THE Federal Government's national transformation programme is expected to transform our power system, roads and railway systems; our education and health systems; unemployment, budget deficit and inflation; government's high recurrent expenditure and so on.
To achieve all these, government will have to reduce the level of governance wastes and corruption; reform the bureaucracy and eliminate ghost workers and ghost pensioners and so on! These reforms, in turn, call for a technical "nuts and bolts" team, which can begin to craft the appropriate reform initiatives!
The first evidence that we need such a team is that nobody else so far, is crafting such vital initiatives! When people complain that we are not seeing enough of transformational initiatives, the question is: Who is there to craft such initiatives?
Is it the Federal Executive Council, FEC, or the National Economic Management Team, NEMT, or the Economic Implementation Team, EIT? Certainly not, considering the very high level at which these bodies are constituted! That's why we need a technically oriented "nuts and bolts" team to serve as the "engine" of the programme, while the FEC, NEMT and EIT play the driving or steering role!
The second evidence of our need for this special crack reform-team, is that even when government has managed to launch some reform initiatives, they tended to be weak on some fundamental principles of reform! We can use our power sector reform and the attempted removal of fuel subsidy to illustrate this.
A very tested reform principle is to deregulate a sector before privatising the government agencies in that sector. It is a technique which not only helps in managing the opponents of change, but also one that enables government to pre-test a sector in a deregulated environment before taking the more drastic step of privatising its agencies in that sector.
We leveraged this principle most impressively in our telecoms sector reform of 2001 when government, through the NCC( the sector's regulator) started by deregulating the sector before talking about privatising the government agencies in the sector. This deregulation allowed private firms, such as MTN and ECONET, to come in and set up their networks and sell their services at their own rates – while the government's agency NITEL continued to do its thing.
There could have been no protest from NITEL's workers, since nobody was laid off, and since the private parties were spending their own money, not government money, and reducing the "supply" scarcity that NITEL was not coping with.
Similarly, there could have been no opposition from the public and civil society groups to the higher tariff of the private-sector firms because their services were optional, and side-by-side with the NITEL's services that the public had always had! Notice that the story would have been totally different if the reform had started with a plan to privatise NITEL, or a plan to raise tariff to attract the private sector! Now, most of the implementation bumps we have experienced so far in the transformation programme (including the last subsidy-removal protests), could well have been avoided if the process had been guided by this principle.
When some people say that our power and oil sectors are different from (and should not be compared with) our telecoms sector, they are only confirming how badly we need the proposed crack reform team because, in terms of fundamental principles of reform, these sectors are not different at all!
I have tried to highlight the foregoing as the kind of problems that the presence of the proposed crack team of reformers could have forestalled. I can also flip the coin to show some specific benefits that having such team will herald.
The first bonus is that it will enable us wrestle the transformation programme from the gridlock of the bureaucracy which has the capacity to turn any good reform initiative into an outright nightmare, and a source of crazy wealth for public servants! The reform team will dramatically raise the tempo of the programme, by, for example, developing minimum technical guidelines that regulatory agencies and other MDAs would use in carrying out their individual reforms.
Note that simply allowing the ministers to "do their own things" in their ministries without the template and technical guidance from such central resource has left the programme at the mercy of the bureaucracy and made it non-existent in most of our MDAs! The ministers, however badly they may want to change things, are not reform experts!
Another bonus of having such a special, technically-oriented reform team is that it will help government to begin to leverage the ideas and suggestions that various third parties can generate for the programme. As things stand now, who is there to sit down and pore through such third party proposals to determine those that have merit for the transformation programme?
Certainly not the FEC, NEMT, or EIT! Indeed, third party organisations with interesting reform ideas for the programme, have been facing frustrations, getting the attention of right people in government! For example, I know that the CLSSP did develop several ready-for-implementation reform initiatives for the transformation programme(at no cost to government), including a new Presidential initiative against corruption, a new Presidential initiative to reform our public procurement, a Presidential initiative to restore Nigerian football, a Presidential initiative for harvesting Nigeria's abundant talents, a new Presidential assault on ghost workers, and so on. Nobody in government that the centre approached had the time to even look at these initiatives! And yet government has not been churning out any alternative initiatives! I am sure there are hundreds of other third party proposals, from people that want to help the government!
Note also that if people with ideas for government are not told where else to go, they will tend to inundate the Presidency with their ideas and proposals; which could simply create very busy waste baskets since the Presidency officials would not have the kind of time required to pore through such proposals! Somebody in the Presidency advised the CLSSP to take its initiatives directly to the MDAs.
This arrangement is not ideal, either because it allows the MDAs, which are not enthusiastic about reform, to quietly kill such ideas! It also subjects members of the public to the ordeal of being bounced from one office to the other, searching for who in government would be interested in their ideas; which will easily make them to give up in frustration!
Therefore, having the proposed crack reform team will create an efficient meeting point for government and members of the public at home and in the Diaspora that may have suggestions for the transformation programme.
And we all know the depth of resourcefulness that can come from Nigerians! The reform team can then pass any ideas it considers immediately implementable directly to the relevant MDAs, and very importantly, follow up on them with the MDAs.
Setting up this crack reform team is not a big deal. The Coordinating Minister for the Economy, CME, can even set it up as a special resource unit which will be feeding initiatives to both the EIT and the NEMT. I don't see how the CME can manage the very difficult assignment this country has put on her shoulders, without the support of such a vital resource.
Mr. GABRIEL ZOWAN, a reform & risk management expert, wrote from Abuja.
Vanguard Nigeria