Not everyone possesses the courage to publicly admit his or her mistakes. Many people will rather justify that such mistakes do happen and that they are not God, and not claiming to be perfect.
Some will even go into history and cite many occurrences of such mistakes in the past. They will point out that other sectors are inflicted with such hitches. Yes, many will refer to technological glitches.
I watched the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, in tears, so pained that the huge mistakes occurred undetected early enough, taking full responsibility with apology. He also provided a remedy to the victims. That is pure courage.
I respect my former boss Osita Chidoka, the then Corps Marshal of Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), for similar courage. Upon my resumption as the Head of Policy, Research and Statistics Department in 2013, I went into a serious review of the FRSC Road Traffic Crash records and discovered that data for three years were under reported. I made a presentation to the management to draw attention, with a recommendation that the wrongly published data should be repudiated. Tough decisions.
Many members of the management felt that would be too damaging to the reputation of the FRSC. They argued that the data had been published in the last three years’ annual reports and circulated globally. Many reminded us that the World Bank, the Word Health Organisation, the International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group and other international organisations already had the data and, turning around to say the data were no longer correct would create doubts on our future data releases. Some even believed the Federal Government might feel embarrassed and, of course, such had consequences.
Osita allowed every contribution and keenly listened. He asked me to come with more facts and reminded us all that ‘only God we trust, every one must come with justifiable evidence’. Each time a management staff went to him to convince him not to repudiate the statistics, he would send for me and ask the person to repeat the augment and that I should respond.
At the next management meeting, I made a further convincing argument. Chidoka kept quiet for a moment then he said: ‘Gentlemen, since this is a genuine mistake and we did not falsify or intentionally decided to mislead, I am ready to go with Figaro (my nickname) to repudiate the data with explanation and offer necessary apology. We should publish the correct data. Good, we discovered the mistakes internally, it would have looked somehow if some stakeholders had done that portraying us as insincere, that we are trying to presenting ourselves as good and performing’.That was a courageous moment.
Then, the further test of the courage. We were in Burkina Faso for the West African Road Safety Organisation meeting where other nations praised our activities, including our data management, which should be emulated. Chidoka was the President. How do you throw away the same data being praised to the high heaven? During the break, a colleague of mine whispered to him to reconsider his position. He beckoned on me to ‘listen to my friend again o’. Then another level of argument. Then he ruled: ‘There is no going back. Other nations should also learn transparency from us. They should understand the integrity of data. Data credibility is key and we discovered there were mistakes. So, we should be able to accept the errors and correct’.
He drew the attention of all to the decision and replaced the earlier published data with the correct ones, which were higher. He subsequently directed that the next Annual Report should contain the repudiated data and the corrected ones. That was inspirational.
I believe some JAMB staff and stakeholders would have attempted to discourage the Registrar from publicly admitting the errors. Some of his friends could have warned him of the consequences, but our cerebral Prof. took the path of honour even though it was painful to have drawn tears from him. That is the way to go. Highly commendable. God bless you Prof.
Olagunju mni, is a retired Deputy Corps Marshal of FRSC
