Excess luggage

Senate President David Mark

With the latest critique and rejection of the recurrent expenditure-focused budget proposal for the year 2012 by the Senators Forum, indications are rife that the on-going budget debate may not just be a mere ritual; and the executive had better watch out for surprises.

The Senators Forum, at a meeting in Abuja last week, openly rejected President Goodluck Jonathan’s 2012 proposed annual budget over the huge negatively skewed disparity in the amount voted for recurrent, as against the capital expenditure projections.

Senate President David Mark and the senators in attendance clearly made their preference for higher capital expenditure projections over and above the recurrent, known at the meeting.

We commend the forthrightness, nonpartisanship and patriotism of the Senators Forum. This is a clear departure from the usual glossing-over-the-budget approach of the past. The objective critique, revelation and the suggested way forward are particularly refreshing. First, the Federal Government’s proposed budget, if passed into law, will only filter away valuable resources paying for recurrent expenditure that adds little or no remarkable value to the common wealth. If such spending pattern is sustained over a period of time, and in lieu of capital project investments, the domestic economy will sooner than later suffer.

Secondly, the major source of this drain has been identified as the cost of maintaining an over-bloated, top-heavy employee structure of the civil service. We hasten to add that the retinue of public office holders, diverse political hangers-on within and around the corridors of power in the name of special assistants and assistants to the assistants to the special assistants, etc., makes the scandalous phenomenon of excess weight in the federal bureaucracy a recurring decimal, which calls for urgent attention.

We recall that the Olusegun Obasanjo administration claimed to have fished out ‘ghost’ and ‘redundant workers’ that were subsequently laid off; thus saving huge revenue for the national treasury. Monetisation policy was introduced and rationalised as a credible means of keeping the burden of excess weight in the civil service and high wage bills of employed persons relatively low. The late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s regime, with Alhaji Ahmed Yayale as the head of service, also pruned the federal civil service. The pertinent question therefore is: between Yar’Adua and Jonathan, how and when did the federal bureaucracy become over-bloated again?

As things stand, a comprehensive audit of the federal civil service is desirable and most appropriate. This is with a view to ascertaining the real figures. Logically, future projections become easier and empirically verifiable. In addition, there is the need to justify the essence and the functional relevance of the current size of the federal bureaucracy. Hopefully, this would help put a stop to the overshooting limits that specific government department(s) can hire.

Thirdly, the Federal Government must begin to deploy ingenious ways and update evaluation techniques to measure performance and productivity of the civil servants. The shortcomings of the present orientation are quite obvious and the effects-cum-opportunity cost permutation an alarming economic scandal. The head of service must respond to this shameful bug of over-bloated civil service under his watch.

It is worrisome that no one has been prosecuted or indicted for culpable role in the bloated civil service scandal. It is obvious now that any system of public administration that relies on oiling of the wheels of corruption for survival cannot but have the phenomenon of an over-bloated bureaucracy as a perennial problem.

still in need of some information? search this site:

LOVE THE ARTICLE ABOVE?
Receive Updates: subscribe to Imo Herald in a reader or sign up for Free Email Updates