Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, on Monday, assured that it is not business as usual in this second four-year term of Muhammadu Buhari presidency, as it concerns the implementation of the administration’s plans.
Speaking at the opening session of the management conference organized by the Nigeria Institute of Management (NIM) in Abuja, Osinbajo, said unlike in the past, “the ministers are to render their first reports on performance in December.”
Government, he said, is “moving to a more measurable way of determining where ministers are going and what they ought to do. Of course, there would be challenges of funding, clarity of plans, etc.”
He recalled that after the Presidential Policy Dialogue preceding the inauguration of Ministers, a list of seven or eight specific mandates and action points were developed for each ministry.
He urged the institute to contribute to the full and effective performance of the mandates which would come with some challenges, even as he urged members of the NIM to comply with the institute’s Code of Conduct.
In a release by Laolu Akande, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Office of the Vice President, Osinbajo said the central management challenge in the public sector today remains implementation.
Nigeria’s problems, as in the past, he stressed, is a management one, urging participants at the institute to the conference to prescribe solutions to the problem, while ensuring that implementation begins with them.
Issues he urged the conference to ponder include: “the central question of governance, ethics in the management of public resources; …merit over quotas and politics in the selection of talents and projects; …the challenges in human capital development; …scale in social services.”
The VP noted, for example, the challenge of “providing 21st-century education to millions of children as the country heads for third place in the world population in a few decades. Lastly, but by no means, the least, is the problem of poverty, and the creation of wealth and opportunities for millions.”
On governance, he stressed the administration’s fight against “grand corruption, which, in other words, is the direct looting of the treasury by senior members of the government.
“The second is changing systems that promote graft. This we have done by the introduction and implementation of the TSA (Treasury Single Account), PICA (Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit), continuous Audit of government-owned entities, the insistence on full implementation of IPPIS (Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information), especially for the armed and uniformed services who had for long avoided being on this transparent electronic platform; the whistleblower initiative and other measures aimed at bringing greater transparency and scrutiny to public finance and the conduct of public affairs.”
The next level, he continued, “is to deepen the fight against corruption especially in government procurement processes and government delivered services. We believe that technology and automation will help, moving things away from the discretion of the desk officer, to the agnostic electronic platform.”