At a dinner party last week, I was offered a job with the federal government. The person who made the offer had a compelling argument, “Guys like you are comfortable with staying on the sidelines to criticise. Come join us and change things from within.”
You see, I work with a research firm that focuses on geopolitical and socioeconomic analyses, and while a lot of our socioeconomic data are similar to what the National Bureau of Statistics publishes, our geopolitical readings are not optimistic, so my interlocutor’s argument was, “Knowing what you know, why don’t you come and help.” I declined.
I turned down the offer for two reasons; First, the state of the civil service. Nigeria’s Civil Service is frustrating enough to deter anybody trying to bring about change. There have been cases where civil servants frustrate policy directions of the government on ideas brought about by innovators, simply on the grounds of “we don’t do that here”.
The rampant corruption in the postpaid and estimated billing system in the power distribution sector is an instance. Power distribution companies and their friends at the power ministry do everything to frustrate attempts of customers to get prepaid meters. It is important to note that when the privatisation of power happened, the DisCos, as part of the arrangement, had to absorb a lot of ex-NEPA/PHCN staff, essentially people in the civil service, so they brought in an already toxic mentality.
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You can look across senior leadership figures who rose through the ranks of the civil service and observe their attitudes towards policy formulation and implementation.
My second reason is that frankly, the federal government cannot afford my services. I am not saying this out of pride. Bluntly, Nigeria is too bankrupt to pay the salaries of its police officers for example. Almost every millennial grew up hearing stories of how the federal government owes salaries and pensions of its civil servants. It is a thing that has come to live in our subconscious at least since the turn of the century. It is not just a federal problem. State governments are owing their workers billions in salaries, arrears, pensions and gratuities. Adding myself to the over-bloated contraption goes against my political and economic belief in small government and big economy. Besides, I have long been an advocate of the implementation of the Oronsaye Report.
Then there is the thing about this government. We have all seen how better brains than mine have flopped after being added to the current federal government. President Buhari appointed an economic advisory or management team last year, headed by the cerebral prof. Doyin Salami, which had interesting names such as Bismarck Rewane and Chukwuma Soludo. At the time, I put out a tweet expressing doubt that they’d succeed and was pilloried for that tweet by the usual party online supporters. It’s been a full year after the hype that ushered them in. The borders are still closed, and Buhari has delivered yet another recession, this time under their watch, thus soiling their reputations.
Simply put, in a very hierarchical society like Nigeria as currently structured, everyone takes their cue from the leader. To state unequivocally, the people in, and the advisory team have been practically rendered useless especially with the policy and cognitive dissonance that have come to characterise the Buhari regime, simply because Buhari himself does not believe the “rubbish” they are saying.
To make matters worse, the resistance to criticism and feedback mechanism the government has adopted has made it insular to sound advice. The well-publicised criticism (with advice) of CBN’s policy by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) and the vitriolic rebuttal by the former is a sorry incident that leaves a sour taste in one’s mouth. You can’t wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep.
No sane person would expect me to take up a position in this government, especially seeing how critics who attempted to venture into the same government in a bid to help, were hounded out. Festus Adedayo was appointed Senate president Ahmed Lawan’s media officer. BudgIT’s Seun Onigbinde was appointed a technical adviser at the finance ministry. We all watched how APC hate groups waxed hysterical about both appointments leading to their sack. For these persons, there is no middle ground. Everything is viewed with partisan lenses which make it needlessly difficult for a genuine person trying to make a difference.
In a parallel universe, the best brains are incorporated into public administration. We had that parallel universe before July 1975 when Murtala Mohammed destroyed an already decaying civil service that had post-1960 continued the British colonial practise of hiring the best minds out of our public university systems.
From my point of view, the decrepit nature of Nigeria’s decrepit public service system is not where a person looking to make a change and influence policy from within should be aspiring to. With partisan hacks acting as wolves guarding the door to a not so beautiful promised land (symbolised by the national cake syndrome), it reads a clear danger sign of “keep out”. When one duly considers the evolution of Femi Adesina from hero to zero, it is hardly any incentive to commit one’s reputation to take a solid beating, and especially not after reading what Reuben Abati had to say concerning the superhuman forces at Aso Rock.
