In late August, President Goodluck Jonathan was reported to have signed performance contracts with his ministers. The underlying philosophy according to the Minister of National Planning, Dr. Shamshudeen Usman, is that the performance contract system focuses on three parameters: “what gets measured gets done, if you cannot measure success you cannot reward it, if you cannot measure failure, you cannot correct it”. The President said that the performance contract system are aimed at improving the quality and accelerated delivery of services to the citizenry through enhanced productivity and accountability. The idea is for the President to hold ministers to account for responsibilities assigned to them through bi-annual reports on the performance of the ministers and to gauge their performance against the background of established Key Performance Indicators. The Ministries, Departments and Agencies are to develop detailed documentation to guide the implementation of the KPIs. Undoubtedly, this is a good practice which has been deployed in many countries successfully to improve governmental performance.
However, there is a challenge in the approach adopted by the President and the ministers. The posers that quickly come to mind are; where is the public in this performance measurement initiative? How is this initiative related to the Service Delivery Initiative of the previous regime? How do we link this up to Vision 2020 and its first National Implementation Plan or even the purported Transformation Agenda of the President? What penalties will be meted out to ministers who fail to meet the cut-off point of the evaluation criteria? It may be difficult to hazard answers to these posers because there is scanty information available to the public from official sources beyond the fanfare of the signing ceremonies covered by the media. The discourse below will focus on suggestions that will make the performance contracts effective and deliver value for money to Nigerians.
It is imperative to state that this initiative should have commenced at the swearing-in of ministers immediately after the 2011 elections. The consolation is in the adage that it is better late than not taking the step at all. For an initiative of this nature to succeed, ministers must not only be given tasks and marching orders to deliver on the assignments, they must also be provided with commensurate resources in terms of human, material, technological and financial resources. A very important part of the human resource is the political will of the President to fight corruption in high places and entrenched interests. This will provide the enabling environment for the success of the assignments given to the ministers. The President must frontally lead the fight against corruption if the ministers are to meet their targets.
Linked to the foregoing is that the performance contracts should be anchored on clear policies that Nigerians can relate with. For instance, it is expected that national targets in Vision 2020 and its First National Implementation Plan should drive the KPIs. These KPIs must find resonance in the medium term financial plans in the Medium Term Expenditure Framework and the Medium Term Sector Strategies and be properly reflected in the annual budget.
The second issue is that there must be sanctions incorporated into the performance contracts. If there are no sanctions, then the basis of the evaluation is defeated from the beginning. The normal human system rewards good performance and sanctions poor results. This is the law of nature and anything to the contrary will be a cruel joke on the people. Poor performance should lead to removal from office. The management of the evaluation by the President must remove extraneous considerations such as ethnic, religious and political sentiments, including loyalty to the party as the deciding factors in who gets sanctioned or acclaimed.
In trying to locate the Nigerian citizen in this new scheme, it is imperative that performance targets set for ministers are made known to Nigerians. We can all recall that the Obasanjo administration set a target of delivering 10,000 megawatts of electricity by 2007 under the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy. The administration failed to deliver same and every Nigerian was in a position to evaluate whether success had been achieved. There must be targets for the short, medium and long term – timeline divisions based on the time left between now and the terminal date of the administration which is 2015. The indicators of success and performance must be realistic and time-bound and could be as simple as how many kilometres of new roads we expect from the Ministry of Works in 2013 and beyond.
Since the signing of these contracts, one had expected to see copies of these contracts in the media or through any reasonable means. The contracts as they stand today are simply the President’s contract with his ministers and not popular documents that Nigerians can buy into. Indeed, it could possibly be seen as part of the family affair of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, on whose platform, the President was elected. The administration should engage the media to disseminate information on the details of the KPIs and the general evaluation criteria.
Apparently, the President distrusts the media, judging by his statement that; “ You will not depend on what the newspapers will want to write because the media today is highly politicised. Before, the media used to be the voice of the ordinary people but now, the media is the voice of those who own the media houses and those who own the media have private jets and those who have private jets are not ordinary people. So, the media is now the voice of the powerful people. So, we have to have a way of assessing ourselves.” Despite its misgivings, the administration cannot reach out to Nigerians except it engages the media. Nigerians are entitled to be in a position to evaluate the President while he is evaluating his ministers. His sense of judgement in taking decisions based on the performance contracts will definitely influence public perception of the success of his administration.
For this initiative to succeed, the administration must take budget planning, implementation, reporting and evaluation more seriously. The New Year budget must be ready for implementation on or before January 1 of every year and capital budget releases should no longer be at the discretion of any minister or authority. The administration must also fast-track reforms that have been recommended by a rash of committees it has set up and stop foot-dragging on white papers that demand urgent implementation. On the part of non-state actors, we must help the government to succeed by holding it accountable to the myriad of promises it has made. We must come to the realisation that impunity and governmental performance are not and cannot be twins. We must begin to demand ceaselessly for the removal of ministers who have failed in the tasks assigned to them. We must revisit and insist on the prosecution of all economic saboteurs. We must also insist on due process in all its ramifications in every facet of public life.
- Eze Onyekpere, a lawyer, is the Lead Director, Centre for Social Justice, Abuja. He wrote in via censoj@gmail.com
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