Government score card: Good initiative but…

The initiative is no doubt praiseworthy considering that Nigeria has had a rather long history of low public accountability.  If the scheme is sustained, as the present administration has done for a while now, we can hopefully look forward to the institution of a culture of accountability in governance in Nigeria. Government should thus be […]

The initiative is no doubt praiseworthy considering that Nigeria has had a rather long history of low public accountability.  If the scheme is sustained, as the present administration has done for a while now, we can hopefully look forward to the institution of a culture of accountability in governance in Nigeria. Government should thus be commended and encouraged to regularize the practice.
But then, there is need for government to appreciate that a score card is not a manifesto, but a record of what has been done or undone in governance.  Against this backdrop, a score card cannot take the form of a plan of action which essentially focuses on “what we are set to do”.  Therefore, the score card on trade and investment matters which revealed that different manufacturing firms were set to assemble vehicles in Nigeria almost amounted to saying that the sector was still trying to take off. Last week’s score card had much of this example. It is even more unacceptable to hear the employment of such diction in the final year of a term as if we are still at the beginning of a term
It is thus obvious that last week’s score card needed to be more comprehensive. Put differently, the scope should have been widened to accommodate all sectors of governmental activities. One area that everyone would always love to have a score card upon is public power supply. Is the score card there what critics refer to as a drop by as much as 1,476 megawatts? In a recent editorial, the Punch newspaper alleged that “the root of the current problem has been a bungled privatisation process that resulted in the sale of the electricity firms to companies that lacked both the technical know-how and the financial muscle to play big in the power sector” How true is this?  
The Nigerian constitution says the purpose of government shall be the welfare and security of the citizenry. The score card of a Nigerian government would thus be incomplete if it focuses on only activities concerning the economic well-being of the people without a corresponding emphasis on the security dimension of the government’s mandate. In earnest, what the people of Nigeria desperately desire at the moment is the security of their lives and property. If so, what was the score card on security? This of course must have put a big question mark on the televised score card programme because while we were watching our Ministers on one channel reeling out their achievements, some other channels where transmitting reality scenes of Nigerians fleeing for safety from Mubi, a major city in Adamawa State that has for a while experienced ample measures of insurgency.
Could it be true that the insurgents who attacked the Mubi Police Station and the Prisons facility in the town actually set free 366 prisoners? Answers to questions like this would have made for a proper score card on security.  Those in charge of the Ministry of Defence would have also done well if they had come forward to explain how much they have repelled insurgency and how many portions of captured territories have been recovered. Such an effort would have placed in perspective the official vow that not a single portion of our territory would be let go.
In the area of law enforcement, the partisan stigma which the premature withdrawal of police protection from the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alhaji Aminu Tambuwal has put on our police should have been explained. The defection of the Speaker from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressive Congress (APC)) as the Inspector General of police rightly observed is covered by our constitution. Accordingly, the first reaction to the incident should not have come from the police but from the House itself whose members should have been allowed to decide whether or not to remove the Speaker. It is only after then and indeed after the Judiciary would have settled any litigation on the subject that the police can make any move on the status of the Speaker.  The truth however is that what Nigerians want to celebrate in law enforcement is not police involvement in political defections between APC and PDP because both parties are essentially one body with two names.
These observations notwithstanding, no one can fault the worthiness of the Federal Government’s decision to institute the score card scheme just as it is wrong for anyone to federalize public accountability. Rather, it should occur at all levels and in different arms of government; otherwise, it will be hard for anyone to say we have a true democracy. If so, states and local governments ought to undertake similar score cards by organizing sectoral briefings on their developmental projects. The need for this is more glaring at the local government level where as we hear, state governors capture the allocation and leave Chairmen of local councils with some pocket money for their personal use. Why should that happen when funds allocated to many of our local governments are higher than the budgets of some countries in our sub-region?
The situation in some states could be more annoying as many of them are reportedly run like a one-man business. That is not all, due process is hardly observed in the award of contracts. Again, the amount of money spent on publicizing projects often competes favourably with the entire project sum. Sometimes, the publicity stints could be distasteful; hence we hear titles like action governors and uncommon transformation. Interestingly, all that the so called transformers do is to merely build some roads and a few other projects. What is uncommon about such developments that are taken for granted in other climes? Besides, what is uncommon about things that had in the past been commendably achieved by great men like Ogbemudia in the old Midwest and Audu Bako in Kano? Nigeria had better fashioned out a more rational score card regime .