The colour of the new government
Well, with ministerial nominees now appearing at the national assembly for scrutiny to ensure their suitability or not, the purveyors of the malicious innuendoes of a government going nowhere has found that the wind has been taken out of their sails. But a new debate has ensued about the character of President Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet […]
Well, with ministerial nominees now appearing at the national assembly for scrutiny to ensure their suitability or not, the purveyors of the malicious innuendoes of a government going nowhere has found that the wind has been taken out of their sails. But a new debate has ensued about the character of President Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet as to whether the government will be chock full with politicians as against technocrats. The implication being that previous administrations were composed largely of politicians and that was why very little was achieved in terms of development. A government of technocrats would be more result driven, so goes the argument.
The underlying reason why politicians have fallen out of favour in the eyes of the public is that when appointed into government achieving concrete result is invariably less on their minds, that as soon as they get cabinet portfolios they become preoccupied with recouping the money spent on their elections and this contributes to the bad judgements they make as ministers. Some would even claim that the ease with which the ministers recover their election expenditures totally make them besotted and obsessed with making more and more money far in excess with what they spent to get elected. And so what should not even be contemplated in the first place because of its illegality becomes the motive force for becoming a politician and when called to serve as a minister. It is the reason for scandals such Hullibutton, Siemens, the 300 billion earmarked for road rehabilitation in the first term of the Obasanjo administration which was not implemented and turned our roads into slaughter slabs instead of thorough fares. Indeed the list is endless.
Technocrats, on the other hand, do not have such need to recover any expenses having not been in politics in the first place anyway. It is assumed they were brought in because of either their skills or knowledge therefore they discharge their assignments as expected. There is a certain simplistic notion about this claim: for one, had the technocrats been so proficient in achieving results surely Nigeria would not be at this appalling level of development. In a recent interview in the Guardian on Sunday, Chief Olu Falae, himself an accomplished technocrat if ever there was one, defined a technocrat as an “individual with recognized professional career and background over a sustained period where he has acquired certain level of expertise”.
By this definition therefore most of our politicians could arguably pass for technocrats because before joining politics they were once in one profession or the other and most of them reached the pinnacle of their chosen professions and even retired before joining politics. Why therefore is it that when they are in government it is their unflattering predilections as politicians that supersede the high performing attribute of the technocrats? A ready illustration was that of Dr Sam Egwu, a former university teacher whose tenure as minister of education during the late President Umar Yar’adua administration would go down as the least effective and efficient so far. On his watch the nation’s universities were shut for several months and while this was happening the minister threw parties for his children who had graduated from some foreign universities. What can beat that in tactlessness and official insensitivity in the discharge of one’s ministerial duties? Or Professor Adenike Grange brought from her paediatrics clinic at the College of Medicien, University of Lagos but fell to the allure of filthy lucre at the federal ministry of health.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo must have been so enamoured of technocrats that he packed his government full of them—Okonjo Iweala, el-Rufai, Oby Esekwesile and others, who in fact constituted some sort of kitchen cabinet charged with instituting and implementing policies to propel Nigeria in to the league of efficient countries. To be fair, they exerted themselves diligently towards their assignments, but many years down the road, unable to sustain the momentum of their initiatives, everything seems to have gone to dross. It is all very well in the case of Dr Okonjo Iweala who is now being brought back in to the cabinet ostensibly as a recognition of her intrinsic value as a technocrat with something to offer. But would whatever she has to offer— for instance fiscal discipline– endure or is it merely a make believe that this government would now take its work seriously but sooner than later go back to its well known inefficient ways?
Therefore rather than splitting hairs about what category of people should be appointed into cabinet, a way should be found to limit the unsavoury impact of the political process on the ability of the cabinet appointee to perform his duties. One way is to reduce the huge cost of the electoral process so that no one has to embark on devious ways to recover monies spent on electioneering. Then, of course, we should rethink the sanctions imposed on wayward ministers who make stealing funds their pastime. In other countries—China for example– the penalty is death, but if this is too harsh for the squeamish among us, then a life time in the slammer would do just fine.