Economic Confidential, April, 2009

FEATURES

Award of Contract as ‘Achievement’

By Salisu Suleiman

Flip through the pages of any Nigerian daily and you are sure to come across full page colour advertorials celebrating the ‘achievements’ of state governors, local government chairmen and other public officials. While I do not begrudge the good fortune of newspaper proprietors, it is a sad reflection on the state of public administration in Nigeria that these officials waste valuable public resources to advertise that they have awarded contract for the construction of a primary school, a dispensary or a culvert. Is it an achievement to do the job they begged to be ‘elected’ to do?

It is only in Nigeria that councilors would use public funds to congratulate a local government chairman for awarding contract for the construction of a borehole, while the chairman would in turn use more public funds to congratulate the wife of a governor to for using public funds to launch a pet project. And the governor would use scarce public funds to thank the First Lady for visiting his state! When the conduct of governance is reduced to such abysmal levels of incompetence and sycophancy, is it any wonder that there is so much angst in the land?

In proper democracies, public administration is about the generation, aggregation and optimization of resources to improve the lot of citizens, facilitate access to social infrastructure and the judicious use of public funds to invest in projects and programs that would improve the lives citizens. Therefore, because a government official awards contracts for public a project is not an achievement by any means. What else would they have done? We know that in Nigeria, they usually just ‘Chop the Money’. That is why they go to such lengths to try to convince the public that though we mere mortals cannot see anything on ground, they in fact exist. We only have to read newspapers to see them!

Until recently, the state of California in the United States was regarded as the fifth largest economy in the world. And yet, the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger is battling with how to raise funds by increasing certain taxes and cutting public sector workers allowances. The first duty is to generate scarce resources, then use such judiciously (and under intense public scrutiny) to select a range of public programs that would serve the public good. Conversely in Nigeria, once ‘elected’ into office, public officials just sit and await the release of monthly allocations from the federation account. So how can the award of contract for the supply of fire trucks (usually second-hand and highly over priced) be an achievement?

Anyone following the current global economic crises would realize the problems facing leaders like President Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Both leaders are committed to stimulating the economy of their respective countries through the massive injection of funds into the economy and the financial system. But their biggest headache is centered on where to generate the vast sums needed to implement their plans. Even as they embark on borrowing to finance their plans, they have an eye on the deficits they are incurring and are planning strategies to cut public debts. The judicious application and management of scarce resources should be the focus of governance, not the award of contracts.

The Monthly Allocation Dependency (MAD) syndrome has reduced governance in Nigeria to the theatre of the absurd. State and local government areas simply do not have the energy to generate internal revenue. Why bother to generate a paltry five million when billions are assured every month? And why bother with transparency and accountability to the public when the money you are using is not from their taxes? And why bother to execute projects in public interest when they did not elect you to office in the first place? And indeed who says you are in office to work for the public good when you can steal and plunder with impunity? These questions explain the terrible tragedy that is public administration in Nigeria. (Happily, Lagos state is proving to be an exception, and one does not have to read advertorials to see proof).

Apart from glibly advertising the award of contract as achievements in office, the saddest part is that the so-called contracts do not follow due process (forget the published ‘Invitations to Bid’) and are hardly executed to professional standards. Thus the same contracts are awarded year after year with no tangible impact on the lives of citizens apart from ‘settling’ political godfathers and providing food for the ‘boys’. With this mentality to public service, we do not need to look far to understand why South Africa, and not Nigeria was invited to the G20 Summit recently.

One of the most disillusioning discoveries I have made is the explanation on why some projects never seem to get completed. Year after year, budgetary allocations are made for these projects. In my naivety, I had assumed that on-going projects were meant to be completed so that new ones could come on stream. Alas, it was to my utter shock that a public official informed me gleefully that if projects are completed, there would no more budgetary provisions and thus no more ‘chuachua’. (Me? I never said Bulkachua). I remember the case of a particular project that was awarded by the Shagari administration at the then mind boggling sum of 40 million naira while I was a secondary school student. Twenty years later as an official, I was part of a delegation that visited the same project. It was still uncompleted.

The same logic is evident in the award and re-award of contracts many times over at the expense of proper planning and development. In Abuja for instance, the original plans were for all electricity and telephone wirings to be underground, and indeed, thousands of kilometers of cable are buried underground. Due to poor planning and total absence of maintenance culture, those expensive cables laid at the cost of billions of naira have been abandoned. Today, the electricity in the capital is distributed by hanging wires and cables. The underground infrastructure remains buried. Literally and figuratively.

In the 2009 appropriation, most local government areas in Nigeria have budgets in billions of naira, yet at the end of the year, it would be difficult to see the evidence of where those billions have gone. School pupils still study under trees. Women and children still have to trudge for miles in search of water. Youth cannot gain admission to schools or find jobs. Public transport is pre-colonial. Neglected farmers cannot get their produce to the markets. But you can be sure that His Excellency, Mr. Chairman would take several newspaper pages to advertise his ‘achievements’. If you cannot verify them on ground, read the papers.

The fact is that most Nigerians do not care about this kind of public exhibitionism. While government reserves to right advertise its ‘achievements’, real or imagined, I daresay that what majority of people want to see are concrete achievements - clean water; good roads, proper schools, operational health care; stimulation of the private sector to create jobs, etc. That way, rather than government wasting scarce public resources to convince us that it has indeed achieved something (which we cannot see), it will be members of the public congratulating government for a job well done. And this is done at the election booths, not on the pages of newspapers. Sadly, as with everything Nigerian, the more you see, the less you understand. Abracadabra!