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Joe Abah, PhD, FPA
Director-General, Bureau of Public Service Reforms, The Presidency, Nigeria
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THE 2015 ELECTIONS AND PUBLIC SERVICE
REFORM IN NIGERIA
By
Joe Abah, PhD, FPA
Director-General,
Bureau of Public Service Reforms, The Presidency, Nigeria
Website: www.bpsr.gov.ng
Facebook:
facebook.com/joeabah
Twitter: @DrJoeAbah;
@bpsr_nigeria
A PAPER PRESENTED AT THE JANUARY 2015 SPEAKERS’ CORNER ON
31ST JANUARY, 2015
1.0
INTRODUCTION
Let
me start by commending Speakers’ Trust Nigeria for creating the platform for
this very important debate and for inviting me to speak at this month’s event.
I want to preface what I say by giving you advance notice that I will make a
number of caveats during this presentation. First of all, I want to make it clear
that I do not speak for any political party. Instead, I will tell you about how
our country, Nigeria, has reformed in the 15 years since we returned to
democratic rule, what we are doing now, what we need to do for the future, and
why public service reform is a vitally important issue in the way that Nigeria
is governed. It is an issue that voters need to have an awareness of in
choosing who to vote for in the forthcoming elections.
Public service reform is not often an election
issue in many democracies. One of the few major politicians, that I am aware
of, that made public service reform an election issue is my old boss, UK Prime
Minister Tony Blair. He won each of the three elections he contested by a
landslide. He famously labelled his final election victory in 2001 as “A
mandate for reform…an instruction to deliver.” It was after this election
victory that he brought me in to help set up the Prime Minister’s Office of
Public Service Reforms in 10 Downing Street.
Similarly,
successive civilian administrations in Nigeria have recognised the importance
of focusing on public service reforms. President Olusegun Obasanjo set up the
Bureau of Public Service Reforms in 2004. The Bureau started very well and
introduced worthwhile innovations like the Integrated Payroll and Personnel
Information System (IPPIS). Unfortunately, around 2007, it was brought into the
bureaucracy as part of the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the
Federation and was headed by a series of short-term permanent secretaries. This
destroyed its independence and vibrancy, and made it part of the problem,
rather than part of the solution. Although a lot of reforms happened in Nigeria
in those years, the Bureau was essentially a bystander. In 2013, President
Goodluck Jonathan decided to reinvent the Bureau and give it back its rightful
place in driving all public service reforms at federal level. He changed the
reporting lines to ensure that the Bureau reports to him through the Secretary
to the Government of the Federation. As fate will have it, he sought me out and
appointed me as Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms in
August 2013, on the strength of my CV alone and without ever having met me
before.
My
second caveat is that you would have noticed that I have spoken throughout of public
service reform, rather than public administration reform, which is the formal
topic of this discourse. I have done this slight modification in order to shift
the emphasis from ‘Administration’ to ‘Service.’ The primary responsibility of
public organisations is to deliver services that the private sector may not
deliver at all, or to deliver services to those who cannot afford the market
price of the service. Therefore, in vibrant democracies, elections are fought
over competing promises to deliver “the good life” – better transport, improved
healthcare, safer communities, better education, and so on. Environments in
which the politician feels accountable to the electorate are more conducive for
public service delivery than environments where there is no accountability to
the electorate. Ideally, therefore, to deliver on its mandate, the political
class will invest in and value the role of the public service; and the public
service, in return, will view its role as helping the government of the day to
deliver on its mandate and fulfil its electoral promises to the people. This is
why we must treasure the opportunity provided to us by the administration of
President Goodluck Jonathan to choose the leaders we want in free, fair and
credible elections, devoid of violence. We must celebrate the fact that INEC
has greatly improved since the Maurice Iwu days and is now providing an
electoral service that delivers outcomes that tend not to surprise the
electorate or independent election monitors.
Therefore,
the real issue is Service. The word ‘Administration’ tends to focus more on routine
internal bureaucratic processes. It lacks the immediacy, accountability and
resonance with the needs of the people that the notion of ‘Service’
evokes.
As our
democracy matures, we in Nigeria also need to focus on competing promises to
“deliver the good life.” It is for this reason that today’s discussion by
Speakers’ Corner is important and timely. I am delighted to be joined at this
event by my old friend, Dr. Otive Igbuzor. A lot of so-called civil society
activists aim to draw the loudest applause by constantly running down their own
country. They are constantly in search of new expressions to show just how bad
things are, and will consciously fail to focus on anything that appears to be
working. Unfortunately, you will hardly ever hear a civil society activist
celebrating the fact that our trains are running again for the first time in 40
years, or that our victory over the Ebola virus has been hailed as an example
to the rest the world, or that our elections have become much freer, fairer,
credible and predictable since the current INEC leadership came into place, or
that life expectancy in Nigeria has gone up from 47 years to 52 years in the
last 3 years.
I
had the privilege to read Otive’s paper in advance of today’s event and his
passion, patriotism and love for country was apparent throughout. He has framed
many important questions for those seeking elective office to answer. There
are, of course, many areas where his paper would have been enriched by more
information about government’s recent actions to tackle many of the issues he
has raised. However, we must not blame him for this, as we are not yet doing
enough to communicate to the public the ways in which their country is changing
for the better all around them, even to the informed elite like Otive. It is
instructive that a recent public perception survey that my Bureau conducted
with the National Bureau of Statistics, with the participation of donors, shows
that people in the rural areas are actually more aware of the reforms of
government over the last 4 years than those in the urban areas. They can see
the new roads and the refurbished ones, they can see the trains running again,
they can access their hospitals and clinics, they are getting their fertilisers
direct without middlemen and touts, and many of them live near the 37 new dams
that has been constructed in the last 4 years. The urban elite doesn’t even
notice the fact that we have refurbished all our 22 airports, which they,
rather than people in rural areas, use. Instead they rely on a constant diet of
negative comments fed to them daily by a press institution with a clear
preference for bad news over good news, and social media commentators who will
actually never stand in a line to vote during the elections. Please note that
80% of our citizens live in rural areas.
2.0 TAKING
STOCK: PUBLIC SERVICE REFORMS 1999 TO 2014
The
Bureau of Public Service Reforms has recently completed a review of all the key
reform initiatives over the last 15 years, and we hope to publish it in the
next few weeks. It assessed 47 of the key reform initiatives against 10 tough
questions:
i.
Have the reforms improved the quality and
quantity of the public services delivered?
ii.
Do more people now have access to services,
including disadvantaged groups such as women, young persons and people living
with disability?
iii.
Have the reforms reduced the cost of governance?
iv.
Have the reforms made the service more
affordable for citizens?
v.
Have the reforms reduced corruption?
vi.
Have the reforms reduced unnecessary bureaucracy
and red tape?
vii.
Is the reform likely to aid our development as a
country?
viii.
Are things improving, staying the same or
getting worse?
ix.
Where things are improving, will those
improvements endure?
x.
Where things are not improving, what should be
done?
In
order to whet your appetite in advance of the publication of the review, I will
give you only the key findings for each reform initiative assessed.
·
The payroll reform through the IPPIS has saved
government in excess of N160 billion and has removed more than 45,000 ghost
workers from the payroll.
·
The reform of the Pension system has seen our
pension funds grow from a deficit of N43 billion in 2004 to a healthy credit of
N4.6 trillion in 2014
·
Our Public Procurement reforms has brought
savings of N618 billion since 2007
·
Our anticorruption efforts has seen Nigeria go
from being the second most corrupt country in the world when we returned to
democracy in 1999 to now being perceived to be the 39th most corrupt.
·
We now have a National Health Insurance Scheme
that covers 98% of federal government employees
·
We now have more credible elections, with
predictable results
·
We have totally eradicated Guinea Worm and are
on the verge of eradicating Polio. Maternal mortality has halved, infant
mortality has drastically reduced, and our HIV prevalence rate has dropped by
37% from 5.4% in 1999 to 3.4% in 2013. We also met Goal 1 of the MDGs two years
ahead of the 2015 deadline.
·
Our defeat of Ebola has been held up as an
example of good practice, and the UK Parliament and the US Congress have each
asked their governments to come and learn from Nigeria.
·
In Education, we have seen a 20% increase in
primary school enrolment and a 24% increase in secondary school enrolment. Our
carrying capacity at tertiary level has gone up from 324,000 in 2010 to 500,000
in 2014, largely as a result of the creation of 12 new universities in states
that did not previously have federal universities. There has also been a 75%
increase in ‘O’ –Level credit passes in English and Maths in the last 4 years.
·
In Sports, the Super Eagles won the 2013 African
Cup of Nations after 19 years; the Golden Eaglets finished 2nd at
the Under-17 African Championships in 2013; and Nigeria got to the last 16 of
the last World Cup in Brazil.
·
Our Nollywood is now the 2nd most
prolific movie industry in the world, contributing significantly to our GDP and
projecting our artistic talents around the world.
·
In terms of Public Financial Management, our
Treasury Single Account has turned a government overdraft of N102 billion in
2011 into a credit of N86 billion in 2014. Tax collection has improved
significantly from N455 billion in 2000 to N4.8 trillion in 2013.
·
The reform of our banking system has improved
our average capital adequacy ratio from 4% in 2009 to 18% in 2013, which is
higher than the global threshold of 10%. Our Non-Performing Loan ratio has also
fallen from 25% in 2004 to just 4% in 2013. Our Cashless Policy has seen a
growth in the use of bankcards from N38 million in 2012 to N24 billion in 2014.
·
Our stock market return of 47% in 2013 was the
best in Africa and our market capitalisation has grown from N1.4 trillion in 2003
to N13.2 trillion in 2013.
·
Our reform in the Agriculture sector now means that
we have virtually eliminated fertiliser fraud. Our innovative E-wallet system
has reached 6 million genuine farmers in just 2 years. We have seen $5 billion
new investment in the Agriculture Sector, and our food importation bill has
declined from $7 billion in 2011 to $4.3 billion in 2014
·
The number of Nigerians with mobile phones has
grown from 8.5% in 2004 to 93% in 2013 and our telephone subscription has grown
by 16,000%.
·
In the Transportation Sector, our trains are
running again for the first time in decades, moving millions of people and 1
million litres of petrol everyday. Our road network around the country has
improved dramatically and we are using our inland waterways again. We now have
made in Nigeria cars, including my official car, which was made by Innoson
Motors in Nnewi, Anambra State.
·
With a GDP of $508 billion, we are now by far
Africa’s biggest economy, 40% bigger than that of South Africa that has a GDP
of $350 billion.
There
are many more, but I will not overwhelm you with statistics. The message to
take away is that our country is reforming for the better. Public Service
Delivery is improving all around us. Our country is growing. Anybody with
contrary statistics should bring it forward.
Of
course there are challenges. The 10 key ones are as follows:
·
We need to defeat the psychopathic serial
killers known as ‘Boko Haram’, so that all of our country can develop at the
same pace.
·
We need to ensure that the reforms in the Power
Sector result in available, stable and cost effective electricity for all
Nigerians
·
We need to further tackle the menace of
corruption, and better manage the perception of corruption in and about
Nigeria.
·
We need to aggressively tackle the issue of
unemployment and build on the successes of initiatives like YouWin and the
Graduate Internship Scheme
·
We need to make it easier for ordinary Nigerians
to own their own homes, and build on initiatives such as the 10,000 Mortgages
for 10,000 Homes Scheme.
·
We need to ensure that Kerosene and diesel are
as freely available as Petrol, at the official sale price
·
We need to reduce the carnage on our roads and
the rate of accidents and fatalities from them.
·
We need to ensure that our parastatals and agencies
deliver to the people, and to reduce the cost of governance by faithfully
implementing the government White Paper on the Reorganisation and
Rationalisation of Agencies, Parastatals and Commissions (our response to the
Oronsaye Report). In advance of required changes in legislation, BPSR has
ensured that agencies slated for scrapping were not provided for in the 2015
budget.
·
We need to ensure that our public servants are
more accountable to our citizens, and promote greater use of the Freedom of
Information Act.
·
We need to further diversify our economy,
particularly given the dwindling price of crude oil in the international
market, and ensure that our economy is growing equitably and inclusively.
Our
compendium of key public service reforms from 1999 to 2014 and the independent
assessment of what is working and what is not, together with the Public
Perception Survey that we have recently completed with the National Bureau of
Statistics represent a robust and credible analysis of where we are now and
what we need to do to move forward. For the public perception survey, we
interviewed more than 13,000 households in ALL 36 states and the FCT (including
Borno, Yobe and Adamawa) and spoke with nearly 700 organisations, public and
private. The Compendium of Reforms, the Public Perception Survey and the
evaluations of progress against the Transformation Agenda have informed our
plans for reforming our public service now and in the future. These, I will now
set out.
3.0 A
ROADMAP AND STRATEGY FOR THE FUTURE
The Transformation Agenda of President
Goodluck Jonathan has focused very heavily on those levers of development that
can position our country for greatness. These include Agriculture,
Manufacturing, Infrastructure, Power, Creative Industries and Transportation.
No country has ever developed without focusing on these real issues, and the
Transformation Agenda represents a credible and comprehensive roadmap, the
results of which are already visible within a relatively short time frame.
To
ensure that the public service is equipped to deliver accelerated development
in Nigeria, Mr President has resuscitated the previously moribund National
Steering Committee on Public Service Reforms, which is chaired by the Secretary
to the Government of the Federation, with the Head of the Civil Service of the
Federation as Vice Chairman. Under the auspices of the Steering Committee, my
Bureau has recently completed a National Strategy for Public Service Reforms.
The Strategy, first developed in 2009, has been fully refreshed and updated,
and is due to be presented to the Federal Executive Council in March. The
Strategy aims that Nigeria’s public services will be world-class by 2025.
Before the cynics dismiss it as “unachievable, given where we currently are”,
let me remind you that “where we currently are” is that our Federal Inland
Revenue Service is already world class; our National Agency for Food and Drugs
Administration (NAFDAC) is already world-class and two of their laboratories
were recently awarded the internationally recognised ISO 17025 accreditation,
meaning that food, drugs and cosmetics that they certify can be sold on the
international market; our Debt Management Office has been recognised by the UK
Government and others as being capable of exporting expertise to other
developing countries; the GDP rebasing carried out by our National Bureau of
Statistics has been validated internationally as credible and robust; our
National Drug Law Enforcement Agency is respected across the world; and our
banking system is an important and valued member of the international banking
environment, with Nigerians able to use their bankcards across the globe. And
do not forget that our response to Ebola has been hailed as world-class. Our
task is to ensure that more parts of the public service are lifted to the same
standards, learning lessons from the successful organisations and initiatives that
we already have.
The
National Strategy for Public Service Reforms addresses all the issues raised in
Otive’s paper. It rests on 4 pillars:
1.
An Enabling Governance and Institutional
Environment (led by the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the
Federation);
2.
An Enabling Socio-Economic Environment (led by
the National Planning Commission)
3.
Public Financial Management Reform (led by the
Ministry of Finance)
4.
Civil Service Administration Reform (led by the
Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation).
The
Strategy has three phases: A ‘Reinvigorating’ phase between now and 2017; a
“Transforming’ phase by 2020; and a ‘World Class’ phase by 2025. Each of the
pillars have a number of building blocks that will lead to the achievement of
clear target results at each phase. There are also robust monitoring and
evaluation, change management and communication plans, including a requirement
to report progress to the Federal Executive Council and Nigerians quarterly.
The development of the Strategy has been based on wide internal consultation
and validation. The draft strategy has been acclaimed around the world as one
of the best in the developing world. As soon as it is approved by the Federal
Executive Council as a government White Paper, we will commence extensive
national consultation with civil society and all key stakeholders.
Therefore,
we have a clear strategy for public service reforms based on robust independent
analysis and validated by an extensive public perception survey.
4.0 CONCLUSION
Let
me conclude by reiterating the importance of public service reform in any
vibrant democracy. It is indeed a topical election issue, if not THE topical
election issue, and it is apt that Speakers’ Corner Nigeria has scheduled this
discourse. Nigerians should be aware that their country has engaged in a number
of deep and important reforms in the last 15 years. The Obasanjo administration
engaged in a lot of rule-based reforms that were absolutely necessary at the
time, given that we were returning to democratic rule after years of military
impunity. A key outcome of those reforms was the debt relief that Nigeria
secured from the Paris Club. The Yar’adua administration strengthened the rule
of law and achieved peace in the Niger Delta. A key outcome of the Amnesty
Programme is that Nigeria moved from 60% production capacity at the height of
the restiveness to full production capacity. The Jonathan administration has
focused on those key levers, such as manufacturing, agriculture and
transportation, on which our rapid development as a country depends. This has
accelerated the growth of our GDP and Gross National Income in a very short
period of time. Equally importantly, the Jonathan Administration has ensured
free, fair and credible elections in the country. Given the correlation between
free and fair elections and public accountability, this is vitally important
achievement. We are on a trajectory of improvement, modernisation and reform.
I
will encourage us all to go out and vote, and to use our votes wisely to ensure
that Nigeria continues on that reform trajectory towards world class pubic
services, rather than returning to the dark days of arbitrariness and impunity.
Let me, once again, thank Speakers’ Corner
Nigeria for this opportunity and thank you all for your time. God Bless
Nigeria.
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