The current paralysis of the public service in many states of the federation is only the latest manifestation of our national crisis of development. Provoked mainly by the inability of many states to pay their workers, our policymakers, short-sighted as ever, fail to see the larger picture of a public service that cannot deliver development, focusing only on their helplessness in raising funds. The cash crunch however presents another opportunity for the federal and state governments to overhaul the bureaucracy and position it to deliver development.
Fixated on the financial crisis caused by sharply reduced oil and gas revenues and severe depletion of savings, everyone appears to be missing the real crisis, namely: in size, in performance and costs, our civil service at every level as presently constituted, cannot deliver development, while gulping the overwhelming portion of all public revenues. Typically, in the 2014 national budget of N4.64 trillion, personnel emoluments and other recurrent expenses took over N3 trillion. This is replicated in the states, while most of the LGs exist only to pay salaries and contractors with nothing left for the citizenry. Governor Nasir el-Rufai put it succinctly while inaugurating the Kaduna State House of Assembly: “80 per cent of state resources are spent on salaries and allowances of civil servants and political office holders, leaving only 20 per cent for the state’s development.”
How do you deliver development – build roads, dams, hospitals, schools and waterworks and provide housing – with only 20 per cent of scarce resources? And this is only part of the problem. If, as experts say, the civil service “is the main instrument through which government implements and administers public policies and programmes,” then a demoralised, over-staffed, ill-motivated, unprofessional and corrupt bureaucracy simply cannot live up to that mandate. Our public service is patterned after the United Kingdom’s that is credited with fashioning the concept of the modern civil service in the 19th century and is the primary engine of growth, encouraging division of labour, specialisation, and professionalism while following the “principle of rationality, objectivity and consistency.”
The United Nations Development Programme credits the development achieved in many countries to the “ability of their civil service to effectively translate the policies of their political leaders into concrete services.” Studies cite this factor in the rise of England in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, Germany after unification and Europe and Japan after World War II.
In Nigeria, the public services of the four regions performed excellently and a British statesman once described the Western Region’s, under the late Simeon Adebo, as comparable to the UK’s. The trend of effectiveness that saw Nigeria through three national development plans and drove growth in the 12, and later 19, states has collapsed and the federal and state bureaucracies of today have become hindrances, rather than accelerators of development. They have become bastions of corruption, indolence, nepotism and oppression.
There is an urgent need to radically restructure the federal and state bureaucracies and make them truly engines of growth. President Muhammadu Buhari should immediately revisit the numerous White Papers on reforms if he wants to succeed. The Allison Ayida Report (1995) and Ahmed Joda Report (1999) made far-reaching recommendations to re-professionalise an independent, non-partisan civil service, while the reforms started by former President Olusegun Obasanjo were abandoned halfway. The 800-page Stephen Oronsaye Report (2011) that recommended reducing federal parastatals, commissions and agencies from 541 to a manageable 161 is gathering dust on the shelf. Surely, we can no longer afford the size of the federal and state workforce put at 2.6 million in 2005 by the Public Sector Reform Team.
The state governors, especially, must realise that given present realities, they simply must downsize. Kano’s Abdullahi Ganduje and Oyo’s Abiola Ajimobi have followed the reforming lead of el-Rufai in reducing the number of ministries. Others should toe this path. Areoye Oyebola, a publisher, reminded us of a state in the 1970s that had 11 ministries, but which is now split into five states with each having 22 ministries!
Such absurdities need to end. Malaysia initiated public service reforms in the 1980s that reached the fifth phase in 2012, adapting it to globalisation, economic liberalisation and industrialisation. China has been partnering UNDP since 1990 to reform bureaucracies at provincial and national levels to streamline operations, reform the service and build capacity to further reduce poverty.
State governments should rationalise their staffing, deploying idle ones to field work, eliminating “ghosts” and indolent ones, professionalising some cadres and out-sourcing some ancillary services. There should be a radical overhaul of the wasteful and largely useless local government councils.
Buhari and state governors will severally have to devise policies to stimulate the economy and create jobs using reformed, leaner and efficient bureaucracies.
