RENOWNED turnaround expert and 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.
Delivering the keynote address, he 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.
According to him, “Economic progress is not only about what a country possesses, but how effectively it organises, produces, decides, delivers value, and scales ideas into jobs,” adding that Nigeria’s persistent underperformance is rooted less in lack of resources and more in weak systems and inefficient processes.
Dr Peterside went on to clarify that business re-engineering is far more than incremental improvement, while arguing that “It is a radical redesign of processes technology-enabled, outcome-driven, and continuously evolving.”
By asking why systems are slow, expensive, unpredictable, or vulnerable to manipulation, he noted, organisations can rebuild processes fit for today’s realities rather than yesterday’s constraints.
The author of three bestselling books stressed that productivity does not rise through motivation alone but through better systems and when processes are simplified, responsibilities clarified, delays reduced, and standards enforced, productivity improves 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.
Turning directly to Nigeria, Dr Peterside argued that high costs of doing business, inefficient logistics, slow approvals, and limited export diversification are design failures, not destiny.
Business re-engineering, he proposed, 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 summed up.