The incessant labour union strike, from ASUU to the NLC, has become a regular staple in Nigeria’s litany of underdevelopment characteristics. And the industrial disputes usually result from labour unions reactions to what is perceived as government’s recurring insensitivity to the plight of workers in the dynamics of governance.

The current labour action—a demand for a realistic minimum wage—is waged on the platform of the argument that government has the means of paying the new wage it proposed. The labour unions, in their arguments, try to justify its theory of government’s insensitivity on two planks. One, there is the widespread indices of poverty and suffering by Nigerians arising from the cost-of-living crisis and the evident loss of purchasing power.

Two, there is also the hype around the whole issue of wastes and redundancies as well as political and bureaucratic corruption embedded in costs of servicing the indulgences of some categories of government functionaries.

On the other hand, government—and even the organised private sector—think the proposal of labour is unrealistic.

And that argument is founded on a range of interconnected economic realities and dynamics, ranging from payroll cost as percentage of budget, dwindling national revenue earning and consequent fiscal deficit, the huge national indebtedness and the imperative need to attract more investible capital, a galloping inflation, devaluation of the naira and fluctuations in the GDP growth rates to Nigeria’s anomalous federal system and the challenges of affordability for some states and all the local government areas. In between the back-and-forth negotiations is the hanging question: what happens to wage increment that a galloping inflation is waiting to invalidate?

And yet, the issues involved in the adversarial conflict between the Nigerian government and labour transcend wage increment. It goes to the very heart of the place of productivity in Nigeria’s development management, resource use efficiency, and the urgency of good governance in the transformation of the lives of Nigerians. Inserting developmental industrial action and orientation into Nigeria’s development challenges requires cross-cutting institutional and governance arguments as bases for reform actions.

This is what I intend in this piece—to provide a technical perspective that should underpin remedial action of the tripartite in redressing the chaotic and adversarial industrial relations which has become dysfunctional to national progress in favor of a more developmental praxis.

Let us lay the cards on the table upfront. One of the key objectives of any state’s development policy must necessarily be the achievement of industrial harmony as a first critical condition for creating the enabling climate for growing an economy that is standing on very weak substrutures.

Even more significant is the critical relationship between developmental industrial relations and the urgency of a national change management strategy meant to rejuvenate the productivity of the Nigerian state as the instigator of good governance through institutional and governance reforms. The critical point to unravel the overall challenge lies in the causal relationship between cost of governance, labour relations and the challenge of productivity in Nigeria.

The wasteful governance architecture that supports Nigeria’s non-developmental federalism is unarguably a major binding constraint to successive governments’ development performance since the 1970s. This resulted from the unguarded multiplication of public institutions, accentuated by the prodigal and geometric increases in state creation and local government structures as well as a pervasive national indiscipline in policy, programme and project implementation.

Our focus in this contribution is the institutional component of Nigeria’s allocative and resource use inefficiency and the imperative need for salvage same through the launch of a national productivity movement, and one at that with a significant national waste management strategy component.

Indeed, one of the most immediate signals of the loss of efficiency in the productivity model of the Nigerian administrative protocols therefore, is the weak or near-collapsed internal management control mechanism in Nigeria’s public administration system. This internal administrative mechanism was built around the control tools of organisation and method (O&M) and the treasury control of establishment that benchmark the ratio of capital and recurrent budget.

The core elements of these controls were the manpower forecasting and planning system of identifying, planning and acting upon human resource requirements and problems related to the conceptualisation of the role of the state in the running of the national economy, as well as the trend analysis of service’s growth in size and expansion of the scope of responsibilities. However, this mechanism collapsed under the weight of the laxity and politisation of entry level recruitment into the public service and institutional multiplication that was not matched by due diligence in HR function and developmental federalism.

The breakdown of the internal mechanism of productive efficiency—from the systematic planning for short and long-term needs and anticipated vacancies founded on periodic functional reviews to structural changes and quantum of workload incidental, as well as basic restructuring due to privatisation of government concerns, etc.—was compounded by the creation of ad hoc structures and units of government business parallel to the existing bureaucratic structures as a rule by virtually all governments, and the replication of these parallel structures by some agencies across each state of the federation.

And these parallel structures, units and agencies are staffed not with an attention to the aggregate requirements of the federal civil service, but based on an arbitrary departmental and ministerial staffing decisions that dumps lots of deadwoods onto the system.

This makes it institutionally inevitable to de-escalate the cost of governance implication of this development through a genuine need to achieve governance accountability that will lead to efficiency in government business. And efficiency can only be achieved with the repositioning of the MDAs to achieve more with less and guided rightsizing.

To be continued tomorrow.

Olaopa is a Professor of Public Administration and Chairman Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja.