For many Nigerians, government is ultimately judged not by its promises but by what it delivers. While public service is often associated with inefficiency, bureaucracy and slow implementation, thousands of civil servants work quietly to keep institutions functioning and services running. Since 2022, the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation’s Emily Aig-Imoukhuede Memorial Award has recognised more than 130 civil servants who exemplify excellence in service, while its Memorial Lecture promotes values-driven leadership and institutional reform. In this joint interview with James Emejo, Chairman, and Executive Vice-Chair of the Foundation, Aigboje and Ofovwe Aig-Imoukhuede discuss recognition, leadership, institutional culture and the need to make excellence the norm.
The Emily Aig-Imoukhuede Memorial Award marks its fifth year in 2026. Looking back, what has this journey reinforced for you about the role of values, leadership and recognition in nation-building?
Aigboje: This journey has reinforced something I have believed for a very long time: people rise or regress to the standards a society chooses to celebrate.
It is important that I give you the background to the annual cash prices we give to Federal Civil Servants who are adjudged to have excelled in service. Back in 2022, I attended a Federal Civil Service Awards Ceremony, and I felt that the awardees were deserving of a higher cash value than what they received. Then and there I asked the then Head of Service if I could donate an amount of NGN500,000.00 to each of the awarded civil servants. She consulted with her team, gave her consent and it was announced as I drove to the airport. I then received a call from a Retired Perm. Sec who was watching the program and she said that she was very touched by my gesture, but that she knew that it was inspired by my mother’s life of service and suggested we rename the award in her memory. So, when we created this Award in memory of my mother, the first purpose was simply to preserve the values she lived by: integrity, compassion, discipline and a genuine devotion to serving others. Five years on, it has grown into something larger than a tribute.
It serves as a major motivation to public servants and also provides evidence that there are far more exceptional public servants in Nigeria than the current perception suggests. We are quick to view the civil service through the lens of its challenges. We rarely pause to consider the men and women who arrive each day, make difficult decisions, solve problems and keep government working, often with no expectation of recognition.
That, to me, is the heart of nation-building. If we want stronger institutions, we must be deliberate about the behaviours we choose to honour. A culture of excellence does not form by accident. People have to see it; believe it is attainable and understand that it counts. Recognition does that work. It says plainly that integrity matters, that professionalism matters, that going beyond the minimum matters. It creates role models, and role models shape the culture that follows them.
At the inaugural Emily Aig-Imoukhuede Memorial Lecture, Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah observed that “there are leaders who do not occupy office and there are people in office who are not leaders,” arguing that leadership is ultimately about influence and service. How can Nigeria’s public institutions cultivate and recognise this kind of values-driven leadership, beyond titles and hierarchy?
Aigboje: Bishop Kukah put his finger on something essential: leadership is not a function of rank; it is a function of impact. One of our recurring mistakes is to assume that leadership begins at the top of the hierarchy. In truth, it usually reveals itself long before anyone hands you authority.
Meaningful progress is often championed by people who are not the most senior people. They were simply the ones willing to take responsibility while others waited to be told what to do.
Our civil service must become better at identifying those individuals and entrusting them with greater responsibility. Too often we reward time spent in the role when we ought to be rewarding initiative.
Much of the conversation around public sector reform focuses on policies, processes and technology. Why do you believe culture and human motivation deserve equal attention in the reform agenda?
Ofovwe: Reforms do not implement themselves; people do. You can design the finest policy, deploy the best technology and build the most elegant process, and still fall short, because if the people responsible for delivery are not motivated or invested in the outcome, the results will never match the design.
What our work at the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation has taught me is that lasting reform depends as much on people as it does on systems. When public servants feel valued, supported and properly equipped, they show up differently. They take ownership, they innovate, they do more than the task strictly requires. Culture is what determines how people behave when no one is watching, and that, more than any policy document, is what decides whether a reform takes root or quietly fades. Culture cannot be an afterthought in the reform agenda. Very often, it is the whole story.
The foundation has consistently argued that Africa’s development outcomes are closely tied to the quality of its public sector leaders. In your view, what distinguishes high-performing public sector leaders from those who struggle to deliver results?
Aigboje: The finest public sector leaders understand that their role is not to be the hero of the story. It is to build systems that keep performing long after they have gone.
I have watched leaders deliver impressive personal results that vanished the day they left office. I have also watched leaders quietly strengthen an institution in ways that outlasted them by years. The difference nearly always comes down to a single question: were they building about themselves, or building beyond themselves? Sustainable development is the work of the second kind of leader.
Over the past five years, the Award has recognised hundreds of civil servants across Nigeria. What has this experience revealed about the untapped leadership and talent that exists within the public service?
Aigboje: What is clear to me is how incomplete the public picture of the civil service really is. If you judged it by the headlines alone, you would conclude that excellence is rare. Yet every year we meet public servants doing remarkable work with almost no visibility.
Many of the people holding critical systems together are entirely unknown outside their own organisations and work in very challenging institutions. So, what we have uncovered is not hidden talent; the talent was never in doubt. What was missing was attention. Recognition, at its best, does not manufacture excellence. It simply brings into the light what was already there.Recognition programmes often inspire excellence in the short term but sustaining that standard over time requires systems that reinforce behaviour, not just celebrate it.
Looking ahead, how do we ensure that the stories and examples highlighted through the Award and Lecture translate into a pipeline of public servants who see excellence not as exceptional, but as expected?
Ofovwe: What I worry about is our tendency to treat excellence as the property of a rare few. The reality is that most people want to do meaningful work and want to do it well. The real question is whether the environment around them makes that possible.
When excellence always demands extraordinary personal sacrifice, the system itself is the problem. What we should be building are institutions where doing the right thing is supported, recognised and repeated until it becomes ordinary.
That, for me, is the next chapter of this work: moving from celebrating individual excellence to making excellence easier for everyone.
There is ever increasing demand for more effective governance and better public service delivery. What role do you see public servants playing in unlocking the country’s next phase of development?
Aigboje: A central one. Nigeria’s next phase of development will be shaped less by the brilliance of our policies than by the quality of their execution, and execution is the work of public servants. The Civil Service is the engine room of the Nigerian state, the machinery that turns national ambition into administrative reality. When it works, Nigeria moves, and Africa moves with it.
Citizens do not measure government by its intentions. They measure it by delivery, whether a passport arrives on time, whether the hospital functions, whether a pension is paid without distress. A capable, motivated public service produces those outcomes, earns public trust and attracts the investment on which progress depends. No nation has ever achieved sustained development without one. Equip our public servants, empower them and honour them, and they will not merely support Nigeria’s transformation; they will lead it.
As you both look ahead, what would success look like, not just for the Emily Aig-Imoukhuede Memorial Award, but for the broader ambition of building a world-class public service in Nigeria and across Africa?
Aigboje: Success is a Nigerian public service that its own citizens trust and the wider world respects, one that draws the country’s brightest minds because it is understood to be a place where excellence is expected, cultivated and rewarded. Decades from now, if a young Nigerian aspires to public service as naturally as a job in a Bank or Telco, we will have succeeded, and Nigeria will have taken its rightful place as a standard-bearer for progress among nations.
Ofovwe: Success for me is a young civil servant, somewhere in Nigeria, looking at the people this Award has honoured and deciding that excellence is worth pursuing. It is a manager who chooses to reward integrity over convenience. It is a ministry that decides high standards are not negotiable. Cultural change rarely arrives all at once; it comes one decision, one team, one institution at a time. If this Award moves that process forward, even a little, then I believe we are making a contribution that matters.
