The following was my contributory comments on Dr Aliyu Tildes face book page, discussing the topic "SNC: Decentralising the Federal Government" - the way forward. Maintaining status quo in the Nigerian governance structure (Centralise) with an over burden centre which often suffer when the top leadership is weak or should we opt for decentralising system and spreading/sharing the responsibilities of the centre to the various regional governance body. Enjoy!
and Dr as you rightly pointed out each of the system of governance has its merits and demerits.
Your analysis brings to fore the kind of expensive and a somewhat wasteful system of governance we're currently operating in Nigeria. And we can't afford to continue that way for a long time to come. The sets of executives and law breakers... oops! I mean to say law makers, we have at the center are virtually replicated in all the states and some government parastatals, ministries and departments.
The current structure supposed to serve as a form of decentralisation that should be able to deliver devident of good governance to the people, but it has woefully failed. Moreover, it is very costly and ineffective, as there are no prudent/efficient means we can benchmark their performance on governance and or how well our tax payers money/oil money has been expended on governance and on those politicians together with their various and numerous aids that included even a facebook (new media) special adviser/aid, this is in addition to sponsoring their often extravagant lifestyle etc-- all at the expense of citizens' common wealth of their state.
As an IT specialist, I can confidently attest to the fact that costs and inefficiencies associated with such costly and ineffective governance, can be greatly enhanced with the adoption of the right IT tools that would fit/serve our well defined dynamic governance structures, processes and procedures.
These governance information system should cover end to end the governance processes/procedures: from planing, defining top strategic trust/goal of the state, to breaking/cascading such goals to lower levels, assigning such goals' objectives to respective government institutions/units with appropriate KPIs set for both the outfits and their respective officials that manned/run them.
This is to enable evaluation and monitoring and measuring performance of each government units and the people responsible for running them. One may quickly ask: isn't what is currently obtainable in our manual or conventional system of governance and why would IT-the-right-way makes any difference?
Yes, to some extent, we could be operating such systems manually or conventionally.
However as with every manual/conventional system - records could be easily manipulated and or destroyed and we hardly can find or track any performance for the purpose performance measure and or reward and cautioning of government officials etc.
With the right IT tools governance would be more transparent, engaging and collaborative. Citizens can be able to securely login and monitor first hand how their government is faring in terms of budget performance for all sectors. e.g. education, health, social welfare etc. It will engender transparency and openness in governance.
And with right content management system, document authoring (collaborative or individuals), endorsement and approvals to closing and archiving such official documents could all be achieved through effective workflow system. Digital signature such as Cosign can also come handy for Approval and authorisation of such digital documents or contents.
This IT systems can work in both centralised and decentralised system of governance.
Let me conclude by reminding us the objective of bringing IT perspective into this discourse, set aside that IT is the in thing in today's information age, my main focus is to highlight those benefits such as reducing the huge costs of governance that we may finally decide to run at the end of the day. And not only cost reduction, when the right fit-for-purpose e-Governance system is successfully deployed and monitored, it will bring about efficiency, prudence, citizen satisfaction and timely delivery of governance products and services.
And Araba is still the most appealing goal to pursue for the North.
Salihu Garba
12th October 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment