How to cut public waste, ensure service efficiency, by Olaopa

Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has proffered ways to cut waste in government and ensure efficiency in public service. He gave the advice, yesterday, in Ado-Ekiti, during the “2024 Ekiti State Public Service Forum and Award of Excellence Ceremony,” with the theme, “Public Service Efficiency: A Barometer of Sustainable Development.”

Olaopa felicitated the governor, Biodun Oyebanji, on the occasion of his second anniversary as the helmsman of the state. He said that the Ekiti State government had made a very critical choice of theme for the ceremony and it served a notice to the government itself — its political and bureaucratic leadership — that there was more to be done. Olaopa further said that the ceremony brought to mind Chief Simeon Adebo’s reaction to Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s political slogan in the old Western Region.

“The Action Group (AG) operated on the slogan of ‘Life More Abundant’ as the basis of its political manifesto.

“And Adebo translated the slogan into bureaucratic call-to-action as ‘Work More Abundantly’ as a signal to the public servants that there is more to be done.”
He said that he was articulating the “practical import of the notion of public service efficiency, against the background of what he had been calling bureau-pathology in the public service system in Nigeria,” noting that public service efficiency is very delivery while significantly reducing the cost of running government.

Olaopa, while listing the sources of the bloating of the cost of government, said that they mainly centred on “the whole ensemble of governance architecture of the Nigerian brand of federalism, electoral process, the presidential system and the politics that the Nigerian elite play with the development future of the great nation.”

He also cited “the collapse of the internal administrative mechanisms of the public administration system, which include the systematic planning for short and long-term needs, forecasting of retirement, attrition rates, anticipated vacancies founded on periodic functional reviews (to determine changes in tasks as a result of government’s new policy targets and programme emphases), and structural changes and quantum of workload incidental.”

They also include basic restructuring undertaken due to privatisation of government concerns, outsourcing practices as witnessed with the compromised monetisation policy for example, periodic personnel and process audits, review of the scheme of service, abolition of vacant posts, control of the creation of new post, units, departments and agencies, accounting for voluntary retirements, retrenchments, and staff reduction due to process reengineering, automation and system changes, and adversarial nature and consequences of industrial relations practices on the macroeconomy.

Olaopa, who lamented that “cost keeps skyrocketing while efficiency wasn’t plummeting,” said that this was due significantly to duplicated agencies and manager functions, complex and non-value-adding business processes, and the continuance of manual processes that could easily have been automated.”