Opinion

Oronsaye Report: Implementation And Cost Of Governance Challenge

Published

3 years ago

November 9, 2021

NewTimes

Professionals In Government: Issues In Navigating The Policy Space In Nigeria

Tunji Olaopa

As it is to be expected, the Oronsaye Report is back in the news. And this should not be surprising. Any genuine attempt at engaging with the Nigerian predicament must be a no-hold-barred engagement with the significant issues that lie behind Nigeria’s inability to make substantive progress since independence. And one such issue is the cost of governance that has ensured that enormous amount of budgetary monies is spent on administrative wastage and redundancies. And out of all the genuine attempts that have been generated to sincerely combat and arrest Nigeria’s drift further into underdevelopment, one of the unarguably fundamental is the Report of the Presidential Committee on Restructuring and Rationalization of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies aka the Stephen Oronsaye Report.

Nigeria’s governance system is one of the most expensive in the world. And the simple implication of this is that by the time recurrent expenditure has eaten a large chunk of the budget, there is barely little left for capital and infrastructural projects that are required to make life easy for Nigerians. To understand the significance of the Oronsaye Report requires situating it within the historical trajectory of how Nigeria came to the burden of costly governance structure. The 1970s, specifically after the tragic Civil War, was a period that saw a process of institutional multiplication in administrative responsibilities. This was indeed a period of national optimism based on several issues. The war had just been concluded. Crude oil had been discovered and was bringing in enormous amount of money. The development planning had entered into its second phase with some measure of successes. Yet, there was no adequate attention paid to how these same factors could facilitate administrative complacence.

By the time the Second National Development Plan (1970-1975) would take off, it was undergirded by the economic philosophy that placed the federal government at the commanding height of the economy within the then reigning paradigm of Keynesianism. This was already necessitated by the unitary framework that had been imposed on the Nigerian 1963 Constitution by the Ironsi administration. And then the immense revenue from oil left the federal government awash in petrodollar. Finally, the urgency of achieving national integration demands that the administrative machinery of government must be infused with a national dynamic that will lay the foundation of national unity. This instigated the need to expand the federal public service, without any similar thoughts given to its management and evaluation in terms of governance dynamics. In the final analysis, and under the sway of the principle of representativeness, the civil service bloated beyond any possibility of administrative efficiency. And it gradually began to lose the capacity for internal critical assessment.

It became inevitable, under the rush for recruitment not matched by diligent due process in human resource management, that the first dynamic to diminish is the internal establishment control mechanism that was one of the colonial administrative legacies that made the public service a fundamental inheritance for the nascent Nigerian state. This internal administrative mechanism was built around the control tool nexus of organization and method (O&M) and the treasury control of establishment that benchmark the ratio of capital and recurrent budget. The core elements of this controls were the manpower forecasting and planning system of identifying, planning and acting upon human resource requirements and problems related to the conceptualization of the role of the state in the running of the national economy, as well as the trend analysis of service’s growth in size and expansion of the scope of responsibilities.

Once the internal administrative mechanism became vitiated, the domino effect of administrative decline became inevitable. And so many administrative functions and processes became irretrievably routine that systematically broke down the internal mechanism of efficiency. These include: the systematic planning for short- and long-term needs; forecasting of retirement; attrition rates; anticipated vacancies founded on periodic functional reviews (to determine changes in tasks as a result of government’s new policy targets and programme emphases); structural changes and quantum of workload incidental; basic restructuring due to privatization of government concerns; outsourcing (monetization policy as for example); periodic personnel and process audits; review of the scheme of service; abolition of vacant posts; control of the creation of new post, units, departments and agencies; accounting for voluntary retirements, retrenchments, and staff reduction due to process reengineering; automation and system changes; etc.

The second dimension of the cost of governance predicament the Nigerian state was confronted with derives from creating ad hoc task force structures and units of government business parallel to the existing bureaucratic structures in order to operate what is regarded as a flexible administrative arrangement unencumbered by administrative codes, rules and regulations, and with the capacity to enjoy self-accounting status in terms of resources deployed for their use. And this is further compounded by the replication of these parallel structures across each state of the federation as field offices as concession to our equally dysfunctional federalism. It takes little reflection to see how the ease of dumping the staff strength of these ad hoc arrangements on the mainstream public service leads to the needless expansion in an institutional context whose internal control mechanism has broken down. The implication of these ad hoc parallel structures is the essential lack of any scientific frameworks and parameters for determining not only the establishment of new agencies, commissions and structures, but also their viability and efficacy vis-à-vis existing governance objectives and dynamics, and cost-sensitive policy to wind them up when they have achieved the objectives of their establishment.

And these parallel structures, units and agencies are staffed not with an attention to the aggregate requirements of the federal civil service or its bloated-ness or otherwise, but based on arbitrary departmental and ministerial staffing dynamics that dump lots of deadwoods onto the system. This is further complicated by the practice by the politicians of making the civil service a dumping ground for settling their political cronies, party supporters and ethnic base. And finally, once these workers are recruited, outside of all known meritocratic principles and human resource management dynamics, they begin a gradual but steady rise within a system that is pathologically bureaucratic in the sense of rewarding extra-administrative, rather than efficient and performance-rooted, practices. And they are backed by a highly unionized career system that locks the government perpetually into an adversarial industrial relation which not only capitalizes on government’s clueless governance protocols, but also undermines any attempts at genuine administrative move that are conducive to national development trajectory.

Enter the Oronsaye Report…

When the Presidential Committee, headed by Mr. Stephen Oronsaye, was constituted on 8 August, 2011, it was clear that government itself was aware of the terrible drain that the cost of governance issue was having on the national development dynamics of the Nigerian state which had been a subject of strident advocacy for decades. The Jonathan administration that set up the Presidential Committee was responding both to the escalation of cost occasioned by the many redundant ad hoc structures of government and the urgent need to achieve governance accountability that will lead to efficiency in the conduct of government business. And efficiency can only be achieved if the Ministries, Departments and Agencies were repositioned to achieve “more for less;” and to “achieve more with less resources”.

In carrying out its business, the committee was guided by five fundamental principles:

(a) the economic challenges and the need for government to make more efficient use of its resources to achieve its development objectives and goals; (b) the fact that Nigeria had undertaken reforms in the past and lessons were learnt; (c) it was imperative to reform to meet the challenges of a better socio-political and economic society ; (d) there was no need to create another body to perform the functions of an already existing statutory entity; the fact that an institution was inefficient and ineffective should not warrant the creation of a new one; and (e) the reform would ensure efficient and effective management of government structures and functionaries to guarantee better service delivery and good governance.

In summary, the Oronsaye Report establishes as follows: (i) that there are 541 Federal Government parastatals, commissions and agencies (statutory and non-statutory); (ii) 263 of the statutory agencies should be reduced to 161; 38 agencies should be abolished; (iii) 52 agencies should be merged; and (iv) 14 should revert to departments in ministries. After the Presidential Committee submitted its report, the government in turn set up a White Paper Drafting Committee, headed by Mr. Mohammed Bello Adoke, SAN, the Honourable Attorney-General of the Federation, to study the recommendations of the Oronsaye Committee and to produce a White Paper on the report. When the White Paper was submitted, as was to be expected, the government on its part accepted only very few of the recommendations, with a larger number rejected and noted.

The findings of the White Paper, when it was finally released for the public in 2014, was greeted by mixed reactions from Nigerians. And most importantly, it was released to a host of national circumstances that proved inauspicious to its implementation. First, 2014 was just a year away from an election year, and it would be pure political suicide for the government of the day to implement a report that would become a liability for its desire for electoral victory. No government, however, its good national intention, needs a power base to be able to facilitate any such good intention. The Jonathan administration also needed victory in the 2015 general election to be in the kitty first if ever it was to then come back to the implementation of the Oronsaye Report. 2014 was also the year when Nigeria rebased her economy. and following a decade of high-end GDP growth rate, it was not surprising that Nigeria came out of the rebasing exercise as the largest economy in Africa, over her keenest rival, South Africa. Thus, this was too much of national news to be upended by the implementation of the report. The opposite end of this rationalization applies to the Buhari administration in its first incarnation. There was no way a government battling acute economic recession would be willing to commit itself to the recommendations of the report, despite the fact that the administration was seeking desperately to legitimize itself in the eyes of Nigerians and facilitate efficiency in government business that will institute efficiency and productivity.

In the final analysis, from the government response to the report and the reactions of a cross section of Nigerians, we are drawn back to the characterization of Nigeria as a “hesitant” reformer. In 2005, Professor Ladipo Adamolekun conducted a rigorous interrogation of 29 African countries on their reform activities. His study revealed that these African countries can be categorized into four groups based on their reform attitudes—the advanced reformers (like Botswana), the committed reformers (like Cameroon), the hesitant reformers (like Nigeria), and the non-starters (like Somalia). And the re-emergence of the report at this time of the second incarnation of the Buhari administration is no less inauspicious. While the first administration was marred by economic recession, the bad news now is the ravages of the COVID-19. All across the world, the coronavirus pandemic has undermined the economies of even the most advanced states in the world. Every country is reeling under the consequences of deaths, infections, unemployment and disequilibrium that the virus has inflicted on humankind. While we might therefore agree that any attempt to consider rationalization at this period could only add to the pains and suffering of Nigerians who are already undermined by the pandemic, it is also a truism that there is never any good time to implement a lofty reform that has been in the doldrums for many years. no reform of governance dynamics is ever palatable. And, as the saying goes, it is impossible to eat omelet without breaking eggs. 2021 is therefore as good as any year to implement the Oronsaye Report. and we must not fail to compliment the courage of a government that eventually returns to this report in the face of continuing inefficiency in the MDAs and decreasing national productivity.

For any country, and especially for Nigeria, these are terrible times. To say that the Nigerian economy is facing imminent recession is a gross understatement. There is a massive crash of the international oil prices, there is already in place an economic stagnation occasioned by the pandemic. The country is getting ensnared by mounting external loans in spite of the gloomy fact that twenty five percent of the federal revenue is spent annually on servicing existing debts portfolios. And the foreign reserve keeps getting dangerously depleted. If the government therefore is not committed to implementing this report this year to effectively reduce the cost of governance and its burden on infrastructural development and productivity in Nigeria, then there is no other time that will be auspicious.

Report and the Larger Governance Issues

We cannot underestimate the significance of the Oronsaye Report to the recuperation of Nigeria;s productivity dynamics. And it is getting this productivity matrix right that opens the gate for increased infrastructural development that will fundamentally transform the well-being of Nigeria. This is where we have been aiming for since independence. Unfortunately, I am of the strong conviction that the Oronsaye Report can only do so little to get us to the objective of undermining the cost of governance predicament that has hampered Nigeria’s efficient deployment of her resources for far too long. There are two significant reasons for my conviction.

First, we all will concede that the report is concerned, and rightly too, with efficiency savings at the macro-institutional level (though outside of the administrative dynamics of the core ministries and their relevance to the success of the productivity battle). This it did by focusing on eliminating redundant and duplicated agencies’ functions through consolidation and/or merger. However, this is a proposal that is not radical sufficiently to undermine the deep waste that has been created by many years of administrative inefficiency. The report has absolutely nothing to say about the role of the state in national development, and what implications a redefinition of the role of government in managing the development process would have for structure, function and service delivery business model of the entire public service. All over the world, managerialism and the managerial revolution in public administration and the public service are enjoining a fundamental reassessment of the state and its overlordship in the economy and in governance. Hence, real reform effort begins with reexamining the role the state ought to play in jumpstarting the rapid economic growth. And that role is basically one of first steering, then regulatory management of the economy that allows both state and nonstate actors to coexist within the governance space to facilitate developmental dynamics. In the final analysis, the Oronsaye Committee report is at best a first-level palliative solution to the deep-rooted cost of governance crisis that bedevils Nigeria. It is only a critical first step.

At another systemic level, the Oronsaye report fails to speak to what would be a most significant institutional and economic consequences of rationalization. Whether we are prepared to face it or not, institutional rationalization carries the burden of redundancy management that often comes with the pain of retrenchment and downsizing. Even if, for the sake of the politics, the Oronsaye Report is limited to targeting overhead cost and payroll saving to facilitate a no-job-loss-palliative. Yet, such an option cannot escape the cost of human-induced redundancies and attendant inefficiency in capacity utilization and associated productivity challenges. The merger-acquisition-undertakers dynamics to implementation of the report will no doubt lead inevitably to the terrible burden of payment of severance packages which will be huge and unaffordable. And we do not need any seer to tell us how non-payment will be met with a further undermining of the productivity dynamics through the reactions of a trade unionism founded on an adversarial industrial relation that sees the government and management teams as enemies. Yet, no one can grudge trade unions the case they make on behalf of their members. When the public service downsizes, it brings untold hardship to those who have always been public servants all their lives, and hence have nothing else to fall back on when they face retrenchment. A government cannot irresponsibly raise hopes of helpless people through reckless unplanned employment contracts, only to wake up overnight to want to throw people with a life into the cold without reasonable cover. And, from the tragic example of the civil service purge of 1975, government is not always ready and prepared to put together a post-retirement package that will help those affected by the downsizing to regain some level of dignity, and that will satisfy the trade unions on behalf of their members.

Beyond the Oronsaye Report … Holding the Reform Bull by the Horn

Let me reiterate: the Oronsaye Report is a solid and perspicacious first step on the way to an efficient unraveling of the cost of governance predicament Nigeria has been battling with since independence. And the bravery of the Buhari administration should be acknowledged for deciding to go through with this first step in cleansing the Augean stable of an inefficient government business mechanism that has consistently failed to meet up with Nigeria’s productivity challenge. However, to get to the core of the issue of the cost of governance is to go all the way rather than half of it. There is therefore an urgent need to go beyond a superficial step towards a more systemic, systematic and scientific framing and diagnostic understanding of the crisis. And there are several administrative and governance ways to go about this. In other words, there are several administrative, legislative and constitutional things that will enable the government put the report in proper perspectives within the governance framework of the Nigerian state.

Reform is a delicate business that becomes complicated and messy if not properly placed in significant contexts and significantly sequenced in ways that will eventually lead to the achievements of the set objectives and targets. Two contextual reform issues are important for the government to note. First, any haphazard implementation of the mergers, acquisition and eliminations recommended by the Oronsaye Report, if not properly managed, will result in deepening the crisis of a virtually collapsed and already fragile administrative system. To underscore this point, we only need to turn our attention to how the structural adjustment programme undermined critical administrative structures, processes and institutions when it was uncritically implemented by overzealous reformers. I need not cite more than the destruction of the architecture of administrative statistics to buttress my point. All public servants just woke up one day to witness a brutal cut in the budget head for the essential printing and publication of basic administrative instruments — the weekly gazette, annual statistical digest, annual sectoral statistical bulletin, federal staff disposition list, public service annual reports, etc.—when the government printing press was privatized. One could easily see the terrible effect of this on the structure of administrative statistics in a pre-Internet period. Thus, reform cannot be carried through to success on the basis of mere passion that is not undergirded by strict knowledge of actions and consequences. Government must therefore begin to think of a functional consultancy support, with strong expert public sector competency handholding to foreclose the usual conception-reality gap in the dynamics of change management that undermined implementation of past reforms; and to tame the unbridled passion that will attend the implementation of the report. Such a consultancy service will bring the implementation within a saner purview of change management that will align the implementation to final objectives in functional review.

Second, there will be attempts to hijack the Oronsaye Report from reaching its full implementation desirable outcomes and potential. This is a logical implication of situating fundamental reform measures within a context of an already corrupted governance space. Parochial and prejudiced interests will always be available to stifle the full impacts of the report. The reform experience of other countries provides the insights that will enable the government to enlist the support of eminent administrator, civil society organisations and other credible individuals to facilitate the implementation and success of the report. For instance, for Margaret Thatcher to ensure the success of the UK managerial reforms in the 1980s, she appointed Lord Rainer, chairman and CEO of Mark and Spenser as the lead reform figure. There is no point in grabbing the reform bull by the horn if we are not ready to wrestle it to the ground to get what we want.

Once the context of corruption is factored into the eventual success of the reform, we can then begin to unravel the fundamentals of implementation. And the first order of business is that the government needs to understand the significance of constitutional legislation in the grounding of the recommendations of the report. Fundamental changes, of the type required not only by the report, but by the reform of government business, requires firm legislation to give them legal teeth to be able to achieve what they are meant to achieve. For instance, there is an urgent need to kick off with several constitutional amendments that produce immediate hanging fruits, like abolishing the state sponsorship of religious pilgrimages, a very drastic reduction to the number of ministries presently functional, the need to urgently reduce the vast numbers of personal aides that attend the executive and legislative arms of government, or even an amendment of section 147 of the Nigerian Constitution that gives the president and governors powers to appoint ministers and commissioners from the 36 states plus FCT at federal level.

The second level of deeper constitutional interrogation requires a series of scientific reviews that probe very deep into the constitutional context to examine the cracks and fissures that have undermined the capacity of our democratic governance system to rise up to the challenge of development. I am talking about the outrageous economics of a non-developmental federalism that uncharacteristically spreads its scarce resources very thin over wasteful administrative redundancies spread across the federal, state and local government areas. Nigeria’s presidential system constitutes one of the most uncreative, expensive, wasteful and unproductive in the world. And it is only at the larger constitutional level that legislation can be provided to ease the way for the entrance of the Oronsaye Report as a significant mopping strategy that keys into the legislative dynamics.

The grand objective of the federal government is to achieve a productivity paradigm shift that is founded on transforming the business model of government business dynamics through a modernizing reform project that essentially undermines wastages, redundancies and leakages. This requires a massive shakeup of the bureaucratic model of the MDAs in such a way that demands a productivity audit that will sharpen the focus of ministries and other governmental structures on the achievement of key governmental goals and priorities. Such an audit will certainly be founded on key elements of change management that requires behavioral and attitudinal cultural changes. And this is exactly where the implementation of the Oronsaye Report becomes an iterative reform framework that will deliver increasing benefits over time in terms of efficiency and effectiveness gains of the MDAs and their productivity capacities within framework reinforced by a culture change programme for which there are adaptable templates that could be quickly calibrated. In its iterative significance, the report will help to determine the very important issue of phasing and sequencing of implementation, which must ensure a timely alignment of fundamental reallocation of resources between and within agencies with appropriate points in the budgeting cycle.

The whole of the Oronsaye Report, within the foregoing constitutional and legislative context, can then become wrapped in a scientific administrative procedure and processes to achieve profound governance objectives. Government must necessarily specify, through deliberately determined analytics and administrative metrics, the efficiency saving targets that the national economy urgently optimally requires from all the MDAs across the sectors that could be realistically and sustainably extracted as total budget saving percentages. It can only be on the strength of these targets that the ministries and agencies already implicated by the report can be asked to proceed to developing reviews and rationalization plans. These administrative feedbacks will enable the government to articulate a performance improvement plan and a framework of cost of governance reduction measures on three critical fronts: (i) identified expenditure reduction proxies; (ii) leverages for increased efficiency in government day-to-day operations; and (iii) measures to strengthen accountability frameworks.

A successful implementation of the Oronsaye Report also depends crucially on the need to conduct a rigorous public expenditure review (PER). The results of such broad PER will then be utilized to determine new budget ceilings for each ministry and agencies within a medium-term expenditure framework. Each ministry and agency is then compelled to undertake functional reviews to achieve a range of objectives:

provide assurance that the determined budget ceiling for the ministry can be achieved without jeopardizing achievement of other key government priorities and objectives;
provide a framework for contingency planning to alter the magnitudes of previous budget targets of revenue benchmark and projection due to budget allocation changes;
deliver business plans for policy effectiveness in spite of budget changes;
redesign the structures and manning levels for greater organizational and operational efficiency;
identify areas of expenditure reduction to achieve the efficiency saving targets;
recalibrate programmes, projects and KPIs in ways that allow some activities to be reduced, some totally liminated, and others especially similar ones consolidated into firmer operational frameworks;
process redesign to automate some processes would have been achieved; and
determine non-core services and activities for outsourcing to free up the efficiency space for the achievement of the core mandates of the ministry and agency.

I will conclude with a reiteration of a fundamental point I made earlier. On the heel of the implementation of the Oronsaye Report, government urgently needs to commence an employability training programme as part of a larger post-retirement package that will place public servants within five years of retirement or less within a framework of social security scheme. We cannot underestimate the critical importance of this measure. Wastages and leakages are often the function of the manpower loss due to trade unionism and the adversarial industrial relations we mentioned earlier. And a fundamental dimension of the grievances of the trade unions is that the retirement deals offered most public servants eventually throw them out in the cold, and even under the bus once they leave service. no one can argue with the logic of making the post-retirement lifespan of public servants one they can step into with dignity. The Oronsaye Report will eventuate into downsizing and the pains that come with it. The government should remember that we cannot care too much for the system at the expense of those who will make the same system efficient. The lesson of the 1975 administrative purge is simple: if we maltreat those retiring or affected by any inevitable downsizing of the system, those still functional within it will learn negative lessons that will undermine the system itself. A post-retirement package therefore is an efficient and irreducible move to instill patriotic professionalism into a workforce for effective performance and productivity.

Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, and Professor of Public Administration, National Institute for Policy & Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos.

tolaopa2003@gmail.com

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Opinion

Burning Issues: (FCT Minister And Paulosa) (2)

Published

2 days ago

December 19, 2024

NewTimes

Prof. Tony Afejuku

By Tony Afejuku

The other burning issue, apart from Farotimi and Babalola’s, which I wish to take a look at – and which I am taking a look at now – relates to what is happening in our capital territory. What is this burning issue – which our human rightists and civil society organisations and personages are surprisingly and un-satisfactorily not inclined to focus attention on and examine as they should? I may be wrong, but it surely seems to me that this issue, this burning issue, which is of more importance than Farotimi and Babalola’s – which has been given undue adulation – is deliberately being neglected and depreciated by proclaimers and heroes and heroines of human rights, justice, equity and equality of rights in your country my country our country. Why, why, why and why, why, why? Anyone who has any iota of patriotic sensibility, feeling and judgment well watered and buttressed by a very great influence upon his or her critical judgment will keep on asking the question I am asking.

Mr. Nyesom Wike, as almost everybody who can read and write a little knows, is the current minister of your, my and our Federal Capital Territory. His post or office is akin to that of a governor of a state. As the immediate past governor of Rivers State who was drafted, after his two terms there expired, to continue in the FCT as its new minister-governor or governor-minister under the auspices of a party he is not a true member of, Mr. Wike cannot but be seen as a lucky man. He is in every possible and impossible way. Minister-Governor Wike is a lucky man and a very fortunate one indeed. No former governor of Rivers State (or of any Nigerian state), as far as I know, has achieved what the famed political rouser of rabbles has achieved in one short gubernatorial life-time, and at a relatively young and fertile age. His dual achievement with and in two different political parties at this delicate point of Nigerian politics indicates to our politicians and us all that there is always time for a reminder that there are ready-made high rewards for arch-angels of betrayals. And Mr. Wike may go down in Rivers and Nigerian history as both an arch-angel and an emperor of betrayal of us all if we attempt to indicate what I have defined here as his dual achievement.

We can roughly divide, briefly, Wike’s political development into two periods. During the first, excluding his lower political positions before he became the governor of Rivers State, he quickly adapted his style to that of an emperor who became a rabble-rouser of rabble-rousers whose gubernatorial efficiency moved from stiffness to stiffness. He did not at any time feel that he needed suppleness to govern Rivers State. “Let the heavens fall if they must fall!” We are not there yet in this attempted analysis of the stiff-hearted and stiff-minded one. True? But he is already demonstrating this characteristic in Abuja. False? Judge and give the answer yourself.

Even after he left Rivers State a short while ago as governor, he is still trying to control happenings there to the political discomfiture of his hand-picked successor, his erstwhile “boy” and “son” – with whom he has fallen out. As the minister-governor or governor-minister of the FCT, Wike is occupied with the other taste of the emperor-juggernaut formulator – doing the work of two key political masters in one room and desk of political jugglery. Since his appearance in the FCT, minister-governor or governor-minister Wike has allegedly attempted to recover or transform for Abuja what is not traditionally or socially Abuja’s, for example, the city’s social idiom and landscape and terrain as well as its environs. In doing this he sometimes over-steps his bounds and mark of human/inhuman decency/indecency and psychological understanding of human nature, if you follow well what I am saying; he has so far become at best not really better than a typical pedestrian Nigerian lawyer and officer of political power: in his explorations so far in the Federal Capital Territory we have come to the realization, as T. S. Eliot would say, that “it is so often true that only by going too far can we find out how far we can go.” But one has to be a very negatively obstinate and self-serving emperor and a thorough-bred arch-angel of betrayal of the people and masses to justify such perilous and perfidious expeditions and adventures.

Last week, I saw on Arise Television “The Morning Show” Chief Rita Lori-Ogbebor, the dutiful widow of the late Nigerian supreme patriot and soldier, Colonel Ogbebor (of Benin stock) battling, so to say, to wrest the legacy of her late husband from the tight grip of the adventurous FCT minister-governor who has registered his name and signature in the hearts and consciousness of the people as the depriver of their possessions. The three anchors of “The Morning Show” were in their respective ways splendid in their structures of remarks and questions to Chief (Mrs.) Rita Lori-Ogbebor whom I have had occasions in times past to call patriotically Rita A-K 47 on account of her natural right to fire her beautiful tongue at any person, usually an enemy, of just actions. When she made the case she made to protect the estate of Paulosa Nigeria Limited, her late husband’s aforesaid legacy in the FCT, she was in her natural territory, habitat and element where even at age eighty-four, she never ever loses her stability – although she unusually restrained herself in the Arise Television appearance. Dr. Reuben Abati, Rufai Oseni, and Ayo Mairo-Ese clearly explored seriously but delightfully the mind of the mother-hen of Warri – my other coinage and appellation I gave her in my poetry. Her “The Morning Show” appearance enabled me to see the poignant cry de profundis of the FCT inhabitants whose property and residences in different guises have been demolished. She did not say anything that was out of joint. She spoke and came out as a mother, protector and symbol of the people who have suffered – and are suffering – from the state of affliction and anguish Wike’s demolitions have placed – and are placing – the people.

Ojy Okpe in her delicious and delectable “What is Trending” slot on the same show, showed without exaggeration but with further elaboration what people in and outside Abuja/FCT think of the mighty Wike’s demolitions, a burning issue that the Senate has asked “Let Heaven Fall” minister-governor Wike to halt as the committee the Senate set up on the issue starts its work. Of course, we cannot but assume that Chief Rita Lori-Ogbebor, Mrs. Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan as well as Mrs. Ireti Kingigbe, the senator representing the FCT in the Senate and other patriotic senators diligently did what they did on the floor of the Senate when the burning issue was tabled for debate with the gracious understanding and authorization of the Senate President.

I need to state further that the “The Morning Show” anchors did well and extremely so by giving the minister-governor the opportunity to air his anti-Paulosa story. His senior special assistant on public communication and social media, Mr. Olalere Olayinka, stood in for him. After he gave the reasons for the clamp-down, his responses to the questions the anchors put to him followed the usual pattern of denials by artificial men in power – denials that they always use to intimidate and betray the people. In fact, Mr. Olayinka’s ploy to ride easily over our dear Rufai Oseni, a wholesome representative of the deprived, that the chap (or is it guy?) and his boss always employ their colloquial speeches and remarks to dishonor, failed. Yes, the ploy failed woefully. In stanza after stanza of the exchanges between Mr. Olayinka and the Arise anchors, he deteriorated – and his deterioration was hall-marked when he unwittingly revealed that the Paulosa land had been acquired by his minister-governor’s close cohort, an act that was nothing short of gross abuse of power and authority.

Because the Senate is already using its authority, power and privilege to resolve the burning issue, hopefully, in a way that the late Colonel Ogbebor’s legacy and family will not be subjected to any kind of degradation, I will utter no more words for now. I trust, however, that the liberties the Senate is taking – or has taken – are for the sake of order to favour the down-trodden.

As for the minister-governor, the PDP emperor at large, here is an immortal quote from Marcus Aurelius, the magnificent and authentic Roman Emperor and philosopher (A.D. 121-180): “If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.” You lose nothing by giving us a slice of your humanity by your right acts and correct words. Everything changes and passes. Be humane as a human being.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.

Opinion

Questionstorm As A Method Of Teaching

Published

2 days ago

December 19, 2024

NewTimes

Witch Burning, Impunity And Abuses Linked to Witchcraft Beliefs In Benue State

By Leo Igwe

Recently, I facilitated a critical thinking workshop at the Bay Wreath Schools in Lagos. The theme was critical thinking and teacher development. As the theme stated, the workshop was on teaching, about teaching, and for teachers. It highlighted the pedagogical value of critical and reflective inquiry. The workshop exposed teachers to critical mental habits and skills. It emphasized how critical thinking would enhance expertise in the learning and delivery of subjects in classrooms.

I used the opportunity to discuss questionstorm as a method of teaching and learning. Questionstorm is a way that I operationalized critical thinking for primary and elementary schools. Questionstorm is the ability to interrogate all objects and materials. It is a habit of questioning ideas and experiences in all areas of human endeavor. Simply put, questionstorm is a question-driven inquiry. Children are naturally curious. They thirst for knowledge and understanding. Unfortunately, the school system kills children’s curiosity and dampens their interrogative appetite. The school system places much emphasis on rote learning and memorization. It makes the generation of answers not questions or problems the test of knowledge, and the determinant of intelligence. Teaching is largely a drudgery, a monotonous exercise, and a process of depositing knowledge on passive recipients, the students. Teaching entails dumping information on learners whose duty is to cram and reproduce during tests or examinations.

This teaching praxis has been criticized and blamed for the poor performance of students post-school (college and university) and their inability to think independently, creatively, and innovatively. Other teaching methods have tried to address these gaps and limitations. There have been suggestions to make teaching and instruction more active, and more student/learner/child-centered. One such method is the Montessori method. The Montessori method discourages grades and tests as ways of measuring achievement or determining intelligence and excellence. It emphasizes hands-on learning and the development of real-world skills. While the Montessori method stresses the practical approach to learning it says very little about the authoritarian teacher-to-student approach that is the mainstay of teaching and learning in classrooms. Teaching follows a pattern that leaves students and learners in the margins and unable to question and contribute to the learning process. Teachers present what is to be learned such as a text, and then generate questions that students respond or address to demonstrate knowledge of what has been taught. The student’s or learner’s main job is to answer questions, to look for or find answers or solutions. The teacher’s work is to get students to look for, and provide answers, and reproduce what they have been taught or told. But students are answer-depots. Students are not memory banks or reserves. They are active minds and thinking agents.

With questionstorm as a teaching method, the mode of instruction would change. Teaching becomes a cooperative endeavor that actively involves teachers and students. What is taught in the classroom is a collaborative note, not the teacher’s note, not a handout to students. Teachers present or generate texts or objects for learning, in response to intense questioning of the object or material by students, teachers provide information as required for that subject, topic, level, and time frame. No two instances of teaching – of the same topic or subject- are or should be the same because the input of students and teachers is not predetermined.
This is because of an overlooked principle in teaching and learning, that I call the “uncertainty principle”.

The uncertainty principle underlies questionstorm because knowledge is not fixed. Learning is a fluid process. All that is to be learned is uncertain, it is unknown and never determined. No teacher can say beforehand what is to be taught or learned because no one knows exactly the questions and answers or replies that would arise when a topic is presented or taught in a particular class. A topic or learning material elicits unique responses and exchanges that both teachers and students cannot exactly know or predict a priori, before the fact.

Teaching is a shared task and responsibility. Class notes are fluid materials. They are not texts cast on educational stones and delivered by teachers to students to copy, cut, and paste as is often the case. Class notes are not written or produced by teachers for students but by teachers with students. Teachers’ notes are incomplete and insufficient. They account only for a part, not a whole of the learning process and material. Students’ input completes and complements the teaching material and learning process. Thus every class note is unique because it is a product of a specific collaborative endeavor, a product of particular teaching and learning agents and circumstances that cannot be repeated or replicated.

Thus, as a teaching method, questionstorm is set to facilitate teacher development and improve the quality of instruction in schools. Questionstorm will help realize a paradigm shift in education and learning. I hope educators, teachers, and school managers will embrace this method of teaching and learning.

Dr Igwe directs the Critical Thinking Social Empowerment Foundation.

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Opinion

Nigeria’s Civil Service Commissions, ‘Katsina Declaration’ And Reform Implications

Published

5 days ago

December 16, 2024

NewTimes

Prof. Tunji Olaopa

By Tunji Olaopa

From November 25 to 28, 2024, the Katsina State government hosted the annual conference of the National Council for Civil Service Commissions (NCCSC). This is coming on the heel of a hiatus of over ten years. This fact in itself immediately speaks to a significant issue in the ineffectiveness of the gatekeeping function of the civil service commissions in Nigeria. If the body in charge of the gatekeepers has failed for over ten years to adjudicate on their effectiveness or otherwise, it raises a cause for concern. However, the conference’s theme—“The Role of the Civil Service Commissions in Driving the Renewed Hope Agenda”—signals a readiness of the NCCSC to regain its constitutional function in regulating the affairs of the civil service commissions in Nigeria as a means of getting the public service to function effectively as a mechanism for democratic governance and development effectiveness.

Apart from my keynote as the chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), three significant technical sessions were also facilitated by distinguished resource persons who are well-versed in the signifiers of the defining challenges that the public service faces from their different vantage points of expertise. Professor Adeola Adenikinju is the president of the Nigerian Economic Society and had been involved in national planning designs, macro-economic policy change management and advisories for decades; Mr Soji Apampa, the founder of the Convention on Business Integrity, had contributed to conversations and praxis in the building of national integrity systems as systemic bulwark in the anti-corruption campaign, and as an essential pillar in the values reorientation dimension to national cultural adjustment dynamic; and Prof. Abdullahi Shehu, a professor of criminology, is the former Nigerian ambassador to the Russian Federation, has core expertise in capacity building on anti-corruption policies and mechanisms, promoting integrity as a vital component of governance and institutional reforms, and anti-money laundering and terrorism financing. Between the three of them, they highlighted several fundamental issues. First, there is the critical role that the civil servants must play in deploying transparency, accountability, professionalism and innovation in facilitating the efficient and effective implementation of the key priority areas of the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration.

In my keynote, I laid a fundamental emphasis on the transformation of the CSCs as the ultimate game changing agent that is committed to a renewed governance partnership with the government through the institutional reform of the public service. And the objective of this reform is to achieve the re-institution of a professionalized, competency-based, meritocratic, and efficient value institution in Nigeria through the effective monitoring of the constitutional gatekeeping mandate. This demands that the CSCs be capacitated sufficiently to facilitate, in the shortest possible time, the emergence of a new generation of public managers who are patriotically committed to the reconstitution of the public service for effective and efficient service delivery in Nigeria. This will demand, within the framework of the renewed governance partnership, the establishment of performance contract with the employees of the MDAs, and a service compact with the communities of service and practice of public administration in Nigeria, as well as with the Nigerian citizenry. This compact will instigate the generation of flagship reform and service initiatives, change programmes, peer review platforms and learning events that will likely keep the various CSCs of the federation engaged all year round.

A brief historical excursion will throw into broad relief the emergence of the civil service commission as the handmaiden of the British government in ensuring the institutional sanitation of the British civil service as the fulcrum of meritocratic efficiency. It will also firmly ground the significant relevance of the Katsina Declaration as a critical watershed in getting the CSCs to gatekeep the vocational significance of the civil service in making the Renewed Hope Agenda crucial for the betterment of Nigerians. Through its evolution from the ancient pharaonic Egyptian society to the monarchy in Britain, it had been difficult for public administration, or the appointment of public servants, to be divorced from the whims of the king or the emperor. Indeed, the Crown deployed the civil service as a system of patronage that was, of course, determined by political consideration and ridden with corruption. It is a system that flouts the politics-administration distinction which is meant to separate between politics and administrative matter for a meritocratic administrative efficiency. However, by the time the Magna Carta had been crafted in the 13th century, there was already a growing need to separate politics and administration, and orient the status of the civil servants on the state and not the Crown.

Much later, and specifically in 1782, a series of economic reform programmes were initiated to effectively deal with the system of royal patronage and decrease the influence of the King on the legislature. Even though this reform had a political motive, its unintended consequence on administration was the emergence of an efficient and non-political civil service. In other words, as the officials who were gradually removed from political activities became more non-political, they also increasingly became more permanent. It then became increasingly impossible for any of these administrators to lose their positions on political grounds. The early eighteenth-century Britain therefore began to see the gradual rise of non-party officials who remain in place when government changes. This led to the second reason that facilitated the separation between politics and administration. As administration was consolidating its autonomy, politics was equally becoming more complex for a minister to ever think of combining it with administrative activities.

It was at this period that the term “civil servants”, as opposed to the military servants deployed by the East India Company, was first used in India. By this time, it was already settled that a permanent civil service could only be secured by the establishment of a security of tenure for public servants. On the other side of the Atlantic in the United States, the Pendelton Act of 1883 was promulgated to undermine the spoil system which made political patronage the basis of recruitment into the service. The Act recognized the significance of competitive examinations as the basis for ensuring merit in the recruitment of civil servants. It was founded on three specific objectives: (a) the use of competitive examinations for admission into public service; (b) provided job security for public employees; (c) prohibited political activity by the civil service; and (d) encouraged a non-partisan approach to an employee selection

However, by 1854 two very significant reform reports were submitted that would transform the administrative efficiency of the British civil service and redeem its status as a noble vocation. The Report on the Indian Civil Service and the Northcote-Trevelyan Report were both meant to safeguard the system against recruitment practices that will undermine the relevance and utility of the civil service for the British government. The Report on the Indian Civil Service was meant to institute specific intellectual tests which will constitute the moral standard for cultivating unique qualities—“industry, self-denial, a taste for pleasure, not sensual, a laudable desire for honorable distinction, a still more laudable desire to obtain the approbation of friends and relations”—that will stand the civil servants out as public spirited and professional.

On the other hand, the Northcote-Trevelyan Report is even more revealing. In specific terms, the Report was based on four basic premises: Recruitment into the Civil Service should be by open competitive examinations which would be conducted by an independent Civil Service Board that would ensure that entry into the service would be entirely on the basis of merit.

Entrants should not be recruited for life into a specific department but would enter a Home Civil Service that would facilitate inter-departmental staff transfers. Civil servants, therefore, would need to have had a general education and to be generalist rather than specialist in their knowledge and experience. Recruits would be segregated at entry into a hierarchical structure of grades, ranging from the lowest (mechanical) level of clerical officers, only capable of simple routine task, up to the most elevated (intellectual) administrative level which would provide the ranks of senior civil servants who exist to assist and guide ministers in the formulation and administration of policy. Promotion ought only to be on the basis of merit and should not be on the ground of preferment, patronage, purchase or simple length of service (Pilkington, 1999: 19).

These two reports inaugurated the emergence of the civil service commission in Britain. There are two implications for the civil service system in the Commonwealth that inherited the British administrative system. The first is the understanding of the politics-administration dynamics that specifies the relationship between the minister and the civil servants. In other words, the CSC becomes the institutional mechanism that would ensure that the civil service system retains its objective of producing intelligent, efficient and effective public servants that would be able to help implement government policies. The second implication is the emergence of the cadre system which ensures that entry into the civil service is gained through competitive examinations. This served as the basis for the establishment of a generalist class—administrative, executive and clerical—as the administrative echelon of the civil service system in a descending hierarchical order of responsibilities and qualifications.

If, as it has become clear from the bureau-pathology of the civil service in Nigeria (and the various technical sessions at the Conference), that we have not kept faith with the founding mandate that inaugurated the CSC as the gatekeeping mechanism for constantly reinventing the civil service as a noble calling, how do we then commence that reform? What are the fundamental next steps to be taken in pushing the CSCs in the right reform directions? The ultimate objective is the restoration of the CSC as the efficient gatekeeper for professionalism and service integrity enabled by a constitutional mandate to serve as the defender and protector of a merit system grounded on competency-based human resource management practices in the civil service.

Six fundamental steps are possible to get the CSCs in Nigeria to this ultimate objective. One: there is the need to professionalize the CSC secretariat so as to capacitate it as the core change space for resolving all human resource and other related issues concerning the public administration profession in Nigeria. Two: there is the correlated urgency to modernize the processes and services of the secretariat through continuing digitization that will enable it to eliminate barriers to creativity and innovation in the service delivery mandate of the public service. Three: the various CSCs need to review and upgrade the guidelines for appointment, promotion and discipline in the civil services, as well as reinforce the standard operating procedures across the various CSCs as a mean of guiding against sharp practices, the politicization of staff career management, and the enforcement of strict compliance with the rules of law and the constitutional order in all operations. With regard to promotion, there is the need, for instance, to institute a performance-based promotion system rooted in competency and project-based assessments. Four: it is also imperative to undertake a comprehensive review of the CSC’s delegated powers to the MDAs in terms of operational guidelines with a view to strengthening oversight, compliance and enforcement. Five: it becomes imperative that all CSCs must strategically collaborate with their respective heads of service to undertake and facilitate the value audit of the civil service that will achieve the objective of enforcing discipline in terms of the code of conduct and code of ethics of the civil service. This will be to articulate a cultural adjustment programme and value reorientation of the civil service as a noble calling. Six: the CSCs must embark on studies to profile changes and transformations in the emerging new public service, especially in terms of the new normal demanded by COVID-19 transformation of the workplace, the increasing changes enforced in the nature of administrative processes due to new digital technologies and artificial intelligences, and the peculiar sociological imperatives of emergence of the Gen Z and Gen Alpha and their impact on the nature of work. This new normal articulates urgent administrative measures that are demanded for situating the public service within the urgency of relevance for the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions. Seventh and finally: each CSC must align these new reform directions and imperatives with their implications for industrial relations. The plan must be to shift the focus away from the adversarial to developmental labour activism and relations that make possible sustainable change agenda in the public sector.

Setting out on these reform directions requires specific reform strategies and focus of implementation. It demands, in other words, change management requirements that are specific for getting the CSCs up to speed in its intent of achieving its constitutional role as the powerhouse for the enforcement of merit-based competency in the civil service. The NCCSC Conference threw up lots of strategic reconsiderations that promise significant reform rewards—in terms of facilitating the “Katsina Declaration”—for advancing the effectiveness and efficiency of the civil service in Nigeria as a world-class institution for backstopping democratic governance and the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration.

One fundamental and pressing business the Conference threw up which has an overarching impact on not only firming the rearticulation of the public service as a new institutional brand—as a vocational calling—is the urgency of promulgating a Public Service Act as a legal tool for codifying the instrumental efficiency of civil service governance and operations. The need for the Act derives from the argument that the inherited administrative codes such as public service rules, financial regulation, guideline on administrative procedures, etc., which have their deep roots in the British unwritten constitution tradition, have become outdated, especially in the light of contemporary postcolonial realities in Nigeria. This is also more so that the British that bequeathed this administrative tradition has evolved beyond it to enact numerous legislations for the governance of the public service. This Public Service Act also has deep implication for strategically revisiting the staffing requirements of the civil service, but specifically that of the CSCs. This speaks, for instance, first to the generalist framework that constitutes the CSC secretariats’ skills set. This framework grossly limits the CSCs and their problem-solving capacity to resolve various career management issues involving staff. This is further complicated by the high turnover rate and other challenges associated with staffing the CSC from the civil service common pool.

The next strategic consideration derives from the urgency of digitization and automation that must be the basis of modernizing the CSCs’ critical operations. Recruitment, for example, requires online application portals that are back-ended by effective databases. Promotion also demands online recalibration in terms of accreditation and CBT assessments. Discipline and appeals can be fast-tracked through the deployment of software that tracks reports, cases and processes. Civil service commissions will need to be capacitated to be much more effective and efficient within the context of available funds and resourcing frameworks. The FCSC and the state CSC will therefore need to become creative in sourcing for a range of technical supports to raise funds that will enable critical studies.

First, there is the need to reinvent the CSC founding mandate to deepen guidelines that undergird merit in entry-level assessment and to infuse better contents and standards to, for instance, review quality of the syllabi and questions in the computer-based tests at promotion exams. Second, the CSCs need to deepen the guidelines for grounding the application of the federal character policy on merit and meritocratic parameters in the recruitment process. Third, the CSCs need to initiate diagnostic studies to unravel the structural bottlenecks hindering career progression of officers as a means by which to reinvent manpower planning, manpower forecasting and succession planning that articulate a better framework for monitoring the size and growth of service through internal management controls.

Lastly, the Katsina Declaration emphasized the need to keep the modernizing imperative in sight through the constant organization of seminar events, both virtual and physical, that keep the attention of the CSCs firmly on new and emerging trends and global practices in human resource practices that keep the Commissions on their toes in terms of their constitutional mandate in the new administrative normal.
The Katsina Declaration constitutes another turning point, and a crucial one at that, in facilitating the reawakening of the CSCs to their constitutional mandate. And this is even more fundamental at this period when the Tinubu administration really demands that the civil service regain its effectiveness to be able to translate the policies of government into dividends of democratic governance.

Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com