Former Director General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Dr Dakuku Peterside, has said that Nigeria’s persistent underperformance is rooted less in lack of resources and more in weak systems and inefficient processes.
This was as he said that economic progress is not only about what a country possesses, but how effectively it organises, produces, decides, delivers value, and scales ideas into jobs.
Dr Peterside, a renowned turnaround expert, who stated these while delivering the keynote address at the First International Conference of the Department of Business Administration at the Ignatius Ajuru University of Education, Port Harcourt, noted that institutions are not defined by walls or rankings, but by the courage of their questions and the values of their graduates.
Taking a critical look at the Nigeria situation, Dr Peterside stressed that high costs of doing business, inefficient logistics, slow approvals, and limited export diversification are design failures, not destiny.
He therefore challenged participants to move beyond searching for easy answers and instead cultivate the courage to ask the right questions.
Peterside 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 explained that business re-engineering is far more than incremental improvement, saying; “it is a radical redesign of processes—technology-enabled, outcome-driven, and continuously evolving”.
Peterside said that by asking why systems are slow, expensive, unpredictable, or vulnerable to manipulation, organisations can rebuild processes fit for today’s realities rather than yesterday’s constraints.
The former NIMASA boss emphasised that productivity does not rise through motivation alone, but through better systems, adding that when processes are simplified, responsibilities clarified, delays reduced, and standards enforced, productivity improves naturally.
While tracing the history of re-engineering, Peterside noted 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.
Business re-engineering, he proposed, should therefore become a national productivity strategy anchored in deliberate policy, institutional restructuring, and strong public-private collaboration.
Accordingly, Peterside called on academia, government, and industry to embrace re-engineering as a mindset rather than a one-time reform.
He further said; “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 summed up”.
