The Accidental Public Servant
Page 47
Management Information System (EMIS) was designed and installed to address the problems of
incorrect data, which had contributed in the past to faulty decision making. The purpose of the EMIS
was to collate all education data into a single unified integrated information system. We also
upgraded the financial accounting systems in all FCT public schools. This project was aimed at
improving the financial accountability and transparency in the management of school funds.
With respect to the health care component of human capital development, the Health and Human
Services Secretariat, which succeeded the MFCT Health Department in 2004, with the responsibility
for overseeing the health sector of the FCT in all respects, granted operational and administrative
autonomy to the FCT general hospitals. This enabled patients to get more than 90% of their drug
requirements in the hospitals and incidences of ‘out of stock’ medication were significantly reduced.
The secretariat’s intensive inspectorate and monitoring functions aided the closure of over 30 fake
and unregistered pharmaceutical premises. Several unlicensed patent medicine stores were also shut
down. Hospital manpower planning was considerably improved, enabling all the hospitals in the FCT
to run 24 hour services with all the shifts covered.
We were conscious of the need for trained personnel for the sector. We trained 150 health workers,
25 each from the six area councils, 189 doctors and 669 nurses/midwives in various healthcare
disciplines in 2006 alone. The Disease Control Division trained over 600 general health workers on
the prevention of malaria, tuberculosis (TB), leprosy, HIV/AIDS, guinea-worm infection and
schistosomiasis. This helped to improve early disease detection, treatment and treatment outcomes in
the FCT We also set up a Public Health Department, which carried out all planned immunization
activities through the administration of oral polio, and Hepatitis B vaccines to children under the age
of five. Over one million children were immunized in the four year period.
With the revamp of the FCT Action Committee on AIDS (FACA) and donor support, we established
primary health centres in the FCT area councils and voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) centres
in secondary health facilities to provide free counselling and testing services to pregnant women and
free infant formula for babies with HIV-positive mothers. We provided free screening procedures, re-
confirmation of HIV status, free immune boosters, food supplements, workshops on positive living,
micro-credit and grants, free food items and referrals for prompt attention. I became personally
involved in interactions with people living with HIV/AIDS, attending their network meetings and
hosting them to dinners in the minister’s residence a few times. This served to reduce the levels of
stigmatization of the disease in the FCT.
We made progress in stimulating a vast job-creation engine focused on enabling the private sector.
Among the key drivers of our activities in this regard were the revamped Abuja Investment Company,
as well as the Abuja Enterprise Agency. We invested heavily also in agriculture and social services
for vulnerable groups, and paid particular attention to quality of life issues.
A Better Life for All
The purpose of government and public leadership, after all, is the constant pursuit of a better life for
all citizens, to be an enabler, not an obstacle, and to ensure security, fairness and justice, and social
harmony. These were our guiding principles, pursued rather singlemindedly, and often requiring the
ruffling of many feathers and the stepping on many toes, big and small. Our commitment to rapidly
accelerating infrastructure investments in Abuja was to remove one of the biggest bottlenecks to
Nigeria’s progress. We ramped up investments in education and healthcare because an educated
population is a society’s most important resource. This may sound like a cliche but it is no less true
for that. We believed that the private sector should lead in economic activities and job creation. We
therefore took steps to make life easier for businesses through tax breaks, import duty waivers,
cheaper access to land and more responsive municipal services. We acted not for personal benefit,
or to create any special advantage for our friends or unfairness for our foes. We believed that a
measure of idealism was necessary for public progress.
We restructured the FCT administration into a slim, efficient and effective bureaucracy that treated
citizens as customers. It comprised four organizations: the FCT Administration itself undertakes
policy, residual administrative and final decision-making functions; the FCDA plans, designs and
builds city and territory-wide infrastructure and facilities; the Satellite Towns Development Agency
(STDA)[99] delivers on infrastructure outside the City boundaries while the Abuja Metropolitan
Management Agency (AMMA)[100] maintains infrastructure within the city and territory and
provides essential municipal services like water, garbage collection and recreational facilities. We
tried to be public servants and did not behave like lords of the manor. We engaged extensively with
the FCT’s citizens through telephone helplines, radio and TV call-in programmes, and quarterly town
hall meetings. I tried to lead by example. I never used sirens or motorcycle outriders. I obeyed traffic
lights as I expected of ordinary citizens, and discouraged having an army of public servants in
centipede-like convoys of vehicles accompany me everywhere, settling typically for only one
additional car carrying security personnel. We did not, as is routine throughout our political
establishment, spend the FCT’s security funds for the benefit of anyone of us in the leadership. We
did not allocate plots of land to ghost companies for our benefit, or used fictitious names or
companies to allocate same to our friends or family.
We instituted a fair system of rewards for good conduct, and imposed sanctions – including firing and
prosecution - for unethical and criminal behaviour. We applied the rules evenly and neutrally, without
fear or favour, and without regard to social status. We got rid of staff with clear cases of
incompetence, corruption or abuse of office, even when they happened to be our friends or
relations.[101] These principles form the basis of how we believe any organization, city, territory
and country should be run. We preached it. We lived it. And our record bears witness to it. The rest
we leave to Almighty God, who is final Judge of all humanity.
Chapter Thirteen
Reforming the Public Service
The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most
ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.
- Thomas Paine
The Civil Service are the Opposition in residence.
- Anthony Jay
The reform of the public sector was one of the key components of our economic reform programme –
the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS). With my background and
experience in privatisation and parastatals' reform in the BPE, the Economic Team assigned this sub-
task to me, and I drafted the sections related to privatisation, commercialisation and public service
reform in the NEEDS document. When it came to implementation, we debated and agreed that instead
of attempting a blanket reform of
the public service all at once, we would conduct a pilot with a few
government departments, learn from them, and then do a phased rollout to the rest of the service.
Naturally, with the structural and service delivery challenges we faced in the MFCT, we offered to
be the guinea pig. This led to the adoption of Abuja as the laboratory for trying out the reform
components within NEEDS, before mainstreaming into the rest of the Federal Government.
First, we had to answer a few questions in designing a public service reform programme from
scratch. Sequencing was a key issue. Do we start with the smaller but more resistant civil service or
reform both the civil service and parastatals concurrently? What about the scope and priorities of the
reform programme? How do we select which departments for the pilot? Should we be concerned
with quality of public servants (qualifications and training-focus) or their quantity (right-sizing
focus)? Finally, how do we ensure institutional sustainability by both injecting new blood into the
service, and then creating reform champions to continue when we leave? Unfortunately, for us, we
found no successful models of public service reforms that were easily applicable to our situation. We
found that a country either has a great public service from day one like Singapore's, and then works to
preserve it, or a good one like New Zealand's and then reform to improve it, or nothing. Once your
public service becomes dysfunctional, it is very hard, like humpty-dumpty, to put it back together
again, and that was precisely the situation with Nigeria. We realized that we were in a grand mess,
but must do ‘something’ even if there was no record of accomplishment anywhere in the world of a
successful turnaround of a broken public service. It was my duty to take charge of trying that
'something'.
Since 1999, President Obasanjo had intended to reform the public service. In fact, he initially had a
minister for the civil service (Bello Kirfi, Wazirin Bauchi) but nothing appeared to have come out of
it. In 2001, a human resource audit of the federal civil service at the behest of the IMF revealed that
about 20 per cent of the nominal roll consisted of "ghost workers". Nothing was done about the audit,
and like most things related to the civil service, these and similar abuses continued quietly growing
unabated.
In 2003, Obasanjo tasked Yayale Ahmed, [102] the crafty head of the civil service of the federation,
with the job of reforming the service, with a huge budget to support it. Yayale ensured the monies
were expended travelling all over the world – visiting Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New
Zealand, among other nations, to learn "international best practices," sent beautiful ‘progress reports’
to Obasanjo, but implemented zero reforms at home. In fact, the situation continued to worsen, with
reported corruption in postings done by the head of the civil service and even malpractices in
promotion examinations undertaken by the Federal Civil Service Commission. [103]
Public Service in Context
It is a truism that no nation develops beyond the capacity of its public service, and there is still today,
broad consensus amongst Nigerians that our public service is broken and dysfunctional. The quality
of public servants and the services they provide to our nation are both below expectations. From the
glorious days at independence when the best and brightest graduates competed to join the
administrative service up until 1970s, our public service is more recently perceived as the employer
of the dull, the lazy and the venal. In 2003, we were well aware of this need to retrieve our old
public service that was effective, well paid and largely meritocratic, attracting bright people,
imbibed with a spirit of promoting public good.
We began by looking back in time to see where we went wrong. The Nigerian civil service
evolved from the colonial service with its historical British roots of an independent, non-political,
and merit-based administrative machinery for governing the country. Each region then had its civil
service in addition to the federal service. We asked some fundamental questions. What is the public
service, anyway? How did our public service evolve from inception at independence to excellence
and now to its current abysmal state of ineffectiveness? How can the public service be reformed, re-
skilled and right-sized to provide the basic social services that will earn the public trust?
The Public Service - An Overview
The public service consists of the civil service - career staff whose appointment, promotion and
discipline are under the exclusive control of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC)- the
national assembly service, the judiciary, public officers in the military, police and paramilitary
services, employees of parastatals, educational and health institutions. By September 2005, when I
became the chair of the Public Service Reform Team (PSRT), the number of federal public servants
was slightly above one million. The estimated number working for the 36 states and the FCT was
another 2 million. Adjusting for the increasing numbers of aides of the president, ministers, governors
and legislators numbering anything between a low of 10,000 and a possible three hundred thousand, it
was not unreasonable to put the total number of those working directly for governments then at about
three million. Therefore, while our national population has increased by about 160% between 1960
and 1999, the size of our public service increased by 350% in the same period.
Crafting solutions to the problems of the public service required careful thought, thorough collection
and analysis of data, and political will. The initial diagnoses and findings were sobering, to say the
least. The civil service was rapidly aging, mostly untrained and largely under-educated. Their
average age then was 42 years, and over 60% were over 40 years. Less than 12% of the public
servants held university degrees or equivalent. Over 70% of the service was of the junior grade
levels 01-06, of sub-clerical and equivalent skills. About 20% of the public service employees were
'ghost workers' - non-existent people on the payroll whose emoluments were stolen by staff of
personnel and accounts departments. In the FCT, as will be detailed below, out of an initial
headcount of 26,000, we found 3,000 ghost workers in the first round of audit. By the time we
introduced biometric ID and centralized, computerized payroll, we found an additional 2,500 who
failed to show up for documentation.
While the public service pay was low relative to the cost of living, the overall burden of its payroll
as a percentage of the budget was huge. We found that in most states other than Lagos, Kano, Kaduna
and Rivers States, an average of 50% of the annual budget went towards the payment of salaries and
allowances to about 1% of their population. Employees of parastatals, including educational and
health institutions, consumed nearly half of the money spent on staff compensation. The military,
police, and other paramilitary groups consumed more than a third, while the core civil service took
the rest.
The team which I chaired faced the daunting prospects of reforming a federal public service whose
central management organs - the civil service commission and the office of the head of the civil
service, had become corrupt, inept and ineffective. We learnt
that appointments, promotions, postings
and discipline were bought and sold by civil servants almost the same way shares are traded on the
stock market.
Surprisingly, and with some relief, we did not see these levels of malfunction in the armed services.
The human resource management systems of the Army, Navy and the Air Force were better and, to
some extent, even the police and other paramilitary services were in much better shape than their
civilian counterparts. However, first, I had to deal with the problems of reforming the largest and
most unwieldy ministry in the federal public service - the Ministry of the FCT and its affiliated public
service. The MFCT had been selected by the economic team to apply the template for reforming the
public service. The success of the experiment led to the decision by the president in September 2005
to ask me to take overall charge of the public sector reforms.
Guinea Pig: The Ministry of the FCT
The MFCT was an ideal pilot for public service reforms for several reasons. First, it was an
administrative basket case, giving rich opportunities for learning. The MFCT with its estimated
26,000 staff was also the largest single ministry of the Federal Government. Its single location in
Abuja made it an attractive pilot. The MFCT also operated as a hybrid-- functioning in many cases
like a state and, in others, like a typical federal bureaucracy. This made it a plausible provider of
lessons relevant for the 36 states. Our hope was that if we succeeded in making Abuja run better and
look better, the regular gubernatorial and other visitors would seek to replicate such gains in their
states. Finally, the leadership of the MFCT - that is our own team - had shown enough reformist
antecedents for the Economic Team to have confidence that we would champion the change process.
The state of service delivery in the FCT was poor. Essential services like education, healthcare,