TASK BEFORE TINUBU’S CABINET
Depending on what happens from now, the economy will kiss or haunt the administration, reckons GLENN S. PRINCE-ABBI
With a cabinet reshuffle by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigerians expect, and are simply impatient for, radical improvements in the country. Hence the expectations of Nigerians from the rejigged Federal Executive Council are very high.
To the few new ministers who have been nominated to be appointed to the Federal Cabinet and have now been screened and confirmed by the Senate, I would say, they should start to focus on the mission ahead of them. It is a serious mission. They should know that by taking on the role, they have, like, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, murdered sleep. They should say goodbye to comfort and sleep. Forget about all the grand reception and all the celebration being planned to mark your appointment (at least think less of them); there is a lot of work ahead. The work ahead of you is not a stroll in the park. In a sense, President Tinubu has not done you a favour by appointing you, he has put your feet over the fire for Nigerians to see what you can do under the scorching flames. Put on your battle gear and warfare kits.
To the Ministers who survived the cabinet reshuffle and are retained to drive the next phase of this administration, I would say: never ever slacken your grip on the baton. This is the time to hold it firmer. Do not fall prey to what I call the Paradox of Success. By this I mean a situation where the perception of having performed well fills a minister with a sense of achievement by which they now feel that, by being retained in the cabinet, it means they have done well, and that they don’t need to stress themselves further. Once they do that their performance will drop colossally. By the paradox of success, a once high-performing party slackens the grip on the oars and starts to deliver lack-lustre performance. It happens. In delivering strategy consulting, we tell successful companies and their managers that success sometimes can paradoxically become a trap. When you are caught in the euphoria, and I will call it hubris, of success, what happens to you is that you start to drop in performance. Nothing is stagnant in nature. For you to sustain momentum, you have to work even harder. That is how it works. As a matter of fact, even if there could be a couple of thematic or sectoral areas where some ministers would have shown good or even exceptional performance, the overall score for the entire country at this stage is far from brilliant. As the new cabinet gets set to settle for business, President Bola Tinubu, on his should at this stage, raise the performance bar by several notches for cabinet members. He should tighten the performance expectations. He should leave no room for celebration and chest-beating by ministers. Mr. President, let work intensify and make the tempo heighten.
This phase of President Bola Tinubu’s administration calls for cabinet members with a heavy payload of explosive ideas. In the field of aviation and space engineering, payload in simple terms refers to the quantum of load carried by the aircraft or spacecraft (namely all such entities, materiel, instruments, etc) which are necessary for the purpose of the flight. The payload of ideas cabinet members are able to develop and run with will make a significant difference in the attainment of the high purpose the current flight undertaken by the Tinubu Administration, and therefore in the way things turn out for the country.
In practical terms, I would advise ministers and all cabinet members to spend a solid amount of time carrying out initial strategic planning and scenario building sessions. Each minister should spend time with their team to build scenarios where, as ministers, they can creatively paint pictures of what the ministry’s priorities should be, I mean the ministry’s most compelling and value-delivering priorities which should impact the sector the most within the Nigerian economic and social space. I dare say that such a process of ideation and strategic choice-making should form a fundamental part of the way members of the Federal Executive Council work in their respective sectors. It should be routinized, standardized and operationalized. It will make their work easy.
The idea-flow in the process forms the essential building blocks to facilitate ministers’ delivery on their mandates. Generally, high performance whether in private sector organizations or those in the public sector is not necessarily the domain of geniuses. It is simple enough. What you sow is what you get; there’s no genius work in it. Individual ministers should spend time to carry out such scenario building sessions. The great ideas that emerge from the process become the work to do. Then you develop a process, a procedure, a defined methodology to execute it in a mission-focused way. With this, good performance would be the outcome.
In this next phase of the President Tinubu administration, I would further advise all cabinet members this way: develop your own performance management and evaluation methodologies; make your performance strategies metric-based and trackable. Carry out your own routine assessment internally under a tight framework, ensuring that your assessment mechanism highlights and accentuates the strategic priorities you have set through strategic planning and scenario planning sessions.
In the final analysis, it is the economy – the economy will kiss or haunt this administration depending on what happens from now.
In the final analysis, the economy will kiss or haunt this administration, depending on what happens from now, as the President repositions his cabinet. Essentially, the phrase “It’s the economy, Stupid”, popularized during the Bill Clinton era in the United States, still very much applies today. It is about vitalizing the Nigerian economy from every possible angle. No minister should lose sight of this commanding imperative. The success of the administration, and indeed, any administration at all, rests on the economy. The storm has reached a crescendo pitch for Nigeria’s economy. with the challenges of astronomical inflation at current level of 32.70 percent posing the biggest trauma for the populace across the all demographies and geographies within the Nigerian space. By many considerations, Nigeria’s economy remains weak, and the excruciating pain is felt across all layers of the economy and worse at the classic bottom of the pyramid.
Ministers should cast an unriveting focus on the economy-impacting potentialities of their respective sectors. Having been clear with that, you then proceed to innovate. Innovate, innovate, innovate or you lose traction and momentum. For those who seem to have performed and those who did not necessarily perform well but are retained and also those who are freshly appointed into the cabinet, my advise is keep building traction, keep the momentum mounting. It means that Ministers should draw up and lead strategic initiatives which on the one hand, strengthen and accelerate economic impacts and on the other hand, optimize the chances of rapid deli
verables on the spelt mandate
of the ministry along the lines of the sector which is its sphere of activity. In the final analysis, all of this will congregate to impacting the economy across short, medium or longer term trajectories. Cabinet members should define or redefine the core elements of their flight path upfront from this moment and stay the course in accelerated mode.
Nigeria is in challenging times as a country. Practically all areas of the country’s national life are in need of rapid revitalization and transformation. Under focused executive leadership, driven by cabinet members in their respective sectors, this can be achieved. For both the newly appointed Ministers and those who have been in the saddle in the past, I would advise: They should get down to work by setting up a strategic performance dashboard across all crucial areas of identified priorities. And then they work to ensure they progressively move the needle upwards on the gauge they set up across crucial and strategic factors that would have been identified through rigorous processes. How do you do that? Ministers should kick-start scenario-building sessions and start to visualize new waves of possibilities. They should smartly set strong milestones for themselves and work against those milestones as KPIs (key performance indicators). At the same time, they should breathe down the necks of their subsidiary agencies under their supervision and demand equally robust expectations under equally challenging performance priorities.
Cost of Governance remains a cancer threatening to further metastasize
Ministers of this rejigged cabinet should carefully and drastically ensure that they are contributing clearly to the excision of this cancer in its diverse manifestations. Ministers, new and old, should carefully address the cost of governance in the way they conduct the business of their ministerial mandate. They should adopt a strong private sector mentality in the management of the public resources put at their disposal. Yes, the President has expressed intention to set an agenda and give specific directives for reductions in cost of governance. But ministers should not wait for what the President would dictate to them vis a vis the curtailment of cost of governance. If they wait for the presidential directive and stick only to it, it means they lack imagination. I always say that lack of imagination is unforgivable in management in the world of the 21st century. Going forward, cabinet ministers should develop their own cost containment approaches. While doing that, though, strategic priorities should not be sacrificed on the altar of governance cost reduction. Mission should guide expenditure. I would want to see Honorable Ministers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria who have an abounding and overwhelming sense of mission. A mission-focused pursuit will be distracted by excessive carrying of costs and excessive displays. These distractions should stop. A solid mission-focus will usually be mean and lean as we do in the private sector. This approach can be transposed into the public sector with great effect.
Curtail costs which feed a sense of grandeur of the office
Often in Nigeria, soaring costs of governance arise, not from strategic matters or core business elements in the discharge of duties of political appointees or officeholders – it arises often from some kind of ego. Often political appointees and other office holders want to match the perception of grandeur of the office they occupy, and so they get to incur a lot of costs in conducting the business of governance. Illusions of grandeur and the struggle to feed that sense of grandeur have contributed significantly to the cost of governance in Nigeria. Political office holder across all layers must carefully distinguish costs incurred as a result of sponsoring a sense of grandeur from costs which are dictated or demanded by strategic priorities for set deliverables along the lines of tracked performance indicators. Let’s get serious with the business of governance.
Strategic and economic factors, rather than political expediencies or social imperatives, should be the guide in taking on costs and liabilities in the discharge of governmental functions. This should be seen as primordial litmus test for ministers and even for the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, their supervisor, as he sets to review and give directives across government administration regarding cost of governance. I want to see a completely new style of routine governance delivered by the rejigged cabinet of President Tinubu, going forward.
It is obvious it has not been a very smooth ride for President Tinubu
From May 29, 2023, when President Tinubu took office to this moment, he can definitely see that it is not a particularly delicious roller coaster experience to manage the Nigerian system – to say the least. A lot is called for from his ministers. As President, Tinubu has not had a velvety ride himself, so should the management of his team be a tough ride for each and every member of the team. Nigerians would want to see more now. Raise the bar. Raise the parameters. Let us take it that, beyond core policy matters, the regular routine style of delivery on executive mandates given to his ministers calls for a more transformational and revolutionary over-sight. And the ministers, both in-coming and current, must brace up to it with the level of focus required of a nation like Nigeria which is facing a strategic inflection point. Let the president raise the bar for himself too by using this moment of the cabinet repositioning to set up an internal monitoring system within his own close circle, possibly visible only to him, by which he reviews, reflects and introspects ad infinitum.
Dr. Prince-Abbi, CEO, Espera Global Corporation is an International Consultant, development economist, strategist. He has consulted for The World Bank, United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and Shell Petroleum
