Buhari’s government lacks strategic and delivery capabilities
A piece of news jumped out at me from a recent edition of BusinessDay. On Monday 13 February, this newspaper reported that the federal government has set up a Strategy Unit in the Vice President’s office.The unit would serve as the government’s “think tank”, and “strategise on policy issues and come up with ideas that can turn around the country’s economy”. This, though, is not an initiative of the government, but of the World Bank and the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID), which would temporarily fund their staff on secondment to the unit. According to BusinessDay, the programme is “part of technical support agreements between the government and the development agencies”.
To be sure, a strategy unit is “the brain” of any government, its intellectual nerve centre. The UK government under Tony Blair popularised this approach when it set up a strategy unit to carry out strategic reviews and disseminate thinking on emerging issues and challenges. A government without a strategy unit is effectively operating without a brain! Thus, by making the establishment of a strategy unit, manned by their own staff, a key component of their development assistance to Nigeria, the World Bank, DfID and other donors have recognised that the Buhari government lacks the strategic capability to devise a coherent approach to overcoming Nigeria’s biggest challenges; in other words, the government is in dire need of a brain, of an intellectual core!
This is a betrayal because, while in opposition, All Progressives Congress (APC), the governing party, presented itself as a thinking party. For instance, it had a “strategy team”, led by Kayode Fayemi, former Ekiti State governor and current Minister of Solid Minerals. Then, of course, APC was trying to show that it had an underlying logic; that its edifice was not built on a weak intellectual foundation. Indeed, it portrayed itself asa reincarnation of Obafemi Awolowo’s party, which, as we know, used strategy and delivery effectivelyas tools of governance. But once in power, the APC jettisoned all pretences to a strategic approach to problem-solving. President Buhari spent his first six months in office without a cabinet, and when a government eventually emerged, it started taking what a BBC journalist described as “pretty hopeless decisions” that made a bad economic situation worse!
Winston Churchill, Britain’s war-time prime minister, famously said: “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. Another version says “A crisis is too great an opportunity to waste”. This also chimes with the “crisis hypothesis” in political economy, with its greatest proponent, Mancur Olson, arguing that crisis would jolt a country out of its tendency to become sclerotic. But crisis has not jolted the Buhari administration out of its lethargy. Rather, the government has been temperamentally laidback, slow to act and complacent amidst a debilitating economic crisis. A government’s critical strategic responsibility is to identify its nation’s biggest challenges and devise a coherent approach to tackling them. But the world has to drag the Buhari government kicking and screaming, often without success, to do the right thing – to, for instance, change a flawed forex regime, form an economic team and set out a coherent and credible economic direction!
Yet, two years into a four-year term of office, and probably a year before real politicking about the 2019 general elections kick in and replace governance, there is a frenzy and a storm of hype about the launch of the government’s “economic recovery and growth plan”.The risk, however,is that the “plan”, when eventually published, will not only be too late, but too little; that it will not be a good strategy! Richard Rumelt, a world-class authority on strategy, said: “We have become so accustomed to strategy as exhortation that we hardly blink an eye when a leader spouts slogans or announces high-sounding goals, calling the mixture a ‘strategy’”. This is, of course, familiar. How many “strategies”, “plans”, “visions”, “agendas” etc in Nigeria have ended up in the dustbin of history? Legion! But would the same fate befall the Buhari government’s much-hyped economic recovery plan? Well, to answer that question we must return to Rumelt!
In his seminal book, “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters”, Rumelt says a strategy must have three elements: a “diagnosis”, which defines the nature of the challenge; a “guiding-policy” for dealing with the challenge; and a set of “coherent actions” designed to carry out the guiding policy. None of the three stages in this sequence can be skipped. If the diagnosis isn’t right, the guiding policy would be wrong, and if the policy is wrong, the actions can’t be right or coherent. Unfortunately, all the three stages are always bungled in Nigeria.
Take the first: diagnosis. Is the government properly defining the nature of the challenges facing Nigeria? Specifically, does anyone honestly believe that Nigeria’s economic challenges, and other issues, such as corruption and insurgencies, can be separated from the problem with the country’s politico-governance structure? Not long ago, the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, shockingly said that Nigeria’s problem was not political restructuring but economic diversification. But are they really separable? Bad strategy occurs, according to Rumelt, when 1) there is bad doctrine, 2) hard choices are avoided and 3) leaders are unwilling or unable to define the nature of the challenge. Sadly, all the three problemsare emblematic of the Buhari government’s approach to governance.
The UK recognises that, to achieve inclusive and sustainable progress and prosperity, its economic model must be built on what it calls “devolution revolution”. But Nigeria’s leaders don’t want to talk about the devolution of power. Yet, competitive federalism or regionalism, not centralised political and economic structures, is what can rejuvenate Nigeria and transform its economy. Any strategy or plan that ignores this fact is based on a flawed diagnosis!
Now, assuming the diagnosis is right, what about the second element: policy-making? The UK’s Institute for Government says“Good government depends on good policy-making”. But Nigeria lacks the capacity for good policy-making. I mean, where is the administrative or policy core in the civil service with the expertise for policy development? Where are the statistics and data for evidence-based policy-making? Where is the inter-governmental coordination necessary for good policy-making? What you have is a lot of mediocrity and muddling through, called policy-making!
Then, finally, even with good diagnosis and policy, what about implementation? Recently, I wrote that Nigeria’s ministers and civil servants should read Michael Barber’s books, “Deliverology” and “How to Run a Government”. Barber was Tony Blair’s policy-delivery czar, who has taken his message of “deliverology” all over the world. The proposed economic recovery and growth plan will, of course, contain several references to implementation, including, possibly, the establishment of a delivery unit. But the critical factors are political leadership and public sector expertise. Yet these are critical lacking in Nigeria. One solution to the delivery deficit, though, is to outsource policy implementation to the private sector, which, for instance, the UK encouraged with its Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994!
So, let’s face it, Nigeria lacks strategic, policy and delivery capabilities, and needs help. If that help comes from foreign governments and development agencies, that’s OK, provided it involves the transfer of knowledge. But, ultimately, Nigeria must attract its brightest and best citizens into the civil service. Nigeria has talented people, but they are not in government. The civil service must be a destination for high fliers, as it is in the UK. Nigeria must also use public-private partnership to enhance governance.That’s a good model of governance in the 21st century. Finally, let’s restructure this country. The current politico-governance structure is not working, and without changing it, every economic reform plan will, as it has been for decades, be cosmetic and not work!