc of The Possible’, which was launched on Saturday in Abuja.

The World Bank country director listed the four attributes as commitment to public service, resilience, courage to speak truth to power and optimism.

“What I have come to realise is that the single most important ingredient in which nations make progress on the basic aspiration of making lives better for all its citizens is the quality and the number of individuals who have dedicated themselves to that mission and to public service,” he said.

“At the World Bank, we talk about global best practices, about institutions and policies. I think it is about individuals first and foremost. And so, my approach in every country I have worked is to try and work with and identify and line up behind and try to support the individuals who have this basic commitment to public service.

“At the World Bank, we are Nigeria’s trusted partners, we are here to support, but the decisions, the actions, the choices are always going to be those individuals who have dedicated themselves to public service or citizens of that nation or the fellow citizens.

“These individuals often have four traits and I think that is what I appreciate very much in Waziri’s book is how that comes out in his own retelling of what drove him to public service and how he dealt with it.

“One is obviously commitment and the deep commitment to the notion of public service to making lives better.

“Second and that is also very clear is a certain resilience. It takes, and often, a lot to kind of persist through the challenges, the everyday frustrations.

“Third is an ability and the courage to constructively speak truth to power and I think we already heard some examples of how Waziri did that.

“Fourth, and I think in some ways the most important and this is reflected in the title of his book is a sense of optimism, a capacity to aspire.

Chaudhuri said Waziri’s memoir will serve as a personal manifesto to others who intend to be persistent in public service but do not have a road map to follow.