How to cut waste, ensure service efficiency in public service- Olaopa
The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has proffered ways to cut waste in government and ensure efficiency in public service.
Olaopa spoke on Monday in Ekiti during the 2024 Ekiti State Public Service Forum and Award of Excellence Ceremony with the theme “Public Service Efficiency: A Barometer of Sustainable Development”.
While expressing his special relationship with Ekiti State, Olaopa felicitated Governor Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji on the occasion of his second anniversary as the helmsman of the state .
Olaopa said that he was articulating the practical import of the notion of public service efficiency.
He noted that public service efficiency as a theme for the anniversary was a smart choice, adding that it focused on many bigger concerns that connected with the urgency to improve the quality of service delivery while significantly reducing the cost of running government.
Listing the sources of over bloated public service, Olaopa said that they mainly centred on the whole ensemble of governance architecture of the Nigerian brand of federalism, electoral process, the presidential system and the politics Nigerian elite play with the development future of the great nation.
He also said “The collapse of the internal administrative mechanisms of the public administration system which include the systematic planning for short and long-term needs; forecasting of retirement; attrition rates; anticipated vacancies founded on periodic functional reviews (to determine changes in tasks as a result of government’s new policy targets and programme emphases); and structural changes and quantum of workload incidental.”
Lamenting that cost keeps skyrocketing while efficiency plummeting, he said that it was due significantly to duplicated agencies and manager functions.
He also listed in-house activities that could have delivered less cost if outsourced; resource use inefficiencies arising from procurement; and the creation of ad hoc structures and units of government business parallel to the existing bureaucratic structures.
“And so, on a collective basis, we are forced to deal with the dead weights of the terrible waste management culture, the resource curse, the poor assets/facilities and poor maintenance cultures. And everything culminates in bad governance”, he said.
On how what he identified as “the structurally-induced inefficiencies over time”, have been resolved, Olaopa said that “the traditional resolution of the numerous challenges of public service efficiency, especially the matter of public expenditure, has always been around expenditure reviews, audit functions, media scrutiny of public expenditures, and most significantly the legislative oversight mostly through the roles of the public account committee”.
According to him, the federal government and some states have efficiency units in place in the federal ministry of finance to combat the cost of governance.
” This is the way to go—making the public service the focal point of efficiency-rooted institutional reforms that are processed through standardization, innovative modernizing of structures and the pooling of resources”, he said.
He listed the key drivers of public service efficiency to then look out for as including “a crucial need to deploy the force of political will power to enforce and institutionalise competency-based recruitment in the public service that will expedite the hiring of expert managers to reduce the dependence on consultants and consultancy services and the costs that accrue from it.”
He also listed the need to reduce fraud and other fiscal and financial irregularities through efficient financial auditing; the establishment of redeemable efficiency proxies as the basis for efficiency target setting in the MDAs through centralized reporting to monitor these proxies.
” The need to co-locate responsibility in the MDAs for policy and operational teams, especially through innovations like shared services, one-stop-shops, etc.
” New technologies need to be leveraged to achieve service redesign that will enable self-service, joined-up governance, etc.
“And last but not the least, digitization becomes crucial, especially in substituting digital processes and solutions for manual ones”, said Olaopa.