Opinion
By Oriyomi Anthony
ALTHOUGH the President Bola Tinubu government’s quest to convince Nigerians that it
will make things better is still hanging in the balance, an initiative launched earlier
this week has shown that the administration means business and has helped in
assuaging the initial doubts of skeptics like me. For the first time, I see a government
that wants to run the country with some private sector mindset, giving the impression
that government business will be taken more seriously, which I hope will indeed be
the case. Let me explain.
Before an employee accepts a role in any organisation, he/she must read through
the job description or expectations for the role. To avoid any confusion, most
employers spell out job expectations in black and white, and when an employee
takes up such job offers it is because they are sure that they can meet the set
deliverables. Some organisations even take it a step further by setting performance
indicators for each deliverable, marking out a time when each indicator would be
evaluated to see if the employee is making progress towards it or has achieved it. If
any cases of non-performance or underperformance are found, appropriate
interventions are deployed, from capacity building to mentoring to reprimands and in
irredeemable cases, disengagement. On the other hand, if the employee has done
well in meeting all deliverables, they are celebrated, promoted and/or rewarded with
higher pay.
This strategy has helped many organisations achieve their goals and has
increasingly become accepted worldwide as a way to monitor and evaluate
employee performance. Non-profit organisations also deploy monitoring and
evaluation as an essential tool for tracking their impact in the communities they
serve.
Beyond corporate organisations, however, there is also a need to evaluate the
performance of public office holders, in particular politicians. While they are not
employed in the sense of what employment entails, they are elected and, in some
cases, appointed, with the expectations to deliver on certain promises or goals. They
are some sort of servants to the people with expectations that they will help
government achieve its promises to the people.
And so, evaluating them will ensure that they carry out their duties with utmost
dedication and efficiency which will help ensure a well-functioning economy.
Recognising the need for monitoring and evaluating public office holders, some
countries have introduced different evaluation tools and have as a result begun to
enjoy improved delivery in the performance of their leaders.
Until recently, Nigeria was not concerned about having a defined process for
evaluating the performance of its political leaders. Indeed, for over 62 years post-
independence, political appointees did their work in a sort of bubble which shielded
them from the blowback from their policies and agendas. This bubble meant some
political appointees, in particular ministers, did not always put in their best in
delivering on their jobs since they knew there would be no one to hold them
accountable for their less than sterling performance. And if not for the efforts of civil
society organisations like BudgIT, SERAP, EiE and others, who have been at the
forefront of making Nigerians aware of the activities of politicians from the local to the
federal level, many citizens would remain in a state of ignorance. BudgIT went as far
as launching Tracka as a way of tracking service delivery across sectors of the
Nigerian economy, and while this has yielded results in some sectors, there is still
much more that can be gotten if there was a more robust platform widely available to
citizens for them to share feedback and evaluate the performance of political
leaders.
Which is why I was excited when I read about the launch of the Citizens’ Delivery
Tracker App by the Central Delivery Coordinating Unit. The app will “provide citizens
with information on priority projects, policies, and programmes of the Federal
Government and enable them to give real-time feedback on their assessment of
governments performance on the implementation of its policies, projects, and
programmes from anywhere they are in the country”.
In addition to citizens, the app will also allow the presidency to fully monitor the
performance of every ministry and minister to know who is delivering as expected
and who is dropping the ball; and to know what interventions to deploy in such
circumstances. This is in line with the performance bond President Tinubu made
every minister sign last year. Like most employers, President Tinubu laid down the
law that any minister found not performing would be shown the door.
And so, on Monday, 8 April 2024, the Central Delivery Coordinating Unit, led by Mrs
Hadiza Bala-Usman, launched the Citizens’ Delivery Tracker. That made me glad!
My excitement stems from the numerous benefits I know would accrue from the
tracker chief of which would be an improved service delivery from all ministries and
ministers. This means that if the health minister performs as he should, then in a
matter of time we will have a well-functioning health sector boasting fully equipped
health facilities. We will also have the right number and quality of medical
professionals in health institutions across the country and our medical practitioners
will prefer to stay than ‘japa’ to foreign countries. It would mean that the proportion of
Nigerians with health insurance would increase seeing that this is one of the metrics
that will be measured.
The tracker will also lead to a revived agricultural sector that is able to provide food
for citizens year-round while also embracing improved agricultural methods and
practices.
Tracking the performance of the transportation ministry will result in an efficient
transportation sector while evaluating the ministry of education will help to bring back
the education sector from its state of near collapse. Essentially, the tracker will
ensure no sector of the Nigerian economy will be neglected or will continue to suffer
from poor service.
Another benefit of the tracker is that it will allow citizens to understand the eight
priority areas, the ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs) contributing to each
priority and the deliverables from each MDA. The tracker also has a column for
projects of each MDA which will let the populace know the precise step or project
each MDA is taking/embarking on to meet its set deliverables.
As a corollary to understanding each MDA better, the tracker will also spotlight the
heads of each MDA so that citizens know who to hold responsible for an MDA’s
underperformance. This would mean that ministers and heads of departments and
agencies will have no place to hide if they do not meet set expectations.
The tracker will help to curb corruption and wastage. This is because by making a list
of projects each MDA is expected to work on available to citizens, citizens can easily
raise an alarm if they do not see any such project in their communities or if projects
are being duplicated.
Of particular importance is the fact that the tracker will promote citizenship and lead
to enhanced democracy. Citizenship in this case would mean an informed and
engaged citizenry who is aware of what is happening in the country and who can be
consulted and who can contribute to decisions that will affect them. This will result in
a form of human-centred design/democratic/collaborative effort where the
government and citizens can deliberate on the specific challenges facing a
community/sector and where the government will ultimately be able to set up
projects based on the inputs/recommendations from the citizens who know where
the shoe is pinching them. This would greatly reduce the cases of creating projects
that have no direct impact on citizens or that are not the right solutions to the
problems of citizens.
To emphasise this further, there’s a story that is commonly cited in non-profit
Monitoring and Evaluation circles about why it is important to involve the end-users
of an intervention in its design. The story goes thus. A certain non-profit visited a
community and noticed that the women there usually walked a long distance to fetch
water. Thinking that this long distance was stressful for the women, the organisation
decided to dig a well closer to the women’s homes. But they soon noticed an
interesting thing. The well became filled with debris and all sorts of dirt, making it
unusable. Thinking it was some sort of structural error, they dug another well and the
same thing happened. They dug a third and it soon became filled with debris again.
Exasperated, the non-profit decides to find out what was happening, and they
consulted some of the women. To their greatest surprise the women confessed to
being the ones responsible for filling the wells with debris. Why did they do this?
Because walking a long distance to their original well actually gave them time to
connect with friends, relax from the daily tedium of their lives and just have some
personal time for themselves free from children, husbands, and other relatives. To
say the non-profit’s executives were surprised would be an understatement, but they
would have saved themselves the money and other resources deployed in building
wells nearer home if they had asked the women what they needed.
And if we are being honest there are many examples of these kind of white elephant
and redundant projects across Nigeria which would never have seen the light of day,
and which do not benefit the masses because the government embarked on them
without considering the pressing needs of the community they want to serve. This
has always resulted in a huge wastage of resources that could have been better
deployed elsewhere. However, this delivery tracker app will help in reducing such
incidences because the citizens will have the opportunity to share their
thoughts/comments and feedback on their needs and the best solutions to it. And
they don’t have to be experts or other professionals before they can contribute, they
only need to have lived experiences of a situation and realistic recommendations to
combat the problems. Essentially, the tracker will help to give a voice to the
voiceless. This will ultimately help in realising the goals of democracy being ‘a
government of the people, by the people and for the people’.
THE tracker will also help in putting an end to the culture of poor and under
performance from appointed ministers. Instead of the previous lackadaisical attitude
that some ministers show to their work because of the secrecy it is shrouded in, the
publicity that the tracker gives means this will no longer continue. Rather, ministers
will now be on their toes to ensure they please their employer by pleasing the
masses they have been appointed to serve. To show that the citizens have been
looking forward to this kind of innovation, less than 24 hours after its launch, there
has been news of some citizens reporting/rating the performance of different
ministers on the app. And if the Tinubu government keeps to its word, then such
underperforming ministers and ministries will have to step up or get out.
Overall, if properly utilised, the Citizens’ Delivery Tracker App will mean Nigerians
will no longer have to beg to get the necessities of life and have the proceeds of
good governance that previous leaders and this government has promised.
This is because the app will help in no small way in ensuring that the 8Priority Areas
of the Tinubu administration would not go the way of the numerous other economic
plans that Nigerian leaders have introduced in yesteryears.
I dare say if past administrations had embraced the culture of setting key
performance indicators and monitoring the delivery of the economic plans and
agendas they introduced, they would have successfully executed the plans. In this
regard, the current administration is visionary and have shown proactiveness, but it
remains to be seen if this proactiveness would yield the expected returns to
citizens.It would also be good to see more monitoring and evaluation efforts
deployed to other political tiers and across states and local governments. This may
be the citizens’ trump card to get elected officials to do their jobs.
Oriyomi Anthony is a development professional, writer, and editor.AA
14th April, 2024.
C.E.
Tags: Oriyomi Anthony President Bola Tinubu
