The former minister commended some of the government’s effort.
A former Vice President to the World Bank, Oby Ezekwesili, on Monday called on Nigerians to demand that the Federal Government urgently convene a mini-national stakeholders’ conference to debate the recommendations of the Steve Oronsaye’s panel for effective implementation.
Mrs. Ezekwesili, a former Minister of Education, was speaking at the one-day dialogue session in Abuja on “Cost of Governance in Nigeria: The Oronsanye Report Perspective,” organised by the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre, CISLAC. The event was attended by members of various civil society groups and international donor agencies.
In her presentation, Mrs. Ezekwesili noted that after the white paper on the Oronsanye committee determined that only 321 of the 541 government agencies in the country were viable, nothing concrete had been done to actually streamline them.
Mrs. Ezekwesili conceded that implementation could not be carried out by executive fiat as most of the affected agencies were created through acts debated on by the National Assembly and would therefore, require a similar process to rationalise them. However, she insisted that by asking the government to organise a national debate on the report, Nigerians would be afforded a clear cost-benefit analysis of the implications of achieving a reduction in the cost of governance in the country.
Mrs. Ezekwesili bemoaned the negative impact of the high cost of governance on national development as a result of duplication of duties and function overlap in ministries, departments and agencies. She also said that more than 44 per cent of Federal Government budget go for personnel costs. She encouraged civil society groups to get involved in all aspects of public finance management in the country as this would help realise set national development agenda.
“Civil society groups must get involved in the legal and organisational frameworks for supervising all aspects of the budget cycle, including planning; preparation of strategies and fiscal projections and costings; procurement; monitoring; internal controls and audit; international scrutiny, legislative follow-ups on audit and; post-budget evaluation processes. This is the only way to help achieve national development,” she said.
While commending the Federal Government’s efforts, through the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to cut costs via its campaign against ghost workers in the civil service, Mrs. Ezekwesili maintained that civil society groups must sustain the scrutiny on how resources are allocated and spent across all levels of government.
“Civil society must set and monitor the benchmarks of what levels of performances and results are expected from government and ensure that they hold all involved accountable by buidling a system of budget analysis on everyday citizens needs profile.”
According to her, the greatest tragedy Nigeria was confronting as a nation is the fact that it had since been left behind in the area of development by countries with which it achieved independence from the colonial masters in 1960. She said that Nigerians have allowed themselves be “entrapped in an unproductive oil economy that has excluded creativity of the people to grow the economy out of the Dutch disease of oil dependency.”
Nigeria’s paradox, she pointed out, shows a wealth that breeds poverty and penury which had made her a poster country for poor governance of national wealth, in spite of the benefits of at least five cycles of oil booms between 1960 and today.
On par capita income basis, Mrs. Ezekwesili said Nigeria has since been left behind by countries with similar development history, with Singapore a having per capita income $50,000 (N8 million); South Korea, $22,000 (N3.5 million); Chile, $14,000 (N2.2 million); Brazil, $13,000 (N2 million) and Malaysia, $10,000 (N1.6 million), while Nigeria had $1,500 (N22, 000).
No comments:
Post a Comment