Cost Reduction and Enhancing Efficiency in Governance Through Deployment of fit for purpose e-Governance system

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

How to Export (Save) and Import Blog Contents from Google's Blogger

I was about composing an article to be publish on my Blog, then suddenly, the need to safeguard those already published articles, crossed my mind. And this need raised some questions such as:


Question 1: And by the way, why would one need to back-up or import his hard worked Blog contents?
Answer: Of course we cant just afford to lose what we spent precious time and work hard to accomplish. And our audience too would not be happy if those contents made for them are gone.

Question 2: Isn't Google free hosting good enough, why would one bother to save or export his blog contents?
Answer: So many things could go wrong and before we know it our whole dedicated effort vanishes into thin air.

• One could make a mistake while working with the Blog’s configurations/settings tools and before we know it the entire Blog is deleted. 
• This could also occur purely from technical issues with Google systems and or 
• Other reasons unknown to users could also cause our Blog and its content to disappear - just like that.

In order to safeguard our blog contents, there are basically two methods one could use to achieve this objective. I.e.

1. Export/Import and 
2. Backup/Restore. 

Export would simply enable a user to export the contents of his/her blog i.e. only posts and comments made on those posts.

The exported contents is stored on user's hard drive in an xml format. And the Import function on the other hand, enables a user to Import the content of exported xml file unto a newly created blog or onto another existing blog of the user.

As for the Backup and Restore, they are similar to Export and Import, only that former is more effective/comprehensive as it made to back up one's Blog i.e. Contents + Themes (the style, looks and aesthetics of your blog).

This “How to” article would only focus on Exporting blog post and comments from your Blogger dash board. However, one could also catch the ideas behind using the other functions Import Back up etc.

To Export, its pretty simple: in about 3-4 simple clicks to one would have his/her Blog contents exported on to one's PC or tablets hard drive.

Step 1: Blogger Home Page: Click 1 and 2 as shown on the image below:

We can also click on setting from the view shown below:

Step 2: Click Other as shown on image below:

Step 3: Click Export as shown on green circle on image below:

Step 4: Download

Your exported file is saved on your hard drive. The file name format is somewhat like this blog-current-date.xml See image below:












Follow similar step to Import the xml file onto your new or existing Blog. You may need to select the Automatic publishing option from the Import prompt/menu otherwise your content would be imported but remain unpublished until you manually publish the contents.

That's it! I hope you've find this "How to Export (Save) and Import Blog Contents from Google's Blogger" post useful!

Salihu Garba
Business Analyst
19th October, 2013

I was about composing an article to be publish on my Blog, then suddenly the need to safeguards my already published articles crossed my mind. And by the way why would one need to back-up or import his hard worked Blog contents? So many things could go wrong and before we know it our whole dedicated effort vanishes into thin air. • One could make a mistake while working with the Blog’s configurations/settings tools and before we know it the entire Blog is deleted. • This could also occur purely from technical issues with Google systems and or • Other reasons unknown to users In order to safeguard our blog contents, there are basically two methods one could use to achieve this objective. I.e. Export/Import and Backup/Restore. Export would simply enable a user to export the contents of his/her blog i.e. only posts and comments made on those posts. The exported contents is stored on your hard drive in xml format And the Import function enables a user to Import the xml file unto a newly created blog or onto an existing blog of the user. On the other hand Backup and restore would enable a user to back up the entire Blog i.e. Contents + Themes (the style, looks and aesthetics of your blog). This “How to” article would only focus on Exporting blog post and comments from your Blogger dash board. And we can achieve this in about 3 simple clicks to have one’s whole Blog content exported on to his/her PC or tablets hard drive.

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