Hamza Rafindadi Zayyad
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Hamza Rafindadi Zayyad (1937-2002) was the former head of the Technical Committee on Privatization and Commercialization in Nigeria.[1] The Committee was designed to strengthen government's control of the direction of the country's then nascent privatization exercise.
Alhaji Rafindadi was one of the few individuals who had a visible and important presence in the early socio-political institutions of Northern Nigeria and Nigeria.
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[edit] Family and Early Life
Hamza Zayyad was born on 1937 in Katsina State.[1] His grandfather was once the Waziri of Katsina (an advisory role), a position the grandson later held. He studied at Barewa College, Zaria, an elite college for Northern Nigeria's academic achievers. From Barewa College, he took a brief but burgeoning personal path and joined Barclay's bank. After a few years at the bank, he continued his academic pursuit, studying accountanting at Kumasi between 1958 and 1960.[1] He later left the shores of Africa and went to Leeds College and the University at Birmingham.
[edit] Professional career
As one of the few Nigerians with a post-graduate degree and coupled with a strong potential for positive influence in the post colonial period, Alhaji Zayyad Hamza Rafindadi's post-graduate career was fertile. Rafindadi started working at the Ministry of Finance, Northern Nigeria, in 1963, and later rose in the field of finance to become the Bursar of Ahmadu Bello University at Zaria. Later on, his professional success continued when he was appointed the Managing Director of the New Nigeria Development Company from 1976-1981, a position that gave him the avenue to know and befriend leaders from Northern Nigeria such as Adamu Ciroma, but importantly, as the leader of one if not the largest firm in Northern Nigeria, he was in a position to impact or direct the course of socio-economic currents in the region.
In 1986, after a downward turn in oil prices from its peak during the aftermath of the Iran crisis, Nigeria's government revenue began to dwindle, and it began selling some government assets. The Technical Committee on Privatization and Commercialization was created as a medium of setting the government's privatization agenda. Hamza Rafindadi Zayyad was then appointed the committee's first director. Today, the agency as evolved to become the Bureau of Public enterprises; one of the lasting non-ministerial government institutions in Nigeria's vacillating public agencies.
Though, they may be questions about his captaincy of the privatization program and his relationship with potentially corrupt elites in Nigeria including sale of assets to potential crooks.[2] However, the agency was partly created to set the government's agenda and the rise of money bags in Nigeria was a result of the oil boom and subsequent administrations courting elites in the country.
[edit] References
- ^ a b c "Hamza Zayyad is Dead," Daily Trust. March 13, 2002.
- ^ William Reno, Old Brigades, Money Bags, New Breeds, and the Ironies of Reform in Nigeria. Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1993), pp. 66-87.
