By Joe Abah

Until August 2017, I was the Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR), with the daunting task of reforming Nigeria’s Federal Public Service. As part of that role, I sought to move the focus of Public Service Reforms away from the Public Service unto the public. This was a deliberate tactical approach that sought to change the approach to public service reforms from inputs to outcomes. Problems with the Public Service are often complex and intractable. There are various reasons why Public Service Reforms are difficult in most environments and are particularly difficult in developing countries, such as Nigeria.

In countries such as ours, the public service reformer is often dealing with myriad systemic input problems in the organisation he is trying to reform, including lack of electricity, insufficient financial provision, lack of working tools, poor internet access, poor staff motivation and systematic corruption. The combination of these, and any one of them for that matter, is sufficient reason to explain away a lack of improvement in public service delivery. Focusing on the outcome expected, rather than the problems with the inputs, gives the reformer a better chance of driving reforms in dysfunctional environments. The need to deliver the outputs expected forces the system to align the required inputs to achieve the expected outcomes, rather than focusing on the difficult task of trying to solve all the input problems before we can get the improvements in service delivery that the public expects and deserves. We will use the tortious issue of obtaining a Nigerian passport as a demonstration of how it could be done.

Many Nigerians go through a painful, dysfunctional and extortionate process when they try to obtain an international passport. Given its population and the absence of a focus on outcomes by the Comptroller-General, Lagos residents suffer the most. It is virtually impossible to obtain a Nigerian passport in Lagos without “knowing someone” and paying above the official rate of N15,000 for a 32-page passport and N20,000 for a 64-page passport. Even after paying more than double the official price and making obeisance to god-like Immigration officials, applicants are still confronted with the claim that “there are no booklets.” The Comptroller-General of Immigration often makes a categorical, but hollow, assertion that there are sufficient booklets nationwide, but the experience of citizens is clearly contrary to that claim. It is either that the Comptroller-General is being economical with the truth or that his officers are deliberately making things difficult in order to derive corrupt benefits from the dysfunction, and that the Comptroller-General is not interested in doing anything about it. Overcoming this logjam is relatively straightforward. Nigerians can obtain an international passport in a week without needing to know anybody and without paying a kobo more than the official price. In the next few paragraphs, I will outline how this can be done.

The first step is for the Presidency to demand from the Immigration Service the service standards for issuing Nigerian passports. The last time, that I am aware of, such service standards were set for passport issuance was under the SERVICOM regime in 2004. At that time, the Immigration Service undertook to provide international passports within one week, but expectedly within 72 hours. Most people, including the Immigration Service, currently appear not to be aware of this service standard. Nobody monitors performance against these standards, and although passport issuance is part of the Ease of Doing Business initiative, the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) has achieved little or nothing in this regard. It is important for the Immigration Service to commit to this standard, or revisit the standard and set a more realistic one and make the targets publicly-known, and for PEBEC and the National SERVICOM Office to publicly report the performance of the Immigration Service against these standards.

In order to meet the existing performance standard, or whatever new standard is set, it is necessary to take a number of straightforward actions. First, all payments must be made online. Notionally, this is already the case, but in practice, citizens are often unable to make online payments, forcing them to have personal contact with Immigration officers and their touts, who extract corrupt rents for “helping” people. The payment systems are often unavailable, either due to weaknesses in technical infrastructure or as a result of deliberate sabotage. Indeed, those that “stupidly go and pay online” are made to suffer interminable delays and forced to regret their attempts to do things properly. The Comptroller-General and PEBEC should be monitoring the frequency of “network” downtimes by location and tackling cases where the downtimes are as a result of deliberate sabotage. The good thing about technology is that there is always an audit trail that tells you who has done what to the system, at what time, in which location. They should also be monitoring how quickly applicants that pay in advance online receive their passports.

Even when an applicant successfully pays online, another major pinch-point is the capture process. Nigeria does not really have a passport renewal process. Every passport application is deemed to be a new application requiring fresh biometric capture. This would ordinarily not be a problem, particularly given the sensitive security nature of international passports. The process of being “captured” is, however, another corruption ‘toll gate.’ It should be possible to simply book an appointment for capture online, appear on the appointed date and time and be captured within 15 minutes. Currently, the appointment system tends to give you an appointment in 6 years’ time when the validity of the passport you are applying for is only 5 years! This forces you to seek out an Immigration officer that will “help” you, of course in the expectation of “appreciation.” There does not seem to be any willingness on the part of the Immigration Service to apply the simple technical fix required to make the appointment system work.

The Immigration Service knows the number of passport applications that it gets each year. It also knows that Nigeria’s population growth rate is 2.6%. How hard can it be to ensure that we have enough booklets to cover all applicants? I mean really! Unlike National Identity Cards, passports are not issued for free but for a fee. The Federal Government should configure the Treasury Single Account to ensure that the fees generated from passport issuance is used to ensure the availability of passport booklets at all times. If, as a result of exchange rates, the price of the passport is too low, especially as it is currently printed abroad, the Immigration Service should review the price and gradually increase it over time. Passport issuance is not a social service. Having said that, every effort should be made to print passports in country.

Every Nigerian knows that if you give enough cash to Immigration officials, you can get your passport in less than 6 hours. We also know that Nigerians like to leave things late, often applying for a passport within just days of needing to travel. Of course, pressure of time on the applicant is a compelling reason why they would pay for “help.” It is easy for the Passport Service to put in place an Emergency Fast Track process that charges four times what the normal rate of passport application is. Those that are in a hurry can pay N60,000-N80,000 per booklet to government, rather than into the private pockets of Immigration officials, and the funds can be reinvested into improving the passport process and even incentivising Immigration officers. Those that are not in a hurry and can wait a week, or whatever the new service target that the Service sets, can pay the normal price and get their passports without begging or bribing anyone.

Finally, the recent data integration between the Nigeria Immigration Service and the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) is commendable. When a Nigerian has a National Identity Number issued NIMC, there is really no reason why they should not be able to obtain their passport within one week of submitting all required documentation. They should be able to pay online, book an appointment for biometric capture, get captured within 15 minutes without begging or bribing anybody, and be given an appointment for when to collect their passports. The performance of the Immigration Service on each of these steps should be monitored and publicly-reported. Until this is possible, the One-Government mantra in Executive Order E001 is simply hollow rhetoric, and the Vice President’s recent charge that Nigerians should not pay a bribe to obtain a passport simply a political statement. These suggestions are not new. They were given to the Immigration Service in 2017as part of a BPSR study on removing the bottlenecks to passport issuance when I was the BPSR Director-General. Before then, a SERVICOM assessment of the Passport Service in June 2006 came to pretty much the same conclusions. The Immigration Service seems to lack the willingness to address the issue and appears to have the power to get away with it. The Vice President, who is the head of PEBEC, should use the power of his office to ensure that they implement these recommendations and that the Passport Service does not continue to get away with the current dysfunctionin passport issuance, to the detriment of Nigerians.

JOE ABAH

Dr Abah is the former Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms. He is currently the Country Director of DAI, a global development company. The views contained in this article are personal to him and do not represent the views of any employer past or present.

By Chris Akor 

 had decided to write on the trampling of the rule of law by the Buhari government. But just as I started, I chanced upon this article I wrote last year. It captured exactly everything I wanted to say. I reproduce it again with minor modifications. This article was first published August 30^th 2018.

Following early signals that the Buhari administration was not totally committed to upholding the rule of law and due process, I started writing, since 2016, to warn about the administration’s gradual descent into autocracy. Of course, not many people took me seriously. I was dismissed as a “wailer” and an unrepentant critic of President Buhari who was just doing his utmost to deal with the miasma left by 16 years of the People’s Democratic Party’s (PDP) rule.

The silence from the bar, academics and thought leaders was noticeably loud. I guess, haven invested so much energy and reputation into the Buhari project, they could not turn their backs on him.

But much more dangerous was a belief, prevalent in Nigeria at the time, that corruption could not be effectively fought within the ambits of the rule of law. We were therefore willing to overlook the occasional disregard of the law and the judiciary and the employment of unconventional and unlawful methods in dealing with the hoard of corrupt officials in Nigeria.

However, with the recent happenings in the polity – the wilful disregard of the rule of law, wanton human rights abuses, the not-so-subtle attempts to silence all opposition and divergent voices, and to illegally remove and replace the leadership of the national assembly – Nigerians are beginning to see a pattern. And when a democratically elected president looks all citizens in the eyes and tell them national security and public interests would come before individuals’ rights, then they know no one is really safe from the clutches of such a state.

Read Also: Maritime sector needs to return over N300bn to Nigerian economy – Amaechi

But Buhari didn’t just take us by surprise. He has a history which we all failed to take into account. In the run up to the 2015 general elections, I’d watched with shock and horror how we all repudiated our history – of events that happened between 1984 and 1985 – and proclaimed Buhari to be the answer to all our national woes and the best person to fix our ailing economy.

Being a keen student of Nigerian government and politics, I’d read virtually every available historical account of the Buhari military regime – and there was almost a universal consensus that the regime was a major economic disaster. Unable to convince multilateral agencies to advance lines of credit to Nigeria following the regime’s stubborn refusal to countenance even a partial devaluation of the country’s currency and due to the drying up of the country’s foreign reserves in the face of declining oil prices, the regime chose rather to engage in counter-trading (or more appropriately trade by barter) where the country bartered its oil cheaply for spare parts and other raw materials to escape from its economic immobilism.

Expectedly, the measure only worsened the country’s dire economic situations. Wages still went unpaid and there were general shortages of basic commodities like rice, milk, sugar, etc and the helpless masses had to queue endlessly to get to these items. Industries had to close shop and those that managed to remain open operated at very low capacity.

Confronted by the apparent failure of its policies to revamp the economy, the regime became even more oppressive and intolerant of criticism. As Adebayo Olukoshi and Tajudeen Abdulraheem rightly noted, “The Nigerian Security Organisation’s powers were significantly expanded. Then the state began to play the old card of blaming so-called illegal ECOWAS immigrants, especially from Ghana, for the continued shortage of commodities and jobs. But the diversion created by the second mass expulsion of aliens early in 1985 was only short-lived and was soon exhausted.”

As rational explanations ran dry, repression became the norm. The famous decree 4 that prohibited journalists from reporting anything that could embarrass the regime, even if it were true, was promulgated. It did not take long before two journalists fell fowl of the law and were consequently locked up. Soldiers were sent out with whips to enforce order and discipline on the streets and ensure cleanliness in people’s homes.

Special secret military tribunals were set up to try politicians accused of corruption despite protests and boycotts of the tribunals by the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA). The accused were all presumed guilty until they could prove their innocence, and few managed that task. Most were given ridiculously long sentences, some running into hundreds of years. Certain crimes like drug trafficking, smuggling, and oil bunkering were made to carry the death sentence and three Nigerians were retroactively executed under this law.

The most sensational example of the regime’s recklessness was the botched attempted kidnap and forced repatriation of Nigeria’s former transport minister under the Shagari regime, Umaru Dikko, who was found drugged in a crate in a London airport that had been tagged as diplomatic baggage. This led to a break-up of diplomatic relations between Nigeria and the Britain.

Read Also: APC denies rift between Buhari, Osibanjo

The history we all rejected and repudiated has come back to haunt us. Just like 1984/85, we have had to endure the worst economic recession in Nigeria in almost 30 years, watched as hyper-inflation and rapid depreciation of the naira erode the spending power of Nigerians and threw millions of Nigerians into extreme poverty. Even, various attempts have been made to bring back the infamous “Decree 4” in form of the “Anti-Social Media Bill”. With the president’s stand on the rule of law, Nigerians should be ready for a full-blown dictatorship in his second term – and perhaps after.

There are feelers that some persons are working on a life presidency project for the president. Recently, the APC candidate for the Senatorial bye-election in Bauchi south, Lawal Yahaya-Gusau stated explicitly that he had only one agenda for seeking to go to the senate – to work towards a constitutional amendment to pave the way for Buhari to become president-for-life. Yahaya-Gusau did win the election and there has been no word of caution or denunciation from either the party or the presidency. Considering how Obasanjo’s third-term project started, we will be foolish to dismiss Yahaya-Gusau’s campaign promise as wishful thinking.

Culled from BusinessDay

I know I should be poring over that whistleblower’s complaint. But instead, let me give you something that’s much more invigorating: news and gossip you definitely do not need.

By Vivia Chen 

I don’t know about you, but I am at a saturation point with news about our Dear Leader and his dealings with Ukraine. I know I should be poring over that whistleblower’s complaint, the details of Trump’s conversation with the Ukraine leader and the testimony of acting National Intelligence director Joseph Maguire (the latest contender for the weasel of the year award), but where would that take us? It’ll just get us all riled up, then depressed.

Instead, let me give you something that’s much more invigorating: news and gossip you definitely do not need. Here’s my People magazine edition of the happenings of the day:

Does your job cover you for death via sex? Now that we know our new labor secretary Eugene Scalia has a much more liberal attitude about sexual mores than his dad, I’ve been wondering if he’s ready to apply the French rule to sex on the job.

The New York Times reports: “A court in France has ruled that a man who died from a heart attack after having sex during a business trip had suffered a work-related accident and that his employer was liable.”

Read more:https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/2019/09/27/sex-food-and-dating-the-other-news-this-week/?kw=The%20Careerist:%20Sex%2C%20Food%20and%20Dating%26mdash%3BThe%20%28Other%29%20News%20This%20Week&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=dailypaid&utm_content=20190930&utm_term=tal