In a bid to enhance national productivity that brings development, the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission FCSC,Prof . Tunji Olaopa has said there was a need to build a new productivity paradigm to reverse the national culture of prodigality and waste.
He further said to contain the unsustainable cost of governance that made it impossible for government to invest significantly and in creating infrastructural backbone to the country’s much desired industrialization; a new national productivity culture must happen that will be a core pillar of governance and institutional reform model.
The chairman made this known today when the Director General of the National Productivity Centre (NPC) paid him a courtesy call at the Commission. Olaopa who was at the event with the Hon. Commissioners and other management staff, said the challenge of the Nigeria project was a resource-dependent mono-cultural economy.
He added that Nigeria needs to harness its resources efficiently to accelerate economic growth that does not depend on the quantum of government spending on development programmes but disciplined policy execution that balances the rate of investment on development projects with return on those investments.
While asserting that Nigerians are basically a very wasteful people, he disclosed that Nigeria’s national values is being eroded by pervasive culture of show-off; where average Nigerian like to celebrate everything-funerals, birthdays, graduation, new houses, marriages, promotion, everything; and never in any way modest, but with unbridled extravagance.
He called on the re-calibration of the nation’s national productivity drivers in terms of service delivery, programme and project management, resource use efficiency etc. He also called for national cultural adjustment that must extend to national work culture and labour standard, work method, skills pricing, pay and reward system; productivity metrics, research and development, talent and knowledge management among others.
He pointed out that the Nigerian State system and the Public Service cannot be developmental if it is the generator of institutional wastes, redundancies and pointless costs being carried as public finance and budget overheads by MDAs.
Professor Olaopa noted: “What productivity can ever exist in a public service with a workforce structure where too many people are doing nothing, too many doing too little, while too few are doing too much. Indeed, the political science literature is replete with evidence of the magnitude of costs and redundancies that Nigeria has generated by its peculiar brand of federalism, presidentialism, electoral system and diversity management praxis. There is of course the opportunity costs incidental on how the dynamics of the implementation of the federal character has undermined meritocracy and the institutional capacity deficits and obsolescence incidental”.
“There are redundancies created by the unconscionable practice whereby every agency irrespective of cost implication, must have offices in all the states of the federation and even LGAs, without consideration for how technology can be leveraged for ‘joined up’ cost saving governance cum institutional networking and outsourcing.” Chairman stressed.
He encouraged National Productivity Centre to generate ideas and models that could help the government to resolve the unsustainable cost of governance including synergizing with National Orientation Agency (NOA) to create a narrative for national values reorientation drives.
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