Get Guardian on GoogleBy Tunji Olaopa
My central argument for this piece is a fundamental one. It goes to the very heart of the success of the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration. The argument is critical: to ground its evolving economic policies, programmes and projects—with no iota of prejudice to their appropriateness or the good intention behind them—the administration need to do more to achieve a policy intelligence framework that solidly backstops these economic, governance and developmental agenda.
By this, I mean that the Tinubu administration, to be able to successfully manage the governance and development expectations of Nigerians in the next administration cycle post-2027, need to urgently reinforce its policy intelligence backend with a few more governance experts and technocrats to shore up the seriousness and critical essence of the objective of achieving a $1trn economy by 2030.
This argument is cogent for two reasons. The first is that it plays out as the most critical undercurrent of the genuine and deeply-held desire of HE, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to put together a government of national competence that will attend, with technocratic expertise and political wisdom, to the challenges of a change management required to transform Nigeria’s governance dynamics. President Tinubu is already renowned for his capacity to harness competence.
What is needed more is to find a framework that makes these competences functional for the goals of the Renewed Hope Agenda. And this change management, I suggest, can be found in the change space framework—a framework of distributed leadership—which allows the administration to intentionally select and appoint cabinet members (Tinubu’s first eleven team) that will coordinate with a backend of technocratic, managerial and bureaucratic leadership which will see eye to eye with the President on his strategic vision for Nigeria and Nigerians.
The change space, as designed by the government, will be structured around a competency model that allows the administration to measure and assess performance based on specific performance bonds or contracts. It also allows the government to generate and structure competency clusters that then cascade down to the operational dynamics of the MDAs as the units of performance and productivity Nigeria needs to enable democratic governance.
The second reason for my argument for strengthening the government’s policy intelligence backend derives from the first. The change space competence-based framework does not allow for just any comers. On the contrary, the essence of such a structured space is the need to drive change management not just through competence but a multidisciplinary corps, nexus and network that could serve as the institutional juncture for a seminal space that accommodates consistent policy conversations and dialogues strengthened by internal policy-engaged research-reinforced policy formulation and management dynamic. This is necessary for achieving a most critical nuancing of the national change management dynamic as it unfolds.
In this essay therefore, I will be sharing a few of the opinions and frameworks harvested from my ongoing engagements with economic policy analysts and international development reports. Let us start from the point of what is already available. As a mark of its readiness to keep pursuing structures and institutions that would undermine the persistent governance and development challenges that Nigeria has accumulated over the decades, the Tinubu administration had already established some structural arrangement as critical platforms and spaces for generating policy advisories. This is the essence of the Presidential Economic Council (PECC), the Economic Management Team (EMT), and the Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC). But there is the need to do more.
The administration is currently confronted by the urgency of bridging the gap created by the macro-to-micro economic disconnect. In other words, there is a disconnection between the government’s macroeconomic gains since it came to office, and the realities of micro-economic experiences of millions of Nigerians. These macroeconomic progresses are in indirect proportional relationship with the number of Nigerians living below the poverty level.
To bridge this gap, the federal government needs to move much more decisively and strategically to harness specific expert policy intelligence and think-do-tank capacity reinforcement across several key economic management quadrants. Such strategic expertise will indeed deepen existing macroeconomic intelligence while pushing vigorously to connect economic growth to microeconomic necessities.
We can now begin to outline specifics. The government policy management architecture first requires specific and dedicated team—from the National Bureau of Statistics to the National Economic Summit Group, and more—to be more involved in the task of deepening policy intelligence through simulated policy analysis and forecasting that generate structural scenario analysis the government can work with. One of such dynamic modeling tools that could serve the purpose is the computable general equilibrium (CGE).
While this model has evolved over time, its significance for an economy-wide simulation and tracking is not in doubt, it is equally useful in estimating the long-term effects and consequences of policy reforms. The CGE would have been a very significant model to use in calculating the economic and governance fallouts of the subsidy policy across direct and indirect channels, especially in terms of consumption decisions, for example.
The CGE and other forecasting and scenario modelling tools are needed to deepen policy intelligence so as to make the economic and governance policy of the government more meaningful and directly impactful for the citizens. The ongoing radical tax reform of the Tinubu administration, for example, demands automated and real-time revenue forecasting intelligence.
This will guide policy managers to, for example, decouple debt obligations from mere consumption and thereby rigorously track cash-flow metrics for infrastructure-linked foreign borrowing. This allows policy intelligence to readily be able to capture such high frequency indicators as weekly consumer price trackers, corporate inventory drawdowns and real-time logistics costs, needed by the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Federal Ministry of Finance in reporting economic performance and in making more agile adjustments to keep the economy on track.
The need for the CGE is larger than the model itself. It goes to the very heart of achieving people-centered human development and inclusive growth that actively undermine multidimensional poverty in Nigeria. Through the economic tracking of policy reforms, the government is then able to articulate welfare interventions and safety nets that enable Nigerians to bear the brunt of macroeconomic shocks and fluctuations like those emanating from the subsidy removal and currency flotation.
To deepen welfarist interventions and safety nets, therefore, the Tinubu administration necessarily must enhance its policy intelligence in ways that could enable the formalisation of the informal sector, facilitate expanded conditional cash transfer and introduce digital innovation that would consolidate the welfare frameworks for the most vulnerable groups and individuals in Nigeria.
The Tinubu administration needs to move away from a reliance on raw GDP statistics in order to be able to focus more on the productive capacity of the economy. This requires expert reinforcement the policy decision making taking the benefit of the growing frontiers of decision science. The reinforcement derives from the proactive engagement between the government, and the universities and research institutes in outlining and undertaking systematic but localised researches that unearth the specific bottlenecks inhibiting critical growth driver sectors such as transportation, housing, and agriculture, and many more. The government has already put in place significant frameworks and procedures that facilitate capital flow into the informal sector and MSME through grants and credits. But the Tinubu administration still urgently needs a deep analytical capacity and expertise to undertake and achieve a MSME de-risking and regulatory impact assessment in order for policy managers to understand why access to credit remain heavily choked by commercial banking bottlenecks despite macro-liquidity changes.
At another critical level, the administration needs crucial help with its “Nigeria First policy.”
Here, trade economists will be needed to transcend mere generic import-substitution frameworks and dynamics in order to be able to identify which local micro-enterprise and its products can be scaled internationally. Such expertise is not only in value-added global supply chain, but also in local content strategy and its peculiar relevance for upscaling the economy. In this context, the federal government will benefit immensely in coordinating its policy programmes and projects with the state governments and regional economic templates. The federal and state governments can then work together in establishing regional growth corridors desks, especially in some defining sectors, that will become functional in providing localised economic data. This will not only enhance the federal government’s local product initiatives; it also has a very strong capacity to negotiate the state governments away from the “caretaker allocation sharing” model towards more competitive ecosystems for developing economic comparative advantages and enhancing internally generated revenues.
It becomes clear in this context why the Tinubu administration will be in dire need of multiple economic expertise in order to be able to better understand local market actors and variables, informal traders and dynamics, and matrices that explain how consumers respond to policy changes.
All these will help the government in making critical decisions about macroeconomic integration.
The expertise, in the long run, also devolved eventually towards designing policies that will attend to job creation, increasing the purchasing power of an average Nigerian and enhancing food security.
The institutional reformer in me is very delighted about the emerging recognition of the need to transition the budget process into a performance-managed model. This facilitates a more progressive framework for measuring the performance of the budget and those in charge of making it work. In this regard, think tanks like the National Economic Summit Group become crucially useful as independent third-party monitoring and evaluation (M&E) auditors that ensure that capital expenditures of government directly translate into real-world productivity that tangibly transform the economic and existential realities of millions of Nigerians. The imperative of fiscal federalism also demands that we recognise and address the limited relationship that exists between the federal and state M&E systems.
The integration becomes key if the Tinubu administration must establish a coherent national framework of development performance. This eliminates the discrepancies in the deployment of the tools, indicators and timelines for implementing policies in many public services, especially agriculture, water, primary healthcare, education, road infrastructures, etc. To strengthen these services requires a structured federal-state cooperation that allows an M&E system that facilitates common standards, shared dashboards and consistent reporting frameworks.
In the twenty-first century, strategic policy intelligence is practically impossible outside of it integration into the digital ecosystems enabled by digital technologies, AI-enabled tools, and predictive machine learning and matrices. This thus immediately signals the necessity of relevant experts and technocrats who are able to design innovative policies that connect emerging technologies with infrastructural development tracking. With this, government can then make public investment choices based not on political expediency but on automated data trends and digitally-enhanced scenario planning.
In all, the foregoing puts flesh and teeth to the aspiration of the Tinubu administration for a government of national competence. What I have done here is to flesh out the kind of competences that need to be situated within a change space context that insists on a seminal and multidisciplinary type of responses to the complexity of deepening and consolidating the government’s modest achievements in the first administration cycle. Post-2027, the Tinubu administration needs a framework of distributed expert leadership to push its governance, economic and development policies into tangible outcomes that touch the lives of Nigerians.
Read the remaining part of this article on www.guardian.ng
Olaopa, a Professor of Public Administration and Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, wrote from Abuja.
