IN 1997 when Brig. Gen. Mohamed Buba Marwa (rtd.) was Military Administrator of Lagos State and yours sincerely was the Editorial Page Editor and member of the Editorial Board of The Diet Newspapers (now defunct), I was privileged to have met this brilliant officer one-on-one. This was when Marwa embarked on routine tour of media establishments in Lagos State. He had just been posted to Lagos from Borno State a few months back in 1996.
Before he came to the Water City, his immediate past predecessor, Brig. Olagunsoye Onyinlola (now rtd.), had claimed that there was no bitumen to fix roads in Lagos. Indeed, Nigeria’s richest state was writhing in debts as it had a debt overhang of over N13 billion under Onyinlola. The state’s anti-crime outfit, “Operation Sweep” was existing only in the name as armed robbers terrorized Lagos and its environs to breaking point. Life in Lagos then was a dreary existence.
It was also a time when General Sani Abacha, then Nigeria’s military head of state and maximum ruler, was plotting to transform himself to a civilian life president. Marwa came from the Lagos Oval Office at Alausa to my office at Queen Street, Alagomeji-Yaba adorned with Abacha’s badge. I had thought then that Marwa was !
Consequently, I did a very pesky column entitled “Neutrality And The Colonel”, in which I took him to task in an avowedly engaging manner. The piece was highly critical. To my chagrin, rather than inviting me to his office for scolding, Marwa became one of my close friends and implacable admirers of CHECKPOINT, my weekly column. It was to be discovered that Marwa’s civilised behaviour even under a military regime was borne out of the quality of education he had received, two master’s degrees, one from Harvard University and the other from the University of Pittsburgh, both in the United States of America (USA).
By his actions, Marwa has shown, time and time again, that Nigeria’s accelerated social progress and political and economic transformation will be best served by the intellect, labour and commitment of her enlighteners; that is, the men and women who possess the gift of social epiphany in abundance, and who can successfully bridge the distance between the ideas in the margin and the operation of the statecraft. Marwa is therefore a tested and trusted technocrat who can level all intruding mountains, bridge all gulfs and put a lamp in every dark tunnel for the good and progress of the common man.
As a radical thinker who could squeeze water out of stones, Marwa thought of a way by which he could raise money to develop Lagos State given what he met on ground under Oyinlola. Employing the services of a tax consultancy firm, he discovered that many companies had deducted the Pay As You Earned (PAYEE) tax from workers’ salaries but refused to remit same to the State Government account. He set up a task force and empowered it to shutdown any company that refused to pay up after a specified period of time.
Within a short while, the task force realised so much money that Marwa set up the Direct Labour Agency which built, repaired or rehabilitated over 700 roads in Lagos State within a short period of time. “Operation Sweep” operatives were kitted, insured and given other motivations that within a short while they sent armed robbers packing out of Lagos. Pensioners and civil servants in the state were now duly and promptly paid their entitlements and salaries. The huge debts Oyinlola left behind were cleared and Lagos, the potpouri of Nigeria where almost every family in the country is represented, now had a breath of fresh air.
Before he handed over the reigns of governance to the new civilian governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Armed Tinubu on May 29, 1999, Marwa was the toast of every Lagosian. When members of the human rights community, radicals and the Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) organized a One-Million Man March at Yaba, to counter the Two-Million Man March organized by Daniels Kanu and other Abacha supporters to buoy up the dictator to a civilian life president, Marwa asked overzealous security agents who were harassing the pro-democracy groups never to touch Chief Gani Fawehinmi, the diehard anti-establishment radical.
Indeed, Gen. Marwa was even more popular than Abacha that the dictator’s supporters and handlers started sponsoring the throwing of bombs at Marwa. He survived or escaped all the bomb attacks. For a man who spent approximately two years as military administrator of Lagos State by the time he left in May 1999, Marwa became a household name in Eko City. Go and read the book, “From Johnson To Marwa: 30 Years Of Governance In Lagos “, written by Uthman Shodipe, one of the greatest or inimitable wordsmiths in the English language in history.
Besides holding an ambassadorial position in the immediate past, Marwa was chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee for the Elimination of Drug Abuse, PACEDA, between 2018 and 2020 before assuming the position of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA. When he was named the new NDLEA helmsman in January 2021, many analysts thought that the new position was demeaning for a man who was Military Administrator of Lagos, the biggest State in Nigeria with a population of over 20 million people.
To these alliterative headline casters, I said Marwa, known for creating something out of nothing, would turn NDLEA into the most effective and functional government institution in the current dispensation. Behold, my assumption has been proven right as Marwa has in just three months turned the NDLEA to a goldmine. “With the pedigree of a highly efficient manager and turnaround specialist”, to borrow from Femi Babafemi, NDLEA’s Director of Media & Advocacy, Marwa has confounded the bookmakers.
“Launching non-stop actions against drug cartels across the country with the new maxim: “offensive action “, the NDLEA under Marwa in less than three months, has produced unprecedented results, among others, the arrest of 2,175 drug traffickers and the seizure of 2,050,766.33 kilogrammes of assorted illicit drugs filing of about 2,000 drug cases in court with 329 convictions and 1,549 pending cases in court and cash and drug seizures valued at over N85 billion.” CHECK THIS OUT
With the old staff on ground, Marwa introduced something more than a management ingenuity to drive home his mission from his trajectory. Hear him: “One of my early findings is that the morale of the officers and men has dropped to the lowest ebb. This has made the personnel become poorly motivated. We need highly motivated personal to win this war, which we must win by the grace of God.” That is Marwa’s magic wand. He first constituted the seven-member “Harmonisation Committee” to address or forms of distortions hampering smooth operation of the Agency.
A visibly sluggish Agency has been steered to global visibility and has opened a vista of world acclaim and international support from the EU, the U.K., the United States of America, Germany and France and, of course, from UNODC. But many Nigerians don’t know that in a country where so many things have been attended by civil discords and wars of aggression, Marwa remains a shining emblem of the future substituting fire and sword for law and administrative efficiency. In fact, terrorism and banditry are reinforced by drugs. And with the emergence of Marwa as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the NDLEA, a substantial part of the war on terror may have been won. He is a bundle of humour.