Imperatives of a New National Productivity Paradigm
This edition of the NISER Research Seminar Series (NRSS) could not have come at a better time. The focus on ‘Computing National Productivity’ brings to the fore, at this critical point in our national life, the challenge of calibrating a new productivity paradigm around which the task of good governance can be projected. We are in the middle of a significant political transition that we all hope will affect our governance trajectory, and the NISER team seems to have rightly inserted itself, in a fundamental manner, into the preparation at a most theoretic and practical levels.
The choice of productivity measurement as the theme for this seminar to interrogate is in a sense rooted in a deep sense of history. It brings to mind the NISER Conference of 1968 that was called to discuss post-war reconstruction and development.
That Conference was significant for two reasons. The first was that it came at a period when Nigeria was faced with the prospect of reconstruction after the terrible horrors of the Civil War. The second reason is that the Conference presaged the evolution of the Second National Development Plan, and its vision for a post-independence Nigeria caught in the complexity of postcolonial existence.
Forty-seven years after that Conference and at moment of another critical historical transition, NISER has, with this seminar, recaptured the challenge of Nigeria of the 70s, which Prof. Wolfgang Stolper summed up as the tragedy of a nation that plans without fact. The glaring absence of a national productivity paradigm around which Nigeria’s governance trajectory can be computed as a strategy for mitigating a nascent culture of institutionalised waste in resource management merely today restates the predicament of the Nigeria of the ‘60s that plans without fact.
Indeed, over three decades ago, Peter Drucker called our collective attention to the managerial truism that what is not measured cannot be managed. This implies that with this seminar, NISER is redirecting our attention to the critical missing link that must be confronted if we are to overcome the infrastructural gaps critical to national transformation.
But the bigger worry is that the challenge, which has been with us for so long in our journey as a nation, is still protracted. Productivity, or the lack of it, which is rooted in statistics is still a daunting national issue close to thirty years after NISER and Stolper raised the warning about its spectre.
National productivity cannot even begin to take off positively until and unless we begin from the root issue of national planning which in itself requires deep-seated rethinking as a corollary of the budgetary process and fiscal federalism. If productivity is the average measure of the efficiency of production and resource use in any nation, then we should really begin to worry about Prof. Stolper’s prophetic assessment.
Planning without vital productivity measures complicates Nigeria’s governance predicament. Good governance is premised on the capacity of the Nigerian state to efficiently and effectively provide adequate goods and services that will constitute the dividends of democracy for Nigerians. But then the task of governance itself has a subtle way of undermining the possibility of an effectively calibrated national productivity framework that affects governance, which raises the critical question: What are the challenges of national productivity that Nigeria faces?
There are four major indices of our productivity palaver: a) the challenge that Nigeria faces as a resource dependent mono-cultural economy being one of harnessing resource efficiency to accelerate growth in the economy; b) the fact that it is not the quantum of government spending that is at issue, the challenge is one of balancing rates of investment with returns on investment; c) the reality, that the average output of the Nigerian workforce reflects, unarguably, low marginal productivity of labour even as national productivity is much more than just labour productivity; and d) the indisputable truism, that given the relationship between productivity, performance and service delivery on the one hand, and the fact that government consumes considerable tax resources as perhaps the single largest employer of labour and provider of services in the economy on the other, Nigeria will hardly advance beyond the capability and productivity of its public service and the level of its overall national productivity, which unfortunately who don’t care to measure.
The long and short of the summary is that, within the Nigerian context, the cost of governance undermines the efficiency of national productivity.
And this unbridled cost automatically generates institutional waste of such enormity that it multiplies and invades every aspect of the Nigerian governance institutions and processes. The real problem begins with the philosophy and perception of the role of the state in the developmental process.
As a carry-over from the oil boom years, the state was conceived as occupying the ‘commanding height of the economy’ where it dictates the critical nuts and bolts of the developmental process. This understanding of the state effectively preclude an institutional architecture that is rationalized to fit into emergent integrated model of managerialism and deregulation/liberalization of the economy with the private sector as the engine of growth in the national economy.
The unfortunate consequence is that the state becomes the focal point of institutional waste. This is close to what Brooks Stevens, the American industrial designer, calls ‘planned obsolescence’; the kind of waste that generates redundancies and pointless cost. It is in this sense that Nigeria is far from being a developmental state capable of facilitating effective and efficient governance paradigm that is conducive to delivering goods and services to its citizens.
There are at least three levels of institutional manifestations that illustrate this obsolescence and redundancies. First, there is the issue of the cost and redundancies generated by Nigeria’s presidential system of government perceived as a kind of spoil system that multiplies appointments and offices as means for compensating party loyalists and cronies.
This system invariably emasculates the state’s development budget because of the huge pressure generated by the wage bill. There are also costs incidental on an expensive electoral system and nation-wide campaign requirements, as well as the need to maintain party offices in all states and LGAs.
On the other hand, Nigeria possesses a large chunk of states which, in governance terms, are not just viable.
This is because these states depend on life-support budgetary allocations from the Federation Account.
These allocations are then drained down the black hole of recurrent expenditures. Yet, the depressing fact is that there are still