Oronsayes’s committee’s confusion

The details of the report I confess is not yet in my library but if the summaries that we read and hear all over the place are anything to go by, the detailed content of the document speaks more about confusion than an assessment of the cost of running government in Nigeria and the way […]

The details of the report I confess is not yet in my library but if the summaries that we read and hear all over the place are anything to go by, the detailed content of the document speaks more about confusion than an assessment of the cost of running government in Nigeria and the way out.

Let me first of all begin with the premise that the federal bureaucracy in the first place is not over bloated as so many people in government would want us to believe. There is still a lot of space that if the system was to work fine that needed to be filled up. The agony is that the practitioners in the system have so mercilessly emasculated the service to the extent that it has completely lost all its values and attributes.

In the civil service today, very few staffers are actually engaged in any meaningful work. The reason is simple, personal aggrandizement, greed and nepotism in some cases. Only those at the top echelon of service and few others are in the knowledge of what obtains in various ministries, agencies and departments of government.

The implication of this therefore is that the work is not done, corruption is elevated to the peak,  the system suffers and the bureaucracy which is supposed to be the implementation machine of government has utterly been made not just irresponsible but unable to provide service to the Nigerian people. This is the summary of the story of the Nigerian public service unfortunately.

The breakdown of ministries and the creation of extra ministerial departments is not new in any government. In Nigeria, the process was intensified especially between 1985 and 1993 and since then it has been the process. The reasons that these departments are carved out of the main line bureaucracy is traditionally to fast tract the attainment of service delivery which if left in the mainstream service, may suffer delays and bottlenecks which are two major characters that stood the bureaucracy as a distinct system.

Such creations are not limited to Nigeria alone but all over the world and from the standpoint of the theory of bureaucracy and service efficiency, they are not out of place. The problem is that they are equally subjected to the general rule of the Nigerian reality which made it impossible for virtually anything workable elsewhere to work in this clime.

It is not about not working or unable to achieve objectives because of duplication or multiplication of institutions pursuing similar responsibilities and objectives but it is about the tradition and custom of inefficiency and failures that characterized Nigeria steadily over the last many years.

When looking for the solution to the failures in the system, it is counterproductive to continue to chase shadows leaving the substance unattended to. The recommendations of the Oronsaye’s Committee to the effect that very critical national agencies created to address specific national issues be scrapped in my view speak volume about the knowledge of the problem by the committee.

Let’s take for instance the ICPC and EFCC that were created to fight the corruption monster in the country. Agreed that all the powers of the two Commissions are encapsulated in the Police Act. Would any sensible citizen at home or abroad recommend the surrendering of the activities of these agencies to a Nigerian Police that is desirous of serious reform?

A few years ago, the corruption perception index as released by Transparency in Nigeria pointed to the Nigerian Police as most corrupt institution in the country. How do you trust such a group to wage a sustained war against corruption in the face of daunting integrity question that it suffers?

I think the case here again is that of a government that has failed to properly come to grasp with the nature and magnitude of malice that it faces in the country. What must be done is to ensure that correct prescriptions are applied to these national epidemics instead of this ad-hoc approach of creating, merging and scrapping of agencies just because the cost of running government is huge.

I appreciate the scare in government circles to the effect that any shock in oil price in the international market would mean complete breakdown of governance. I am of the view that the best way to address the so-called increase in running cost of government is by making the service more efficient and checking on the excess leakages in the nation’s ministries and parastatals where collective national patrimony has since been turned to personal estates by privileged elites in high government offices.

Can you imagine that the NTA, Radio Nigeria for instance are to be scrapped? So who reports the story on the side of the State? AIT? Channels or DITV? This is sheer madness and cannot be rationalized for any reason talk less a flimsy excuse of reducing cost of running government when everybody knows how the monies are misappropriated.

In Britain, the colonial mentor of Nigeria, United States of America, the contemporary headquarters of global capitalism where the economics of slimmer government takes its roots, the BBC and VOA are still more or less the official mouth pieces of the government in London and in Washington. Why would Nigerian government throw away its own channels of communication? I think the committee was far too taken away by money-phobia.

We warn those in authority on a sustained basis that the problem with governance shouldn’t necessarily be on high cost but effective spending in relation to value addition. Nowhere in the world is the responsibility of the government balancing its account in a fashion that corporations and entrepreneurs do. Government is not about profit and loss but more about the creation of enabling environment to improve on the quality of life of citizens.

In conclusion, I wish to submit that the problem with Nigeria’s public sector management is not about how much is spent but how it is spent. Government must stop chasing shadows and face the problems head on. I believe sincerely that the public service sector is under employing and need to readjust to take in more Nigerians for service delivery.

This merger, scrapping or demerger are mere attempts at looking at the problems without proffering any honest solution to the issues at stake. Block the leakages, stop the theft and reinvigorate the civil service to function for the common good. The white paper committee must do the right thing and throw out that escapist thesis of the Oronsaye’s committee.