There is no gainsaying the fact that the incoming government will be taking over the apparatus of government in a very somber mood because Nigeria today has been heavily pulled down by all manner of problems.
One of the main functions of government all over the world is to provide security for its citizens to go about their daily life. And this is one of the biggest failures of the outgoing government as it failed to provide security to us, as individuals, as families and communities. Worst of all, we even lost large parcel of our territory to an insurgency that seemed to have been deliberately allowed to fester. The human suffering is intense and material damage so much that will require a herculean effort to sort out.
At the other fronts it is the same sad story; the economy is down, our currency, the naira, went into a free fall and even the resident Guru in the ministry of finance who was beautified with the fancy title of 'coordinator of the economy' seems helpless, and can only wring both hands in hopeless despair. Our financial remorse is further compounded by the tragedy affecting our main source of national revenue, oil, now facing serious pricing challenges in the international market which is further worsened by impudent illegal bunkering, thus seriously depleting our national income.
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When you add all these ingredients to the cauldron that contains other elements such as poor generation and distribution of electricity, poor transport facilities, and inadequate health and education facilities, the brew is potent, and the look of it is enough to shake and frighten any incoming government. Our economists even doubt the future survival of the country. They give us a lowly Human Development Index (HDI) score and say we cannot even achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The blame for this poor performance is often laid at the feet of the public service that is said to be incompetent, corrupt and visionless. Of course the operators in the public service will tell you that a government will get the public service it deserves. If the government is clueless, inept and corrupt, its public service will not be otherwise.
But life must go on, as May 29 beckons. The new government must take over and lead us out of this doldrums. A good step, one will make bold to suggest, is to take a fresh look at the public service which is the engine through which government policies and decisions are implemented.
The public service is the vehicle through which dividends of governance are transported to the citizenry. The public service as we all know is all encompassing, including not only the core civil service but also those in the parastatals, educational and health institutions, the national assembly, the judiciary, the military, police and paramilitary services. It is the performance of the operators in the public service that the citizenry see and feel, to measure the ultimate success of any government. Once the new government is able to invigorate the group on this platform to perform, then the task of taking the country out of the economic and social doldrums is bound to be easier. The judgment of the citizenry will then be kinder.
Chief Olusegun Obasanjo had a good understanding of this premise when he came on board in 1999 as the first elected president in this dispensation. In the first two years he planned and unleashed the most comprehensive public service reforms ever, which had salutary effect on the nationwide. At the expiration of his tenure Chief Obasanjo left the public service better than he found it. He chalked up many achievements in terms of enhancement of salaries for public servants, pension reforms, better working facilities, and better working environment. Others were improvement in budget management and procurement processes, and several others.
The reforms were meant to continue but somehow subsequent administrations have not given it the required boost which has today led to widespread feeling of despondency in the public service. I expect the new government to give the public service reforms documents a good dusting-over and or come up with its own version after due consultation with all relevant stakeholders.
Other means of revamping and invigorating the public service for better performance is through creation of commissions usually assigned to identify the problems and proffer solutions. From earlier times, we have seen several of such, starting from Adebo and Udoji in the 1970s, Dotun Phillips in the 1980s, Ayida and Danjuma in the 1990s and Adamu Fika recently. The purpose of instituting these various commissions had virtually the same intention: putting the public service on the pedestal of reformation for better services to the people of Nigeria.
It is a pity that the outgoing government did not deem it fit to implement the recommendations of some of the committees it created to handle specific problems that arose in the public service. A good example is the Adamu Fika Presidential committee on the review of the reform processes in the Nigerian public service whose recommendations are left to be gathering dust, due probably to political inertia. One is certain if the Fika report is adopted it would have cleared a lot of the structural imbalances obfuscating relationships between organs dealing with the public service, besides other obvious benefits to the overall functions of the public service.
Another report that has received a cavalier treatment from the outgoing government is the one submitted by the Steve Oronsaye committee on restructuring and rationalisation of agencies, parastatals and commissions. Due to the way and manner parastatals and commissions have proliferated over the years with heavy consequences on the lean resources available, it became incumbent on the outgoing government to re-focus and rationalise them accordingly.
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The committee was inaugurated with all fanfare but when they submitted a report, the outgoing government looked at it and probably due to the national outcry against it, developed cold feet. As it was widely reported, if the report had been taken, we would have since had a slimmer group of government parastatals, very focused on the attainment of societal goals. The savings that would accrue could then be deployed to add to the finances of executing the capital projects.
Apart from rummaging past reports hitherto gathering dust in the dark alleys of government offices and creating new commissions to go over what has clearly been gone over before, there are plenty of other ways the new government can revamp the public service. What should be noted, however, is that in these times of our being part of a global village, most of what would be suggested as panacea to our public service maladies have probably been tried somewhere else. We cannot invent the wheel again. What is required is political will and moral resolution to implement the options available. And sadly this is what was lacking in the outgoing government.
This article was earlier published on May 25, 2015
