DR. JOE ABAH WELCOMES YOU TO SEPTEMBER'S EDITION OF REFORMER MONTHLY...

Publisher's note 

Dr Joe Abah - Director General

Bureau of Public Service Reforms

Welcome to the September edition of the Reformer Monthly. In September, we saw an increasing appetite by State Government to work more closely with the Bureau of Public Service Reforms. 

We are grateful to have the cooperation of FEPAR and SPARC, both DIFID programmes, who are working with us to put in place a community of practice on governance reforms that we can share with the State Government, and it is an exciting development for us and we would tell you more about it as the month and weeks progress. September also saw the Bureau rated as one of the most transparent government agency in the country. An organisation called The Public Private Development Center, rated 116 public sector organisation and the Bureau was rated the 7^th most transparent. 

Most of the rating was done on responsiveness to procurement information as well as public disclosure. So while the Bureau has made substantial progress to have been racked 7^th, there is a lot more that we need to do. We are already working with that organisation and the Right to Know initiative to ensure that we can improve on our future ratings and improve our compliance with the freedom of information act and also to respond to the open government idea.

Significantly, the Bureau has recently completed the development of the Self-assessment Tool, which agencies and parastatals can use to assess their performance against national and international best practice and that assess performance in areas such as strategic governance, strategic planning, human resource management, financial management, procurement and service delivery. 

It has a 117 questions on which agencies can rate themselves independently about how they fair and if they want a more rigorous assessment, the Bureau facilitates a rigorous assessment through which we would ask for proof for every score that they give to themselves. We have identified six pilots for this initiative and by the next edition, we would be able to update you on how far we have gone with regards to this initiative.

The Bureau partnered with the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation to put in place a new capability building programme for civil servant and that programme was successfully launched on the 7^th of September and shortly afterwards, I had the privilege of addressing the participants on current governance reform efforts in the country, and that went very well and I hope to be able to repeat that with successive participants in the programme.

Finally, we are working with the Budget Office of the Federation to put in place a seminar on budgeting for change to see how we can reform the budgeting process to be able to deliver the governments change agenda. Again, that is an exciting opportunity for us, given that the government is currently working on enforcing the Treasury Single Account and putting in place zero based budgeting as well. So how that develops into the 2016 budget, is an exciting area that we need to bring more awareness to.

I hope you enjoy this September edition. Thank you for subscribing to the Reformer Monthly.




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