Olaopa Proffers Solutions on Ways to Cut Public Waste, Ensure Service Efficiency

The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has proffered ways to cut waste in government and ensure efficiency in public service.

Olaopa spoke on Monday in 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”.

While expressing his special relationship with Ekiti State, Olaopa felicitated the state Governor Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji on the occasion of his second anniversary as the helmsman of the state .

Olaopa said that he was articulating the “practical import of the notion of public service efficiency, against the background of what I have been calling bureau-pathology in the public service system in Nigeria.” He noted that public service efficiency as a theme for this anniversary was a smart choice because it was focused on many bigger concerns that connected with the urgency to improve the quality of service delivery while significantly reducing the cost of running government.

Listing the sources of the bloating of the cost of government, Olaopa 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 elites 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 privatization of government concerns; outsourcing practices as witnessed with the compromised monetization 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.

Lamenting that “cost keeps skyrocketing while efficiency wasn’t plummeting”, he 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.”

He also listed in-house activities that could have delivered less cost if outsourced; resource use inefficiencies arising from procurement; and the creation of ad hoc structures and units of government business parallel to the existing bureaucratic structures.

“And so, on a collective basis, we are forced to deal with the dead weights of the terrible waste management culture, the resource curse, the poor assets/facilities and poor maintenance cultures. And everything culminates in bad governance”, he said.

On how what he identified as “the structurally-induced inefficiencies over time”, have been resolved, Olaopa said that “the traditional resolution of the numerous challenges of public service efficiency, especially the matter of public expenditure, has always been around expenditure reviews, audit functions, media scrutiny of public expenditures, and most significantly the legislative oversight mostly through the roles of the public account committee”.

According to him, the federal government and some states even have efficiency units in place in the federal ministry of finance to combat the cost of governance.

” This is the way to go—making the public service the focal point of efficiency-rooted institutional reforms that are processed through standardization, innovative modernizing of structures and the pooling of resources”, he said.

He listed the key drivers of public service efficiency to then look out for as including “a crucial need to deploy the force of political will power to enforce and institutionalise competency-based recruitment in the public service that will expedite the hiring of expert managers to reduce the dependence on consultants and consultancy services and the costs that accrue from it.”

He also listed the need ” to reduce fraud and other fiscal and financial irregularities through efficient financial auditing; the establishment of redeemable efficiency proxies as the basis for efficiency target setting in the MDAs through centralized reporting to monitor these proxies.

” The need to co-locate responsibility in the MDAs for policy and operational teams, especially through innovations like shared services, one-stop-shops, etc.

” New technologies need to be leveraged to achieve service redesign that will enable self-service, joined-up governance, etc.

“And last but not the least, digitization becomes crucial, especially in substituting digital processes and solutions for manual ones. “

Olaopa noted 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.

He said further that the the ceremony brought to mind Chief Simeon Adebo’s reaction to Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s political slogan in the old western region.

He said: ” The Action Group 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.”