NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT AND EFFICIENY
By
Kayode J. Fakinlede
A fellow Nigerian had been somehow bothered when, in my response to Prof. Falola's issue concerning the president's medical trip overseas, I said that the Nigerian government has reached its highest level of efficiency.
Please let me say outright that I did not mean to disparage the average Nigerian working for government, not did I mean to say that the Nigerian is incapable of performing at a higher level of efficiency. I had stated, further down in the article that we are as good as anyone, given the correct condition to perform – Period. And that is the truth.
It goes without saying though that the segment of Nigerian life called the government performs at a dismally low level of efficiency. Left to me, I would measure this level as hovering around nothing more than fifteen percent. This would mean the following:
1. If a given task can be performed by a non-government institution in fifteen days, it would take the Nigerian government institution100 days to perform the same task;
2. If it would cost fifteen naira to buy a given item, the same item would be bought by government for 100 naira;
3. A job that would take government 100 employees to perform can be done by a non-governmental concern with fifteen people.
In all these instances, I am being excessively generous to our government. Let us remember that I am only comparing government's efficiency with that of other institutions within Nigeria. If this were to be done on an international scale, that number, in my estimation, would be much, much lower than fifteen percent.
What I mean by government workers is that segment of the Nigerian labor force that derive their livelihood from the government, including employees in government run hospitals, schools of all grades including universities, corporations, ministries etc. I say this to contradict the oft repeated assumption that we are all government. We are not. There are some segments of these workers in Nigeria that are performing at a very high level of efficiency and would compare favorably internationally in efficiency but for the influence of government on their performance.
Moreover, there are some level of workers in Nigeria whose efficiency far outstrip international level because they have very little interaction with government. I mean, market women, laborers, artisans, bricklayers, farmers, non-government factory employees, private bank employees etc. But for this segment of the economy, Nigeria would have collapsed a long time ago. Many of these people earn a pitiful fraction of what government workers earn and work many times as hard.
Ironically, some government employees earn in a single day what some non-government employees earns in a whole month!! That is the nature of the discordance in our labor force that makes progress unachievable. It is a case of people who work the most earn the least.
FAKINLEDE
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