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 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 181Megawatt Geometric Power Plant in Aba and the Aba Power Electric Company; both are valued at $800m. All these investments were in the face of spirited sabotage by top Federal Government officials between 2012 and 2015. 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 in instances where events eventually vindicate optimists.
The streak of boundless optimism has enabled Nnaji to record several significant attainments. He was 36 in 1993 when the University of Massachusetts named him The 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 valedictorian in physics and mathematics. No black person had emerged as the best overall student in the institution which was then 120 years old. Though his tuition fee payment was not regular at St Patrick’s Secondary School, Emene in Enugu, Nnaji passed the West African School Certificate (WASC) in 1974 with distinction, getting an AI in Additional Mathematics in which he never had a teacher; this was only four years after the Nigerian Civil War when many schools were short of teachers in some key subjects.
An incident that occurred when he was in year four of high school 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 house 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 400 metres, defeating star athletes representing East Central State in national competitions. As expected, there were cries of fowl and protests against supposed manipulation. The race was cancelled and a repeat was ordered. The result was the same.
Nnaji was thus buoyed to represent his house in two other races. 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 record in the long jump at St John’s remains 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 past 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 and it 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 endless applause from a huge crowd on September 4, 2016.
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 an emergency power plant within one year. NEPA was constructing the Abuja- Shiroro Transmission Station 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 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 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 181MW, and it has an embedded power distribution company that evacuates its electricity. 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 (2018-2022, Â is a management researcher.