I HAVE been one of those who congratulated the current
administration during the recent launching of new
Economic Recovery and Growth Plan, ERGP, by
President Muhammadu Buhari and his Economic Team.
President Muhammadu Buhari flanked by Vice President,
Yemi Osinbajo, President of the Senate, Dr Bukola
Saraki, Speaker Rt Hon Yakubu Dogara, Zamfara State
Governor Alh Abdulaziz Yari, SGF, Engr Babachir David
Lawal, Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator
Udoma Udo Udoma, Minister of State Budget and
National Planning, Zainab Ahmed CBN Governor, Mr
Godwin Emefiele, Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi
Adeosun and APC National Chairman Chief John Odigie-
Oyegun during the formal launch of the Nigerian
Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) at the State
House Council Chamber in Abuja.
One of the novelties in this plan relates to its avowed
commitment to rigorous policy implementation. What is
making many observers sceptical, however, is the fact
that it is a commitment that remains shrouded in
ambiguity, if not obfuscation. What we have been told is
that a new unit will be put in place in the Presidency and
will be charged with the task of monitoring
implementation to ensure the administration meets up
with all its multifarious policy targets.
Given that this administration has a penchant for moving
with the speed of an oil tanker, those of us who wish
them well remain anxious as to whether such an outfit
will emerge and will be able to hit the ground running, to
borrow the language of US marines.
As far as I am concerned, the Achilles’ heel of our
national development efforts going back decades relates
very much to the question of implementation. We have
not been short of good plans. On the contrary, we have
had a surfeit of them.
The NEEDS framework, Vision
20-2020, the CBN’s FSS2020, the Transformation
Agenda and several others, were unassailable on
technical grounds. There was also broad enough
consensus on those plans. But the devil has been in the
details of implementation.
Up till now, sadly, we have not
developed a rigorous framework for policy
implementation for Nigeria. As a consequence, many of
our budgets are never completed as at and when due.
The ‘abandoned project’ syndrome is a typically Nigerian
disease. According to UNIDO, some 60% of our national
projects never reach the completion stage.
In the policy sciences, the new paradigm of delivery is
gaining increasing popularity. It is part of the legacy of
the Tony Blair administration in Britain. Like many
executive leaders, Blair was not wholly satisfied with his
government’s performance during the first mandate of
his administration during the years 1997—2001. When
he won a second mandate he decided he would do things
differently. He invited a top policy expert, Michael
Barber, to help him set up a Prime Minister’s Delivery
Unit, PMDU, in the very heart of his government.
The whole initiative, as to be expected, was greeted with
a lot of scepticism, if not outright hostility, by Whitehall
mandarins. But the Prime Minister gave his full political
backing to the project. The Director of PMDU had a
simple and straightforward mandate: to ensure that the
government of Prime Minister Tony Blair delivers on its
campaign promises. In the words of the pioneer director
of the PMDU: “What I discovered with others in the Blair
administration was that you could put in place some
basic approaches that, if you followed them through,
would make it much more likely that you’d deliver what
you’d promised than otherwise.”
The PMDU was staffed by a Director and a small but
very robust team of analysts, most of them from outside
the normal administration. Their role was to develop a
metrics for the government’s strategic priorities and
monitor these across all ministries, departments and
agencies of government, MDAs.
The aim was not to act as watchdogs breathing down
the throats of ministers and senior members of the
cabinet but to be solution providers who monitor all
programmes, identify obstacles and assist senior
government officials achieve their goals. The beauty of it
is that they will claim the credit, not the PMDU. On its
part, the PMDU would send regular monthly briefings to
the Prime Minister and the kitchen cabinet as to how
progress is being made on the government’s top priority
programmes and projects. Whenever a sector was
slacking, the alarm bells would ring and emergency
solutions will be proffered on how to move the
programmes forward.
And let’s not mince words about it, asses could be
kicked. It is not for nothing that the African sages used
to counsel the king to talk softly and carry a big stick!
The approach of the new paradigm is to remove
monitoring and programme implementation from the
spasmodic approach to one based on regularity and
routinisation. The idea is to ensure that the alternative to
spasm is the installation of routine.
Thus, a new government coming into power, with a
shortage of technical and political skills, should be
asking a number of pertinent questions: “One is: What
are the priorities?” The second would be, “If you
succeeded in delivering a given priority, how would you
know? What would success look like in 2019, at the end
of this mandate?” and the third question would be, “How
would you know at any given moment you’re making
progress toward your goals?”
Addressing these questions will lead a delivery-oriented
government to develop a set of measurable indicators
backed by the requisite data. Most would have to be
publicly available and thus, if government is heading in
the wrong direction, would have to feel acutely
uncomfortable with the inevitable negative public
attention. For example, how many kilometres of roads
have been paved to date, how many clinics and
maternity centres were constructed, how many new
schools and how many new rail tracks were laid, and
how do these measure against the overall targets set in
the government’s priority programmes?
It was my singular honour to have met Tony and Cherie
Blair at the home of a mutual friend in Abuja not too long
ago. Over a sumptuous dinner we had occasion to
discuss his ideas about policy and statecraft
I always
believed that his playing the poodle to George W. Bush
and his neo-con brethren over Iraq was an act of
consummate folly, but I thought it was not the occasion
to raise the matter.
To get ourselves out of the current morass, creating a
small Strategy and Delivery Unit in the Presidency will be
a great help in restoring morale and helping this
administration regain confidence of the people. It will
also help the President and the Economic Team to keep
tabs on progress on all fronts.
The proposed Unit should be in the Presidency for a
number of reasons: first, it is important that they are
not seen as part of the regular administration or political
set-up. Second, being in the Presidency will give them
the authority to approach all MDAs without fear or
trepidation; and third, being independent technical
experts, they cannot be accused of being self-interested
actors or prisoners of vested interests within or outside
government.
If this task were given to the Planning
Commission or any other MDA, it would create conflict
with other ministers, as they would insist that they are
authorities on their own right. In the last administration,
the Minister of Finance who also doubled as Co-
ordinating Minister of the Economy drew a lot ire that
caused much disquiet within the entire cabinet. Such
problems should be avoided.
Implementing a new delivery programme will not be
easy. There are vested interests that will always be
opposed to a new order of things. Implementing
effective delivery in the way depicted here presumes a
government that is indeed committed to achieving
results and is also responsive to the electorate and
mindful of its mandate and promises to the people.
It
also requires the existence of a servant state that
serves the people rather than the caprices of rent-
seeking public officials.
It will require no less than a
transformed public administration that is efficient and
professional; deploying the arsenals of e-governance,
technology and big data to leverage efficiencies, reduce
waste and drive implementation to meet measurable
targets.
administration during the recent launching of new
Economic Recovery and Growth Plan, ERGP, by
President Muhammadu Buhari and his Economic Team.
Yemi Osinbajo, President of the Senate, Dr Bukola
Saraki, Speaker Rt Hon Yakubu Dogara, Zamfara State
Governor Alh Abdulaziz Yari, SGF, Engr Babachir David
Lawal, Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator
Udoma Udo Udoma, Minister of State Budget and
National Planning, Zainab Ahmed CBN Governor, Mr
Godwin Emefiele, Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi
Adeosun and APC National Chairman Chief John Odigie-
Oyegun during the formal launch of the Nigerian
Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) at the State
House Council Chamber in Abuja.
One of the novelties in this plan relates to its avowed
commitment to rigorous policy implementation. What is
making many observers sceptical, however, is the fact
that it is a commitment that remains shrouded in
ambiguity, if not obfuscation. What we have been told is
that a new unit will be put in place in the Presidency and
will be charged with the task of monitoring
implementation to ensure the administration meets up
with all its multifarious policy targets.
Given that this administration has a penchant for moving
with the speed of an oil tanker, those of us who wish
them well remain anxious as to whether such an outfit
will emerge and will be able to hit the ground running, to
borrow the language of US marines.
As far as I am concerned, the Achilles’ heel of our
national development efforts going back decades relates
very much to the question of implementation. We have
not been short of good plans. On the contrary, we have
had a surfeit of them.
The NEEDS framework, Vision
20-2020, the CBN’s FSS2020, the Transformation
Agenda and several others, were unassailable on
technical grounds. There was also broad enough
consensus on those plans. But the devil has been in the
details of implementation.
Up till now, sadly, we have not
developed a rigorous framework for policy
implementation for Nigeria. As a consequence, many of
our budgets are never completed as at and when due.
The ‘abandoned project’ syndrome is a typically Nigerian
disease. According to UNIDO, some 60% of our national
projects never reach the completion stage.
In the policy sciences, the new paradigm of delivery is
gaining increasing popularity. It is part of the legacy of
the Tony Blair administration in Britain. Like many
executive leaders, Blair was not wholly satisfied with his
government’s performance during the first mandate of
his administration during the years 1997—2001. When
he won a second mandate he decided he would do things
differently. He invited a top policy expert, Michael
Barber, to help him set up a Prime Minister’s Delivery
Unit, PMDU, in the very heart of his government.
The whole initiative, as to be expected, was greeted with
a lot of scepticism, if not outright hostility, by Whitehall
mandarins. But the Prime Minister gave his full political
backing to the project. The Director of PMDU had a
simple and straightforward mandate: to ensure that the
government of Prime Minister Tony Blair delivers on its
campaign promises. In the words of the pioneer director
of the PMDU: “What I discovered with others in the Blair
administration was that you could put in place some
basic approaches that, if you followed them through,
would make it much more likely that you’d deliver what
you’d promised than otherwise.”
The PMDU was staffed by a Director and a small but
very robust team of analysts, most of them from outside
the normal administration. Their role was to develop a
metrics for the government’s strategic priorities and
monitor these across all ministries, departments and
agencies of government, MDAs.
The aim was not to act as watchdogs breathing down
the throats of ministers and senior members of the
cabinet but to be solution providers who monitor all
programmes, identify obstacles and assist senior
government officials achieve their goals. The beauty of it
is that they will claim the credit, not the PMDU. On its
part, the PMDU would send regular monthly briefings to
the Prime Minister and the kitchen cabinet as to how
progress is being made on the government’s top priority
programmes and projects. Whenever a sector was
slacking, the alarm bells would ring and emergency
solutions will be proffered on how to move the
programmes forward.
And let’s not mince words about it, asses could be
kicked. It is not for nothing that the African sages used
to counsel the king to talk softly and carry a big stick!
The approach of the new paradigm is to remove
monitoring and programme implementation from the
spasmodic approach to one based on regularity and
routinisation. The idea is to ensure that the alternative to
spasm is the installation of routine.
Thus, a new government coming into power, with a
shortage of technical and political skills, should be
asking a number of pertinent questions: “One is: What
are the priorities?” The second would be, “If you
succeeded in delivering a given priority, how would you
know? What would success look like in 2019, at the end
of this mandate?” and the third question would be, “How
would you know at any given moment you’re making
progress toward your goals?”
Addressing these questions will lead a delivery-oriented
government to develop a set of measurable indicators
backed by the requisite data. Most would have to be
publicly available and thus, if government is heading in
the wrong direction, would have to feel acutely
uncomfortable with the inevitable negative public
attention. For example, how many kilometres of roads
have been paved to date, how many clinics and
maternity centres were constructed, how many new
schools and how many new rail tracks were laid, and
how do these measure against the overall targets set in
the government’s priority programmes?
It was my singular honour to have met Tony and Cherie
Blair at the home of a mutual friend in Abuja not too long
ago. Over a sumptuous dinner we had occasion to
discuss his ideas about policy and statecraft
I always
believed that his playing the poodle to George W. Bush
and his neo-con brethren over Iraq was an act of
consummate folly, but I thought it was not the occasion
to raise the matter.
To get ourselves out of the current morass, creating a
small Strategy and Delivery Unit in the Presidency will be
a great help in restoring morale and helping this
administration regain confidence of the people. It will
also help the President and the Economic Team to keep
tabs on progress on all fronts.
The proposed Unit should be in the Presidency for a
number of reasons: first, it is important that they are
not seen as part of the regular administration or political
set-up. Second, being in the Presidency will give them
the authority to approach all MDAs without fear or
trepidation; and third, being independent technical
experts, they cannot be accused of being self-interested
actors or prisoners of vested interests within or outside
government.
If this task were given to the Planning
Commission or any other MDA, it would create conflict
with other ministers, as they would insist that they are
authorities on their own right. In the last administration,
the Minister of Finance who also doubled as Co-
ordinating Minister of the Economy drew a lot ire that
caused much disquiet within the entire cabinet. Such
problems should be avoided.
Implementing a new delivery programme will not be
easy. There are vested interests that will always be
opposed to a new order of things. Implementing
effective delivery in the way depicted here presumes a
government that is indeed committed to achieving
results and is also responsive to the electorate and
mindful of its mandate and promises to the people.
It
also requires the existence of a servant state that
serves the people rather than the caprices of rent-
seeking public officials.
It will require no less than a
transformed public administration that is efficient and
professional; deploying the arsenals of e-governance,
technology and big data to leverage efficiencies, reduce
waste and drive implementation to meet measurable
targets.
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