Nigeria: Performance Evaluation Will Eliminate Profligacy in Governance-Monye
Professor Sylvester Monye (MFR), Special Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan on performance evaluation and monitoring can best be described as an erudite scholar who believes in the Nigerian project. Monye demonstrated his uncommon patriotism when he left a lucrative academic career in the Diaspora to serve his fatherland. Since that epochal decision, Monye has remained as constant as the Northern star in the corridors of Government and has helped to fashion out reforms that have repositioned Nigeria’s economy and bureaucracy.
Professor Sylvester Monye (MFR), Special Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan
Monye comes with an impressive portfolio of service and result-oriented background in the act of Governance.
Described as an astute administrator and technocrat, he has earlier served as Director of Marketing at Nigeria Tourism Development Corporation (NTDC), Executive Secretary of National Planning Commission among other national assignments before his recent appointment as Special Adviser on Performance Evaluation and Monitoring.
In this exclusive interview with Emeka Umejei, Professor Monye talks about his new office and agenda for transparent performance evaluation which he emphasizes would change the face of governance in the country. Excerpts:
Q: Your position as Special Adviser on Performance evaluation and monitoring is critical to the achievement of President Goodluck Jonathan’s transformation agenda, How do you intend to help him achieve it?
It is true my office is a very important position and central to the transformation agenda. One of the things the president has set out to do when he was campaigning during the election is to transform the ways government business is conducted. He campaigned vigorously on the mantra of transformation. So, in actualizing that immediately after the election he conceived the idea of establishing this office. This office is intended to help him do a number of performance management issues, particularly the tracking of the implementation of Government decisions. As you well know, in most cases decisions are taken, either they are not done at all or not done properly because know body is watching. So, this office is established to address some of those challenges.
Q: One of the factors that may impede on your job is the issue of fiscal discipline in implementation of budgets which has also had effect on how Government projects are implemented?
You probably know that the easiest thing for people to say is that budget is not been released but what you don’t here is that what is released is not even utilized, no body talks about that. As I am talking to you now, federal Government has in the various bank accounts in excess of N250 Billion lying down waiting to be utilized. So, people are focused on the one that has not been released but nobody is talking about the one that has been released . Part of my job is to find out why people are not doing what they are suppose to do. Why are they not implementing
Programs. If they have challenges, what kind of challenges are hampering their abilities to implement and then, how do we come in to help them remove some of those blockages to allow them to deliver on the President’s mandate. So, it is not just issue of non-release of budget but also utilization of the one that has been released
Q: I am actually asking whether you have a structure or mechanism that will help to inculcate a discipline that will help compliance with budgetary provisions
One of the major plan of the transformation agenda is the fact that we are now deploying performance management system for the first time in the history of Nigeria. There would be performance contract between the president and all the ministers. In the performance contract, it will be freely negotiated; the ministers will indicate what they want to achieve within a given time frame, the resources they need to execute what they plan to do and then, my job is to track the implementation of what they said they want to do. So, this is no longer a case of business as usual but a case of a contract that says give me X amount of money and I will deliver X amount of service or goods. If you don’t, that is another matter but clearly we now have a platform, a frame work to monitor the implementation of the ministers
Q: Why this proposal is laudable in every sense of the word but politics has most often impeded good gestures of government and governance. How would this angle be accommodated?
I don’t see politics playing anything because the president has hired people to work for him and he is telling them how he wants to do his business. So, it is his constitutional responsibility to run the country. He simply hires ministers for them to assist him to do what Nigerians expect him to do.
If he therefore says I want to have some framework within which I can monitor what you do, then I don’t see how politics comes in here. Mind you the contract is not between me and the ministers but the president and the ministers. Secondly, the contract will be freely negotiated so that key performance indicators would be identified and target set. Target that are reasonable, realistic and achievable but beyond that target that are easily measurable. So, that if you perform, everybody will know and if you don’t perform everybody will also know. So, I don’t see how politics can hamper this particular one.
Q: Let’s talk about the project continuity bill developed by the National planning commission while you served as Executive secretary of the commission. It is believed that if pursued to the latter, it would make your job easier
As you rightly said, I was part of that initiative when I was at the National Planning commission; it is known as Project continuity bill and planning as a compulsory element of our national life. So there are two elements; one is to make planning compulsory. The idea is that you just have to plan to be able to execute and as the saying goes, what is not measured is never delivered or achieved. So, you have to have some measure of planning and a measure to determine the extent of that implementation. That is one side. The other side of that bill which is very critical is that the intention is to make continuity critical in our national life. You are aware that last year, the president established a committee under the leadership of Architect Ibrahim Bunu to actually take stock of some of our existing and abandoned projects and at the end of their stock-taking they came up with an inventory of 11,800 of either ongoing or abandoned projects.
It is really not possible for any country to develop not when you have that many project littered everywhere without completion and then you start new ones, it doesn’t make sense. So, the primary thing that we want to do is to make it compulsory for you to start project and finish it before you start a new one. If we do that, everybody will be better for it. We won’t have abandoned project because before you take on a new project you would have cleared your books, you have ensured that all the ones under your supervision have been cleared and completed. So, when you have a new project come on stream, you will know that the chances of completion are extremely high. But right now without some framework, legal backing, you have over 11000 projects all over the place. So, the first thing we need to do is to a critical project of these projects to know what is out there and to see how we will complete these projects. SO, the bill that is coming from national planning commission is very critical to this whole assignment because it will now give legal backing to the drive to complete ongoing projects.
Q: Do you have a clear cut policy of how you intend to achieve the goals of your office
Obviously, it is not just policy but we also have strategy for the delivery of our mandate. Our mandate is very simple; it is to assist the president to achieve transparency, accountability and efficiency in the way government businesses are conducted. That is our mandate and to do that you will have tools. One of the things we want to do is to have an effective communication portal that allows us to upload everything that we do on the website. So, if you are in the UK you will know what contract a minister has signed and you will know what the deliverable are ; you will know that every quarter he submits report to us that he has done ABC which we will upload for the public to verify.
You can also access what amount of money a minister says he has spent on executing a project which will be on the website. You can do some cost benefit analysis to determine whether it is good value for money for the citizenry or not. So, it will be transparently done, it will be online and we expect the media and the public to be actively involved in the assessment of performance rather than to expect the president to be the one to tell you which of his minister is doing well. And off course, you will recall that some media houses have always done performance analysis for ministers and awarded best minister. Clearly, our work will make it easier for such media houses to pick the fact and deliver to Nigerians to say on the basis of ABC, this is the best minister. So, it should encourage the ministers to perform, deliver on their mandate and by extension help the president to deliver on his commitment to the Nigerian people. So, I have absolutely no problem by telling that we have the framework in place to achieve our mandate. The other side of it that you would like to bear in mind is that in doing government work, things are never the way they seem. There are too many dependencies in Government work. So, the issue of competence may not have something to do with the ministers’ ability but it may be as a result of factors beyond his control. For instance, if budget is not released on time, it becomes a problem and on the hand if budget is released on time but there are externalities that hamper the performance of that minister, you don’t know that.What you know is that the minister has not performed. Let give you a good example. I know that the ministry of works is constructing a road in somewhere in delta. State and for the past two years, they have hit a road block. What is the road block- they have reached a built up community. In that community, people are saying we will leave our land if you pay us compensation and the compensation is being negotiated by Ministry of land and housing. It therefore means that ministry of work cannot proceed until ministry of land and housing is able to complete the negotiation successfully to give ministry of work right way to enable them to continue with their work. So, here we are it has nothing to do with the competence of te contractor; it has nothing to do with the focus of the minister but all to do with negotiation by minister outside his own ministry. So, you see that such dependencies are the order of the day in government work. So, part of our job is to see how we can help a minister deal with those dependencies so that he can get on with his primary assignment.
Q: Would you like Nigerians to hold you down to a particular time for this performance indicator portal to be online for Nigerians to have a firsthand knowledge of how ministers perform
Before I left national planning commission under the leadership of the minister of planning, Shamsudeen Usman, we have developed over 250 key performance indicators for every sector of government . Therefore , every ministry as we speak now has their own clearly identified key performance indicator. Also, in the last three months, the Minister of planning has met with various agencies and ministries to fine tune their key performance indicators. It is therefore suppose to be on the website currently of National Planning Commission. So, it is not new. However, from these list of key performance indicators, we will take target so the minister will now take target to say for the next three months this is what I am going to do or for the next six months this is what I am going to do. That is the one I am tracking
Q; So, when is it going to be on the web
Though my office is brand new, we are already constructing
The platform but while constructing it we are also putting together the materials. But our tentative date is January 1,2012 so that we can do something that is sustainable. We don’t want to put something on the website now and when you go there tomorrow you won’t get the information you require. It require snot just construction of the website but sensitization of stakeholders and public; training those from the MDAs that will furnish us with the information that will populate our system. So, it is a huge task and we intend to make sure that we will do our planning very well. I am from planning background,so I believe in planning
Q: You played vital role in the development of Vision 20:2020 as executive secretary of NPC. I would want your response without any sentiments or bias. Do you think Nigeria can become one of the top 20 economies by 2020
I was the secretary of the steering committee that developed Vision 20;2020 that is why I know all the issues in the development of Vision 20:2020. What is Vision 20:202 that is one question we need to ask ourselves. Vision 20:2020 is a national aspiration that by the year 2020 we will become a top 20 country in the world but not 20 most industrialised nations as people are saying. That is not the agenda; the agenda is that we would become the top 20 economy in the world by GDP. Currently we are 39. In the last three years, we have jumped from 44 to 39 even without doing much; by the sheer size of our economy, population and market, we are already 39. So, if we now work actively to fix power, infrastructure, roads, railway, and agriculture then, clearly the size of our economy will escalate even further. By the year 2020, if our population continues to grow at the rate of 3% per annum by the year 2020 our population would be 205 million. It means that our country will become even a bigger market. Therefore in terms of the size of GDP, I see no reason why we cannot become a top 20 economy by size and GDP. So, I don’t see any difficulty with that. Where we have difficulty and where you are headed which I am not is the issue of whether we are going to be among 20 most industrialised country; if that is your question, the answer is no but that is not the intention of government anyway.
Q; You once served on the adhoc committee of Excess crude account and in recent time, the ECA has depleted to about $4billion dollars from about $20billion in 2009 due to sharing it between states and federal government. By economic implication, do you think sharing ECA without justifiable infrastructural development is a better deal?
First of all there is need for clarity over the ECA. You would recall that under former President Olusegun Obasanjo when the present coordinating minister of the economy in her first coming as minister of finance, she plotted a graph that showed how our revenue and expenditure pattern was and it was very cyclical. The revenue goes up, our expenditure went up, the revenue came down and our expenditure came down.
So, we didn’t have any buffer and she said no country can develop with that pattern of income and expenditure. That was when the all these fiscal rule came that we will budget not on the basis of what we earn as a country but we will budget at a particular rate so that our expenditure will be consistent. That was when we began to tie revenue independent of what was coming in and anything in excess of the bench mark price was put at side . That was how the excess crude account (ECA) accrued. Having accrued, people started saying that the ECA was illegal because the constitution says any money that came into revenue account should shared in accordance with the subsisting revenue sharing formula that was what they said the constitution says. But what the constitution didn’t say was when to share it; the constitution says share the revenue that goes into the federation account but the constitution did not say when to share it. Also, the constitution gave the president the right to manage the economy. So, the president has a duty first and foremost to manage the economy for the good of everybody. The governors are saying he has the right to manage the economy but we also have the right to have our own money. So, there has to be some understanding that you cannot be living under bone and bust condition. So, that discussion has gone on for many years now. We had debate about lets share but if the standing pattern of the past before the introduction of the ECA is anything to go by, there is no evidence that if everything was shared we will be better off because you have to juxtapose the past and the present and compare if we are better off then than we are now, that is the big question that Nigerians will need to answer. I am a great believer that we are not. It is from the ECA that Nigeria as a country was able to dip their hand that she needed to invest heavily on power. If we didn’t have the savings, there is no way the FG can invest in power as they have done.
Q; By Tuesday, the naira fell to its lowest point in two years, The IMF has also predicted that inflation rate in the country would remain unchanged and recently the CBN has just notched interest rate which will affect lending rates and the manufacturing sector. Taking all these into perspective, where is Nigerian economy headed
When you are doing structural changes and reform, the first thing that you need to establish is control over the indicators. It is completely within the purview of the CBN to determine the interest rate and all that based on their assessment of the liquidity in the system, It doesn’t necessarily mean the economy is in trouble because the interest rate went up. Is an instrument that you use to control liquidity of the economy and the biggest worry of any manager of the economy is inflation. It doesn’t matter how much money you have in your pocket, if the value keep being eroded on day-to-day basis, then the money is worthless. So, its really a principal function for the CBN to ensure that inflation is controlled. But in terms of money supply or investment or manufacturing, clearly what is happening is that the economic team is paying attention to all aspect of the economy to ensure that they bring back manufacturing on stream so that they can continue to contribute significantly to our GDP more than what we are doing now. All hands are on deck and everybody is working towards the same agenda and I think we will be better for it.
