Al-Makura versus Nasarawa permanent secretaries
While I do not hold any brief for the individuals involved, I hasten to add that the allegation sounds all too familiar, especially coming from a politician, who is out mainly to secure political advantage over his rivals. The civil servant, in all circumstances, owes loyalty to the incumbent political head, but such loyalty must […]
While I do not hold any brief for the individuals involved, I hasten to add that the allegation sounds all too familiar, especially coming from a politician, who is out mainly to secure political advantage over his rivals. The civil servant, in all circumstances, owes loyalty to the incumbent political head, but such loyalty must never be allowed to translate into political partisanship. However, because the politician is inclined to cry wolf where none exists, the civil servant, helpless in the face of a code of anonymity, becomes the ready fall guy.
Before now, I have had to observe the new governor from a distance as he grappleds with the day-to-day challenges of governance in the state in the past three months-plus, and I was left with a sour taste in the mouth, to say the least. The performance index is as grim as it can ever get: running battles all over with the state House of Assembly, workers unions, coupled with a military approach to the public policy process and public administration at large. The business mogul-turned politician has broken every available records in the field and set new ones in the process.
In the run-up to the general elections, he made outlandish pay-as-you-go promises to all strata of the state – civil servants, medical workers, teachers and academic staff of tertiary institutions, NULGE, sundry groups inclusive. Once firmly in the saddle, he was no less keen to discountenance the promises without bathing any eyelid. Although the typical Nigerian politician takes electoral promises in general as non-binding rituals of the sport, such a posture will not be considered good enough for a political party like the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), which masquerades as a veritable conscience of the nation.
Being the lone CPC state in the country, therefore, it behoves Governor Al-Makura to lead by example. Rather than a concrete difference however, the Nasarawa helmsman may have inadvertently, proved the cynics right that the more things change, the more they remain the same. His has at best been an enervating performance, suffused with histrionics. In this context, the wholesome dismissal of the permanent secretaries, without prior warning, must rank as the defining highlight of his first one hundred days in office. It was an act of unsurpassed flight of reason.
The reasons for this act of impunity appear far-fetched, apart from the political imperative to propitiate the base appetites of apparatchiks who have for sometime now, been baying for blood. Al-Makura’s heavy handedness against a politically vulnerable group is symptomatic of the widespread abuse of office which most state governors have perfected into an art lately. Rather than the pursuit of good governance and the rule of law as the cornerstones of democracy, the likes of Al-Makura have been all too eager to project raw power, thereby failing to concentrate energy on the provision of democracy dividends to a majority of the people. His handling of the issue at hand has invariably, exposed his palpable inexperience coupled with the limitations of his private sector background. It seems to me increasingly that our man is boxing above his weight.
As a retired Permanent Secretary myself, I bear testimony that he has a lot of catching up to do with his predecessor, Alhaji Aliyu Akwe Doma, in that regard. Doma, a consummate public sector man and doyen of achievement ethic in the civil service, resisted every temptations to compromise the autonomy of the Service. Indeed, he went out of his way to re-position the service as a veritable vehicle for service delivery to the generality of the state; the climax of which consisted in the completion of 500-units of three-bedroom detached bungalows designated as civil servants housing estate in the heart of Lafia. Surely, Al- Makura can improve on this record.
As politically expedient as the present action may appear, it is fraught with dire implications for the state, and in particular, for the future of the state’s civil service. The affected officers, it must be noted, represent the crème de la crème of the state’s civil service, the finest that the state can boast of in terms of experience, expertise, integrity and technical competence in the field of public administration. Sadly, the crop of professionals will now be replaced.
The state’s evolving civil service is being unduly politicized from the very top and the perpetrators have taken refuge in sinister imputations. The seeds of politicization will inevitably pave the way for the installmental destruction of a young bureaucracy that has been built up in the past fifteen years on the backs of some of the officers who are today, victims of rampaging executive lawlessness. It is disheartening to observe that rather than take steps to strengthen the civil service, the state government finds it convenient to weaken the service instead, by embarking on measures that actually undermine its capacity to serve as the conveyorbelt of the state government’s policies and programmes.
What follows next is predictable: the enthronement of mediocrity, corruption, indiscipline and godfatherism in place of merit and a system of impersonal rules and processes upon which a viable civil service organization anywhere is built. The attendant loss of morale and fear of the unknown, especially at the top, levels of the service, is pure recipe for anarchy which is bound to negatively impact on goals, hamper service delivery and distort policy monitoring and implementation.
Modibbo, a retired Perm Sec, lives in Abuja