The greatest English playwright, William Shakespeare, sketches out three pathways to greatness in his play, Twelfth Night. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,” he theorises.
To the Bard of Avon, the first pathway is to be born into greatness, to come from a wealthy family. A person so born naturally has high social standing as a result of their parents’ wealth. To the second class belong individuals who are not obviously born great, but who achieve greatness through dint of hard work and diligence. In the last class are those who come to greatness through happenstance or serendipity.
All things considered, the subject of this piece, Zacch Adedeji, fits into the second category. Adedeji, as the Executive Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service prefers to be called, is one of the prominent appointees of President Bola Tinubu. This is on account of his immense capacity, a knack for diligent execution of given tasks and the content of his character. He is a man shot to the limelight by hard work, discipline, and the abundant grace of God.
But his road to prominence was never smooth. Born into a humble, agrarian family in Iwo Ate, Ogo Oluwa Local Government Area of Oyo State, he resolved early in life not to allow the circumstances of his birth to dictate how far he could go. While helping his father out on the farms, precocious Adedeji never joked with his studies, especially realising through examples seen around him that education is the only medication against fatalism.
After flying high through his primary and secondary education, his quest for more knowledge took him to the Federal Polytechnic in Ede, Osun State, where he finished his Ordinary National Diploma in Accountancy with distinction. Hungry for more, he enrolled for a higher degree at the prestigious Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, to study management and accounting. Just as he was going to start the journey to Ife, a setback surfaced. His beloved father died. But Adedeji did not allow the tragedy to extinguish his dream of going to Ife and emerging the best. After just two semesters at Ife, his fame as an ‘efiko’ (a brilliant student) had spread beyond his class, earning him the appellation ‘Prof’ from his classmates. ‘Prof’ shone brightly, finishing with first-class honours.
Everywhere Adedeji has worked after leaving OAU, he has left a mark of excellence and made so much positive impact that they look back at his times in those organisations with admiration and superlative commendations. At the multinational American company, Procter and Gamble, he started as a General Accounting and Stewardship Manager and rose to the level of Chief Finance Manager for West Africa with enviable performance records. He led a cross-functional team to prepare and report financial statements for the company regionally and globally through a consolidated data entry tool. He supervised the day-to-day evaluation and implementation of Systems Applications and Products modules and also led a 15-member finance team to develop the internal processes for the rollout of SAP for West Africa.
While at P&G, he met Senator Abiola Ajimobi. What drew Ajimobi to the high-flying Adedeji was the young man’s reputation as a brilliant finance expert doing so well in an A-list organisation. Ajimobi took Adedeji under his wings because he saw in him someone he could mentor and pour himself into. The relationship blossomed and when Ajimobi was elected governor of Oyo State in 2011, he appointed Adedeji, then 33 years old, as his finance commissioner, making him the youngest person to have held that position in the state. The late former governor had this to say about Adedeji: “He is a young, brilliant and wise man. I can testify to his unusual creativity, astuteness and uncommon skills in public finance management. I can see his lights shining ever so brightly on the global horizon for many decades ahead.”
His appointment as the fifth substantive Executive Secretary of the National Sugar Development Council in March 2021 was greeted with loud cheers from stakeholders in the industry. Adedeji immediately set out his priority areas. He emplaced a number of strategies and programmes that drew huge investments into the sector, particularly through the council’s backward integration programme as enshrined in the Nigerian Sugar Master Plan. He regarded the sugar sector as one that could be used to solve unemployment if the potential was fully harnessed.
From sugar, he was first appointed Special Adviser on Revenue and then Executive Chairman of FIRS. After more than 100 days in charge, he has not left the staff of the agency in doubt that his administration will be signposted by merit and driven by data. He places a high premium on data because it is only a data-driven system that makes revenue targets predictable for the realisation of the fiscal projections of government for economic development. “There is nothing like fiscal discipline except you have accurate revenue prediction. If you say you want to spend N10 and be disciplined with it, that means the N10 must be somewhere,” he once told the staff. He has equally assured them that their welfare is topmost on his agenda, while also entrenching and maintaining the highest standards of accountability and transparency.
Apart from the journey to make FIRS rediscover itself which has since started under Adedeji, the chairman has been building the confidence of the taxpayers in the service, assuring them of a just, fair and modernised tax administration founded on data and technology. Speaking at a meeting with the top 30 taxpayers in the country last year, Adedeji stressed that FIRS under him would be committed to watering and making entities corporate flourish so that their fruits could be beneficial to oiling the wheels of the economy. “Our plan is simple. We want to grow tax revenue and we only want to tax prosperity and not poverty. Therefore, it is not in our interest to kill the trees that bear the fruits. We will not collect what is not due to us. But we don’t want anyone not to pay what is due to us. Fair engagement is our plan.”
This is not all there is to say about Adedeji who turns 46 years today. Space economy has to factor. Adedeji, like Baltasar Gracian, believes it is not enough to be intelligent, as having the right character is equally crucial. This belief was vividly captured about Zacch by a former governor of Edo State and currently a senator, Adams Oshiomhole, during the screening of Adedeji as FIRS chairman: “I think beyond his compelling CV that we have seen, what is not often captured in CVs are things like character, commitment, patriotism and competence. I have had interactions with this young man and I know he is of good character and he is very competent. What Mr President has done by appointing him is to show that what elders can do, young people can do even better and in a digitised way.”
If you are looking for a young man so blessed with high native intelligence, who is generous and compassionate, who wipes tears from people’s faces, a human calculator whose root and branch analyses of issues about figures and processes are so spot on, Adedeji is your ‘one-stop shop.’ I wish Olo’un wa a birthday filled with loads of happiness and fulfilled wishes. Bon anniversaire, chairman.
Adekanmbi is the Special Adviser Media to the FIRS chairman
