Former Director General of NIMASA, Dr Dakuku Peterside
By Dianabasi Effiong
A former Director General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Dr Dakuku Peterside, says institutions are not defined by walls or rankings, but by the courage of their questions and the values of their graduates.
Dr Peterside stated this at the First International Conference of the Department of Business Administration at the Ignatius Ajuru University of Education, Port Harcourt.
In a keynote address, the turnaround expert challenged participants to move beyond searching for easy answers and instead cultivate the courage to ask the right questions.
He described the conference with the theme, “Business Re-engineering as a Catalyst for Economic Development,” as both urgent and practical for a nation seeking to unlock its unrealised potential.
He said, “Economic progress is not only about what a country possesses, but how effectively it organises, produces, decides, delivers value, and scales ideas into jobs.”
According to him, Nigeria’s persistent underperformance is rooted less in lack of resources and more in weak systems and inefficient processes.
Peterside said that business re-engineering is far more than incremental improvement, adding that “It is a radical redesign of processes—technology-enabled, outcome-driven, and continuously evolving.”
He said that systems might be slow, expensive, unpredictable, or vulnerable to manipulation, noting that organisations could rebuild processes fit for today’s realities rather than yesterday’s constraints.
Peterside, who is author of three bestselling books added that productivity would not rise through motivation alone but through better systems.
According to Peterside, when processes are simplified, responsibilities clarified, delays reduced, and standards enforced, productivity will improve naturally.
Tracing the history of re-engineering, he argued that from early industrial workflows and quality movements to the era of digital transformation, technology has become a powerful enabler—through automation, data platforms, and AI—the enduring lesson remains that technology cannot fix a broken process unless the process itself is first redesigned.
Linking re-engineering directly to development, he highlighted productivity as Nigeria’s core structural constraint, adding that improved processes raise productivity, boosts competitiveness, lowers costs, improves quality, and enables firms and nations to grow and in turn, expands jobs, raises wages, and opens the door to exports.
Peterside argued that in Nigeria, high costs of doing business, inefficient logistics, slow approvals, and limited export diversification were design failures, rather than destiny.
He said that business re-engineering should therefore become a national productivity strategy anchored in deliberate policy, institutional restructuring, and strong public-private collaboration.
He called on academia, government, and industry to embrace re-engineering as a mindset rather than a one-time reform.
“By committing to measurement, discipline, and institutional performance, Nigeria can build systems that outlast personalities and deliver sustainable growth, better jobs, stronger firms, and a more inclusive economic future,” he said.
