Everyone in the room is praying, about thirty people.
They
pray for his enemies to fall. They pray for the protection of his
family. They pray for God to give him wisdom to improve Nigeria’s power
sector. These prayers are part of a birthday celebration for Dr. Sam
Amadi, the Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission,
NERC.
Dr.
Amadi is in the front of the room, praying on his knees with his head
bowed. You can barely see him as he is positioned behind a table. At the
end of the prayers, he begins to stand up. Everyone in the room stands
up and they begin to toast.
“Give me a J!
“Give me an E!
“Give me an S!
“Give me a U!
“Give me an S!
“Jesus!”
Everyone shuffles forward to greet Dr. Amadi, to give him happy birthday greetings. His 46th
birthday was actually almost a month ago, but he smiles anyway,
receiving the compliments graciously. Merriment is in the air. This
celebration, brought together by friends and youth who look up to him,
is for a man who calls himself an “evangelist”; a man who heads the
cleaning department in his church; a Harvard-educated lawyer, civil
society activist, father of four, husband, reformer and regulator.
“Gani
used to call me the great intellectual,” he says. Dr. Amadi worked for
Gani Fawehinmi as a young, idealist lawyer and the impact on his life
remains.
“Gani
Fawenhimi is the greatest Nigerian who ever lived,” Dr. Amadi says. “In
all of Gani’s life, he never failed his commitment to the ordinary
people.”
Indeed,
Dr. Amadi likes Gani so much that he decided to have an artist paint a
portrait of Gani. That picture, which he says he paid about N150, 000for
is a collage of public figures.Gani Fawehinmi, Enoch Adeboye, Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, FelaKuti, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer are all depicted in this painting that hangs on a wall in
Dr. Amadi’s home.
“I admire them so much,” he says.
That’s
why for him, Enoch Adeboye, the general overseer of the Redeemed
Christian Church of God, is the utmost exemplary of Christian-oriented
activism.
“His
sense of duty to his mission is powerful,” he says, sitting on a couch
and looking up at that picture where Enoch Adeboye casts a subtle grin.
Dr. Amadi has his own mission: to bring power to Nigeria.
In
his role as the executive chairman of NERC, he fulfills what he
believes is a spiritual and moral calling to regulate the power sector
with transparency. For Dr. Amadi, transparency and openness are key.
“I
am a prisoner of the idea of open society,” he says. “I used to dream
of living in a glass house, where everyone can see me… because I have
nothing to hide.”
This
idealist philosophy empowers Dr. Amadi’s actions, while his Christian
perspective, largely shaped by the Irish novelist C.S. Lewis, defineswho
he is. A man with a bold ambition to be a leader of righteousness in
the power sector, Dr. Amadi says evangelismis a proclamation that all
leaders must make.
But what is Dr. Amadi proclaiming?
As
one participant in that birthdaycelebration noted with a smile for all
to hear, “Dr. Amadi has not been able to defeat the demons in the power
sector of this country.”
The
beast of Nigeria’s power sector as we know it remains a primitive,
gigantic, paradoxical entity that stumbles more than it runs, never
performing at full capacity, eatingfood under the table where money is
passed in bulging envelopes.
It’s
this beast that Dr. Amadi was commissioned to tame when he was
appointed to head NERC in 2010. The regulatory agency is expected to
monitor the electricity business in Nigeria, issue licenses to private
firms, protect environmental standards and fix the price of electricity.
The
agency has been largely assisted by the likes of the World Bank and is
viewed by many as the most transparent and efficient federal government
agency. “We were the first regulator in the country to openly subscribe
to a code of conduct,” Dr. Amadi likes to say.
Apart
from the work in the power sector, Dr. Amadi likes to mentor youth. He
organized a groupcalled the Joseph Company this year to bring youth
together in a forum for learning and sharing ideas on how to attain
their career and personal goals. The group meets monthly.
When
Dr. Amadi is not lecturing young people on how to live with moral
standards, or going through the documents laying on his massive desk in
his spaciousglass-walled office at the NERC headquarters, or
philosophizing with his friends, or praying in a corner somewhere, or
sweeping the floors at his church or engaging with his wife and
children, or getting a scoop on the day’s news, or supporting Barcelona
in a football match, you may find him reading. He is reading two books
at the moment: “The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos” by Neil
Turok and “The Leadership Lessons of Jesus” by Bob Briner and Ray
Pritchard. These are the sort of books Dr. Amadi likes to read, because
in the end, he is a man of ideas, who believes that Nigeria can be a
dangerous place for a person with ideas and goals and dreams.
“The
easiest thing to kill in Nigeria is a dream,” he says. “Everyday in
this country, people, especially the youth, are having their dreams
die.”
And
dreams are important to Dr. Amadi, a man who is imprisoned in his own
vision and a dream to see a corrupt-less Nigeria where efficient
electricity is available to all.
As he says, “All the things I have achieved in my life came from a dream.”
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