sits at an interesting intersection of politics, public administration and management practice. Best known to many as the turnaround Director General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) and a former federal lawmaker, Dr. Peterside in October 2025, amid Nigeria’s 25th year of uninterrupted democracy marked by both triumphs and tremors, unveiled two seminal works: Leading in a Storm (published by Safari Books) and Beneath the Surface: Essays on Nigeria’s Chequered Journey (under Masobe Books’ Makere imprint). Launched in high-profile events across Lagos, Abuja, London, and Chicago, these volumes distill decades of frontline experience into actionable wisdom, appraising leadership not as charisma but as calibrated competence.. Taken together they are less self-promotion than a compact syllabus of technocratic practice: diagnosis, systems-thinking, crisis leadership and concrete reform prescriptions. Indeed, these are not just additions to the bookshelf of public leadership; they are markers of a maturing intellect committed to decoding the dysfunctions of the Nigerian state and offering a manual for its repair, making Dr. Peterside’s steady evolution into a scholar-technocrat standout.
In Leading in a Storm, he gives us a compass for crisis. In Beneath the Surface, he hands us a mirror for the nation. Together, they mark him as one of the few Nigerian public figures who seem determined not only to participate in the system but to understand and, perhaps, redesign it.
To speak of Dr. Peterside’s technocratic depth, then, is to acknowledge an evolving blend of practitioner’s insight, reformist instinct, and intellectual engagement. His books do not merely instruct; they provoke reflection on the conditions that make reform either possible or impossible.
He embodies a newer kind of Nigerian public figure; one whose authority stems not from populism or proximity to power but from the disciplined study of how systems work and fail. This technocratic turn, if sustained, could inspire a generation of leaders to think more rigorously about governance as an engineering problem: one of design, feedback, and adaptation.
But every technocrat must confront a dilemma of how to make technical rationality speak to political reality. Dr. Peterside’s frameworks are lucid and his prose persuasive, yet the Nigerian state remains stubbornly resistant to change. The next frontier for him may not be another book but an experiment in translating his ideas into institutional practice beyond NIMASA—a laboratory of reform in a new domain.