FG PROJECTS N1.5 TRILLION FOR 2006 BUDGET, THISDAY, August 9, front page 

FG, STATES, LGS SHARE N130BN EXCESS CRUDE, The Punch, August 9, page 19

FG Projects N600bn for Road Rehabilitation, THISDAY, August 9,

As above headlines from recent editions of national dailies indicate, our news items on budgets, revenue allocation and major national or state projects are almost always tall on the billions and trillions of Naira earmarked for things but pitifully short on the specifics the xillions should deliver for us to eyemark.

When we have cause to believe that some governments, institutions and public figures in Nigeria are doing well, we have serious difficulty being clear about how well such governments, Institutions and individuals are doing. When we have strong feelings about the non-performance of certain governments, institutions or public figures we also struggle to be specific about the extent of their non-performance. Even the best of us tend to assess performance of governments and public figures in vague generalities.

One suspects that this is largely because we, the commentators, lack the statistical reference points (baselines) against which to measure/discuss progress. Our governments, our institutions and our key public figures are not in the habit of telling us, in any quantitative or qualitative terms, what their baselines are. We the people do not seem to require them to do so. We do not even seem to want to propose those baselines ourselves even where we can.   

Because they have no baselines or may have chosen not to share the baselines with us, our governments, our institutions and our key public figures are in no position to tell us, in any measurable terms, how things will change or when they will change. You can’t measure change if you don’t know where the first mark on the ruler is to be placed.

Even where we have baselines, some of which naturally present themselves, our leaders and our institutions are not in the habit of stating, in any measurable manner, what we are targeting from these baselines - the goals. And we the people do not seem to require the leaders to commit to measurable goals. Therefore, even when we know where to apply the first mark on the ruler, we don’t know where next to place the finger on the ruler in order to unambiguously measure change.

If a Manager entrusted with huge sums of money is not required to deliver any measurable results, what is the motivation for such a Manager to use the money wisely? Against what unstated vapour can anyone tell whether the Manager is managing the money wisely or not?

Very soon, governments all over the land will announce 2006 budgets and no one in the public space will see clear performance targets in any of the budget proposals. There will be weasel words everywhere, intended to maximise confusion and to avoid responsibility. The budgets will be read (not presented) on TV by talking heads that show no passion and convey no conviction. Like the headlines at the top of this article, many headlines will scream budgets in billions and trillions of Naira but all will be pitifully short on what the billions and trillions will deliver, how they will be delivered and when they will be delivered. Below the xillion headlines, the newspapers will have fun with miles of text which hint at deliverables, but lack measurable specifics. Then the rest of us will pontificate that the main issue is proper implementation of the budgets even though it is not clear to us what is to be implemented and what is to be delivered. Subsequently, projects will be announced in terms of the billions to be spent with little or no emphasis on any measurable results to be delivered by the projects. We are not told the seriousness of the problems being addressed by the projects. No statistical reference point. So we cannot be told how much relative difference the projects will make. We do not ask. We are content with the sound of millions, billions and trillions and they know it. They are no fools.

Therefore, public officers who want to do well, do their best but wonder why the critics remain unimpressed. We have not helped the arm-chair critics see where to place the ruler. So they give their imaginations a free reign. Public officers who never meant well squander our money and hire megaphones to tell us why we should be grateful that God allowed them to walk among us. We reward them with national honours and Chieftaincy titles. But sometimes, with the help of instinct or rich imagination or when the loots are simply too much in our faces, we rightly accuse the thieving tin gods of non-performance or outright embezzlement but can’t prove a thing against them because we don’t know where to place the ruler to measure what should have been delivered with the obviously stolen money. We were never promised anything specific. A government official squanders more than half of his budgetary allocation and nobody finds out until he quarrels with his accomplice. Did we have specific delivery targets for Tafa Balogun? If so, how was it possible for him to have squandered the much he is accused of squandering without his boss (and others who had access to those targets) noticing the funds leakage through the non-delivery of what the diverted money was meant for?  Nigerians don’t find out until too late that people are stealing from them because we don’t know and do not ask how much solution our money should buy us. We can’t go on like this and somehow achieve accountability.

One hereby recommends to all governments and major institutions in Nigeria that they do what every properly-managed business entity does: plan with emphasis on results and measure performance against plan at appropriate points. As governments across the land begin to think of the next financial year or the next major planning cycle, they should first clarify, in simple straightforward language and with simple statistics, the current state of things. Then, they should shape a simple vision of where we should be heading and share such vision with the rest of us – the people they are travelling with - in the language we can understand. With the current state and the shared vision as the backdrop, they should put forward their budget proposals, with emphasis on activities and milestones that will take us towards the vision. They should make clear to us, in measurable terms, what each milestone in their proposals will deliver and when such delivery will be due. Finally they should give us, in low decibels, a simple summary of how much it will cost to deliver the promise. In the legislature-approved budget proposals and the subsequent press reports, the emphasis should be on key activities and the expected key results, not the xillions to be spent. The government proposals and subsequent media coverage should liberally use simple charts to make the points about current state and the quantum of change.  And nobody should read budget proposals to Nigerians any more in any setting: the proposals should be presented, complete with illustrations, with a clear intention to communicate hard facts to the ordinary Nigerian. Formal presentations and due legislative inputs should be followed by interactive media events to explore the details and fill in the blanks.

We all talk about “the Project called Nigeria”. Well, let us apply some Project Management discipline in the way we run it: plan, execute, appraise. But Nigeria is more than a project: it is actually a complex enterprise and should be managed with the business rigour a complex enterprise demands. That’s why baselines and shared vision must come first.

I don’t know whether people in government, both The Executive and The Legislature, will do as suggested above. The average turkey is not really very likely to vote for Christmas. But it is not up to them alone. In fact, it is just possible that some of them already do these things and the rest of us just don’t know it.

So, one hereby further recommends that our media start doing their bit with real rigour. They must stop printing empty budget and project announcements laden with zeroes behind the Naira sign. They should ask the hard questions and fill in the blanks on baselines and targets so that the media themselves, the legislature and the rest of us can have the objective basis for assessing performance at the right moments in time.

Moreover, the media should be prepared to lead performance assessment by conducting independent field work to ascertain what has been delivered against the ascertained targets. It will be extreme naivety to expect our governments and institutions to properly appraise themselves under the prevailing climate of grudging accountability.

Independent bodies like the NGOs should also do their bit in establishing national baselines and in appraising deliverables. Academic research projects should be conducted on the progress of key national programmes with their I-don’t-give-a-damn outcome published in a variety of media. The more popular media should actually reserve some space for this sort of politically-detached input to help educate the rest of us without overstretching internal media resources.

Legislation should be introduced by whoever to require budget proposals at all levels of government and for all public institutions to be accompanied by balanced scorecards, complete with clear targets for all major line items. Same legislation should mandate formal and very open semi-annual review of budget performance against confirmed scorecard targets. This will actually help the budget screening process and ultimately facilitate performance reviews. We should not have to institute expensive and very political commissions of enquiry just to determine whether a government has delivered what it promised. Such information should be in the public domain by default and when it is not, somebody is already guilty. If this sort of legislation cannot happen, or does not produce acceptable results, then the media and the rest of us should be prepared to develop unofficial scorecards for all announced budgets and subsequently carry out our own very public assessment of performance of governments against such scorecards.

The foregoing is not about spying on governments or public servants. It is not about expressing our collective distrust of them. It is about showing healthy interest in our own business which some people run on our behalf. It is about equipping all concerned for fair and balanced assessment of our servants’ performance so that we can allocate reward and blame fairly. It is about driving an expensive modern car with a working navigation system and a clear windscreen.

None of what is being suggested here is really that far-fetched or that unNigerian. Obasanjo showed that a Nigerian leader can set a clear target when he (Obasanjo) set one at the beginning of his first term for the attainment of stable power supply. That target was badly missed but the step itself remains commendable for it let us know the baseline for power supply in Nigeria in 1999, gave some focus to whatever efforts were made then, forced the players to report interim results against the target and now allows all of us to say unambiguously that the government failed on that one.  Through the NCC’s license auctioning process, we also set a national target for Telecom penetration when we told the then GSM bidders the teledensity conditions that would be attached to successful bids. Thanks to the clarity around the baseline teledensity of only about 440,000 working landlines and the clarity around aspired near-term levels of penetration, most of us today are experts on the so called subject of “Telecom Revolution” in Nigeria. Ordinary people throw around real data when they discuss this subject. We just need more examples like these two.

If we want progress, we must be prepared to measure it. To measure it, we must baseline it and then set clear improvement targets. If you can’t measure progress, you can’t manage it.

If we are serious about checking corruption, we must make people control their own inclination to divert funds through a culture of in-built accountability which base-lining, target-setting and routine appraisal can engender.

So how bad are things with the Police and what quantum of difference will any 2006 budgetary allocation make? How many kilometres of national highways do we have in a poor state? How much improvement can we promise for any 2006 budgetary allocation for roads? How many students will leave our Universities this year and what percentage of them will our new enhanced economic policies for 2006 and beyond help into meaningful jobs? Simple questions that should attract simple answers. They are the sort of questions we must have very specific answers to at the end of any budgeting exercise. Performance against the hard targets associated with the answers to such questions should be the basis for any allocation of funds in subsequent years. 

Failure to observe this kind of rigour will only ensure that the annual budgeting exercises continue to be useless and unproductive rituals, where the people are only told the monies available to government officials to use as they please.  Failure to observe this kind of rigour will perpetuate the grand announcement of project billions that deliver vapour. This will not take us anywhere near the culture of public accountability.

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Engr. Ndukwe (Nd) Uche writes from The Sultanate of Oman where he works for a major Oil Company as the IT Infrastructure Manager. E-mail: nduche@yahoo.com