What FG is doing to improve governance: Osinbajo

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo in a speech on Monday 16 September, marking the opening session of the 2019 Annual Management Conference of the Nigerian Institute of Management outlined some of the steps the Buhari administration is taking to improve governance and service delivery to the people. One of them, he said, is that Ministers will render first performance report in December

“Every minister has a mandate with action point, some of the mandates have 7 or 8 points. The ministers are to render their first reports on performance in December. So, in some sense we are moving to a more measurable way of determining where ministers are going and what they ought to do. Of course there would be challenges of funding, clarity of plans etc,” he said.

The full speech:

I am extremely pleased to be here and to have received the invitation to participate at this annual management conference of the Nigerian Institute of Management (NIM) for 2019.

Coming at a time when we are in the early months of the current administration it seemed to me to be a good time to come to the management gurus for some lessons on fresh ideas on management, especially the management of a complex democracy. With the quality of attendees today, I think I should award myself an initial pass mark for properly identifying the solution by picking the right conference to attend personally.

I also checked very diligently and found to my relief that there is no charge, open or hidden, for my category of attendee, which means that I can derive the immense benefits from this gathering of the brightest and best in management free of charge.

What remains is for me to consult with the President of the Institute as a true Nigerian to ask whether attendance at this one meeting qualifies me to start parading myself as a management expert henceforth.
The theme of the conference, “Managing the Challenges of Democracy”, really could not have been better framed. I think it was one of the illustrious past Presidents of the NIM, Alhaji Mohammed Abubakar, who at the 2006 Conference, declared quite perceptively that all sectors of the Nigerian economy were suffering from endemic management failure.

To carry his prognosis a little further, I would say that the central question especially in the public sector today is not the lack of talent or well researched policies, but the weakness in getting things done, or implementation – doing things as opposed to talking about doing them.

Implementation is possibly the central management challenge today and it is, in my respectful view, at the heart of the challenges of managing our democracy. So, in every real sense, our problem is a management one.

If the NIM achieved nothing else but a prescription on how to resolve the problem, you would certainly deserve to be described as national heroes. But to take the prize you will need to ensure implementation beginning with all of us who are seated here today.

Let me set out some of the issues or, as researchers will say, the problematic, for your consideration.

First is the central question of governance, ethics in the management of public resources; second is the issue of merit over quotas and politics in the selection of talents and projects; third are the challenges in human capital development; fourth is the problem of scale, scale in social services; for example, education – providing 21st century education to millions of children as the country heads for third place in world population in a few decades. Lastly, but by no means the least, is the problem of poverty, and the creation of wealth and opportunities for millions.