Bart Nnaji at 68: The Value of Boundless Optimism

By C. Don Adinuba

As Bart Nnaji, founder and chairman of the Geometric Power group, Nigeria’s only integrated electricity organization, turns 68 today (Saturday, July 13, 2024), one important lesson our countrymen and women can learn from him is the imperative of matchless optimism. Even when all hope is forlorn and all available evidence points to gloom and doom, Nnaji not only expects the best but also works passionately towards delivering superior performance. At a time when top Western multinationals are leaving Nigeria in droves, Nnaji is demonstrating unparalleled patriotism: he is leading General Electric of the United States, the world’s oldest and largest electricity equipment manufacturing company in the world, to build another power-generating firm in Aba, Abia State. If not for the Federal Government’s suspension of power purchase agreements (PPAs) some years ago, the plant would have been completed by now. This is a story for another day.

Indeed, only a person with Nnaji’s faith in Nigeria could insist, for a whole 20 years, on proceeding with the 188 Megawatt Geometric Power Plant in Aba and the Aba Power Electric Company to a positive conclusion, despite the spirited determination of top and powerful Federal Government officials between 2012 and 2015. These investments, the largest in the Southeast, are worth S800m. The fact that the Aba Independent Power Project was commissioned last February 26 is nothing short of a miracle. It is frequently difficult to comprehend what drives Nnaji’s optimism against all evidence and rationality. This is all the more so because, as the great American thinker, Francis Fukuyama, notes in The End of History and The Last Man, we live in a world where pessimists are considered profound and optimists are regarded as naïve, even when events eventually vindicate optimists.

The streak of boundless optimism has enabled Nnaji to record several significant attainments. He joined the University of Massachusetts in 1983 at the age of 26 and rose to Professor and Director of Automation and Robotics Laboratory almost within the twinkle of an eye. He was the first Black person to be become tenured full Professor of Engineering in the University. In 1996, the University of Pittsburgh named him Distinguished Professor of Engineering. No Black person by then had been named a Distinguished Professor in Engineering in American history. At St John’s University in New York, he made history in 1980 as the best graduating student in physics and mathematics. No black person had emerged as the best overall student in the institution which was then 120 years old.

An incident that occurred when he was in year five at Saint Patrick’s Secondary School Emene, Enugu, is worth recalling. During the inter-house sports competition, there were no persons to represent his house in two or three field and track events. He was the Deputy Senior Prefect, so he felt personally challenged. Though he had never participated in any sporting competition, he took up the gauntlet. Nnaji surprisingly took the first position in the long jump and triple jump, defeating star athletes representing East Central State in national competitions.

Nnaji was thus buoyed to represent his house in two other races, hurdles and 100 meters. He came first in each. By the time anyone could say, Bart, he had begun to represent East Central State, now comprising Abia, Anambra, Imo, Ebonyi, and Enugu states, in national competitions. In one of the events in 1975, he met, among other great sports icons, Emmanuel Okala of the famous Enugu Rangers Football Club who was to become Nigeria’s most legendary goalkeeper. They are still friends.

Nnaji joined the East Central State Sports Council, as Okala had done. He received scholarships to study in the United States for excellence in sports and academics. Though one of the scholarships came from Columbia University in New York, an Ivy League institution, Nnaji chose the one from St John’s University because of his devotion to the Catholic Church which owns the institution. Much as he would have accepted the offer from Columbia if he had known what he now knows about the rankings of the two New York universities, he is very proud of the ethics and values St John imbued in him, especially regarding working for the public good. Lest we forget, Nnaji’s records in the long jump and triple jump at St John’s remain unbeaten, and this is one of the considerations for his name to be in the university’s hall of fame.

To appreciate Nnaji’s philosophy that there is no mountain too high to climb, another incident is worth recalling. The immediate Catholic Archbishop of Owerri, Anthony Obinna, an outstanding scholar, approached Nnaji in 2016 with a proposal which the religious leader was fairly certain that the scientist would reject: to deliver a two-three-hour academic public lecture in central or standard Igbo to a large audience that would be broadcast live. Nnaji, who had never studied Igbo even for a day all his life, accepted the challenge with enthusiasm! And he delivered the lecture to an endless applause from a huge crowd on September 4, 2016.

Now, the third example of Nnaji walking successfully where angels fear to tread. The leadership of the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) was in 2000 privately bemoaning the fact that there were no Nigerian organizations capable yet of competing with foreign firms in such things as building power plants, not to speak of building an emergency power plant within one year. NEPA was then constructing the Shiroro to Abuja 330KV Transmission Line and needed a plant to supply power to key places in Abuja like State House, the Central Bank of Nigeria headquarters, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) headquarters, the Federal Secretariat, and the entire Central Business District. Nnaji, an industrial and mechanical engineering professor, led a small team of Nigerian engineers to take up the challenge. The 22MW Abuja Emergency Power Plant was commissioned by Vice President Atiku Abubakar in 2001, and its performance was to be rated excellent.

Impressed by this achievement, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the newly appointed Minister of Finance, and the visiting World Bank president, James Wolfonsohn, asked Nnaji in March 2003 if he could consider building a 50MW gas-fired plant to assist low, medium, and large manufacturing firms in Aba whose greatest impediment to full industrialization was poor electricity. He readily accepted. The size of the plant is now 188MW, and is embedded in a power distribution company that evacuates its electricity – Aba Power which is now the 12th DisCo in Nigeria. In addition, it has a 27-kilometre gas pipeline from Owaza in Ukwa West Local Government Area to the Osisioma Industrial Estate in Aba. The Geometric Power group boasts Nigeria’s most advanced power infrastructure, including its steel tubular poles that can withstand any earthquake and are found only in world-class cities like San Francisco and Tokyo that are natural disaster-prone.

Nigeria is grappling with its most difficult socioeconomic challenges, and local as well as international confidence in its capacity is at an all-time low. Nigerians need to learn at least two related things from Bart Nnaji, Commander of the Niger (CON) winner, Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM) laureate, Fellow of the Academy of Science (FAS), Fellow of the Academy of Engineering (FAEng), etc: faith in the Nigerian possibility and the value of boundless optimism. All Nigerians wish Nnaji many more years of good health, wisdom, and service to God and the country.

Adinuba, Anambra State Commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment (2018-22), is a management and leadership researcher.