Nigeria’s national productivity dynamics stands at the very core of Nigeria’s economic recovery project. In other words, any recovery strategy must be targeted at rebooting the system in a manner that injects new life into government institutions. The national productivity paradigm therefore centers the institutional reform awareness that Nigeria urgently requires to become a viable global economic force. And the commencement of that reform is the paradigm shift in the national productivity profile. Unfortunately, this paradigm shift cannot be achieved successfully except Nigeria deals decisively with the execution trap that has bedeviled it since independence. This trap speaks to the inability to push policy through from design to implementation in a way that impacts governance. Development outcomes are more dependent on execution than visioning, strategic plan and all the big picture concerns at a ratio of 85/15 per cent. To appreciate the critical essence of the gap between policy and outcome, our issue is a case of an administrative transformation that must of necessity be propelled by a bureaucracy with a jet engine, but is actually powered by the engine of a Beatle car.
Since government’s governance effort will be measured in terms of what is achieved rather than what it undertakes, the issue of execution involves the balancing of doing the right thing with doing it right which is conditioned not just by the legendary Nigerian Factor but by the breakdown of institution as mix of structures and values.
Let us consider some instances that drive home the point that connects productivity to the capability readiness of the public service to deliver on goods and services. First, there is the recurrent issue of waste management and redundancy in the Nigerian economy, aligned with a national maintenance culture model. There is no doubt that the workforce of the public service in Nigeria is over-bloated. There are so many people doing so little and so little doing the significant work. For anyone that truly understands the challenges confronting the public service, especially the need to put in place a performance management system, it becomes immediately obvious why there must first be a redundancy management framework that will make it possible for the injection of new talents in the wake of the downsizing of the institution. The overall vision, however, is better resource allocation and utilization efficiency through national assets optimization and performance with increased quantum of composite value added as local content and efficient maintenance system. A robust master data of national assets and their regular profiling along lines of cascaded maintenance schedule that is a component of scorecards for top public managers is imperative. It does mean that assets maintenance would be a significant proportion of the top management KPIs. It would however help if there is a vigorously enforced national policy and quality control benchmarks for budget allocation that reflects national assets status and maintenance audit reports. A centrally coordinated dashboard managed with the involvement of NGOs and professional bodies would need to be developed to report on KPIs around national assets maintenance and performance across sectors of the economy.
On the other hand, there is equally the corollary urgent need to block revenue leakages arising from government agencies’ involvement in capital projects. One fiscal consequence of this is that their involvement reduces the revenue accruing to the federal government at the end of each fiscal year. However, if government ensures the transfer of capital projects away from its agencies, this will have the advantage of increasing the revenues that each agency is able to remit.
Making the public service functional and achieving a paradigm shift in Nigeria’s productivity profile are necessarily part of a larger governance reform project that consolidates the public service reform by providing other institutional reforms—electoral reforms, anti-corruption reforms, security reforms, infrastructural reform, and so on—that facilitate the efficiency of service delivery to the people. The reform of the anti-corruption mechanism is particularly urgent in this governance context because corruption, by its very nature, is anti-developmental. In fact, the efforts geared towards taking the civil service to the next level cannot in any way be divorced from combating corruption, either political or bureaucratic.
In the first place, political corruption makes it possible that significant reforms do not even take off because those who have the capacity to give it political backing are already hamstrung by powerful interests. On the other hand, bureaucratic corruption is defined by the replacement of the virtue of deferred gratification in the name of service by the culture of immediacy. The instant effect is that the civil service not only lost its reputation as a noble and spiritual vocation, but there crept into the system the unbridled desire to undermine it processes, procedures and ethos in the bid to satisfy selfish desires. And so, the very people who ought to be at the forefront of reforming the system became the worst opposition to it. The first order of business of the anti-corruption reform is to strengthen the structure and processes of service delivery in the public service by transforming the transparency and accountability components of all reform management and implementation. The anti-corruption campaign is to be backed up by effective anti-corruption agencies, and education emphasizing the importance of ethical conduct and integrity. The anti-corruption reform therefore ties all the other governance reform into an effective framework of development and a developmental state in Nigeria.
In the final analysis, one of the direct consequences of the reform of the governance and administrative structures and institutions of the Nigerian state should be the adequate diversification of the Nigerian economy away from its unhealthy dependence on the oil sector. Economic diversification only speaks to a state’s creative capacity to read the time and adjust its development strategies accordingly. For instance, beyond commodity products, global economies are now adjusting to the implications of the emerging knowledge society. A proactive diversification scheme becomes a foregone conclusion when the public service has achieved the required capacity readiness to deliver on the mandate of democratic governance that will enable the Nigerian state cultivate other economic possibilities that can complement oil.
Concluded