Bumbling Nigerian bureaucrats

Whitehall is a street in London that has bestowed its name on ministries of the British government. It also bestowed its practices and traditions on the civil service of Nigeria and most other Commonwealth countries.

The street is now a metaphor, like New York City’s Wall Street and Broad Street, which respectively represent investment banking and dramatic arts theatres. Fleet Street, London, where the earliest British newspapers had their offices, is synonymous with journalism.

In addition, Whitehall is a symbol of the power and prestige of the British bureaucracy, as it is also steeped in intrigue and falsehoods that lead to the failure of ministers who weren’t aware of the banana peels on its corridors.

Like its British progenitor, the Nigerian civil service, once described as an abyss by a senior journalist and columnist, is home of “capa y daga,” or cloak-and-dagger, intrigues, treacheries, lies, and large doses of incompetence. And that, unfortunately, is the system that runs Nigeria.

The political class that pretends to be ruling Nigeria is no more than a group of ignoramuses, led by the nose into the labyrinth of governmental machinery run by cunning civil servants who have near-permanent tenure within the bureaucracy.

It is these generally incompetent bureaucrats that administer the disastrous economic and political policies in Nigeria. The World Bank doubted the competence of Nigeria’s bureaucracy even from the early days of post-independence Nigeria.

When proposing Nigeria’s First 5-Year Development Plan for 1962-1968, the World Bank observed that “it is doubtful whether the (Abubakar Tafawa Balewa) Government’s administrative machine, as at present staffed and organized, will be able to carry out public investment at the planned rate.”

So, when you are impatient and lambast the “wobbling and fumbling” political class of Nigeria, remember that it is this calibre of unprofessional bureaucrats that have been providing them with counsel from the very beginning.

The bureaucrats have been as constant as the wall gecko in Nigeria’s corridor of power. That is probably why the most senior officers in the civil service are styled “permanent secretaries.” It takes a tortuous process to discipline or fire incompetent or erring civil servants.

The failure of Nigeria’s bureaucracy in the last 64 years makes it clear that the economic and political fate of Nigerians is in the hands of incompetents, with their much-storied credentials, obtained from some of the academic citadels of the Western world.

If you look at the epileptic outing of Nigeria’s energy “multiverse” which includes electricity and fuel for automobiles, homes, and industries, you will see a graphic representation of the cause of the quandary that Nigeria has sunk into.

Despite the many transformations and changes in the nomenclatures of the electricity provider, Electricity Corporation of Nigeria, to the National Electric Power Authority, National Electric Power Plc, Power Holding Company of Nigeria, and the spaghetti of names for now partially privatized electricity generation, transmission, and distribution companies.

The same incompetence is apparent in the running of the Nigeria National Oil Corporation, which was renamed Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation. It has a legendary incapability to provide enough fuel for Nigerians.

After a meeting with some International Oil Companies, former President Olusegun Obasanjo wisely sold Nigeria’s refineries in Port Harcourt and Kaduna to billionaire businessmen, Aliko Dangote and his pal, Femi Otedola.

The bureaucrats saw their cookie crumbling and quickly joined labour to prevail on Obasanjo’s successor, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, to reverse the decision. He reacquired the refineries and returned them to the bureaucratic vultures.

The bureaucrats are simply lurking within the lumbering NNPCL, indulging in their private interests, while ramping up $6.8 billion in trade debt, which has now become a roadblock to Nigerian motorists having a regular supply of petrol.

The bureaucrats, who famously kept the lie of fuel subsidy going in the public space, have now capitulated and admitted that the subsidy can no longer be sustained and the pump price of petrol must be hiked.

Recently, NNPCL surreptitiously increased the pump price in its petrol outlets. When Dangote Refinery offered to sell petrol and diesel at undisclosed prices said to be below that of NNPCL, marketers, allegedly encouraged by bureaucrats, rejected the products.

They preferred the imported products because it gave them legitimate access to foreign exchange. Maybe President Bola Tinubu should have allowed marketers to import petroleum products and see them compete with the expected lower cost of Dangote Refineries.

After failing to run NNPCL refineries, the oil bureaucrats cleverly sidetracked marketers and initiated a meddlesome plan to make NNPCL the sole off-taker of Dangote Refinery petroleum products, perhaps to look as if they are working. Still, the bureaucrats continued with their mischief.

After Olufemi Soneye, NNPCL Corporate Affairs Manager, announced that NNPCL paid N898.78 for petrol per litre from Dangote Refinery, it was compelled to respond that though NNPCL paid in Dollars ($0.55), the price was lower than the current cost of imported petrol. NNPCL then disclosed that the petrol price for the Lagos market is N950.22 (or $0.58).

Everyone knows that this is just a scheme to put NNPCL somewhere in the loop of the petrol supply chain. NNPCL should only sell crude petroleum to Dangote Refinery, collect its money, and leave the midstream and downstream sub-sectors alone.

The perennially unresolved disagreements between the government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities reveal a horde of bureaucrats lurking in the crevices of failed negotiations and unimplemented agreements.

The involvement of bureaucrats in inconclusive negotiations dates back to the days of the Federal Military Government of General Yakubu Gowon, who issued a quit notice for striking dons to vacate their official university residential quarters.

The can of the problems continued to get kicked down the road to successive politicians who have no sense of the history of the failed negotiations and therefore have no clue on what to do to resolve the outstanding disagreements.

It keeps looking as if the bureaucrats love the problems to continue to have a sense of relevance and have something to do in their offices every day. It sounds like the fulfilment of the mischievous quip, “Why do what can be done tomorrow, today?”, something you often hear on the corridors of civil service premises.

Keen observers see in Nigeria a tribe of self-serving civil service bureaucrats who look out for their interests only and leave the devil to care for the citizens and their employers. Someone suggested that bureaucrats became more self-centered after former military Head of State, General Murtala Muhammed, carried out a massive purge of the civil service in 1975.

They claim that when serving civil servants saw that their tenure was no longer protected and that they could lose their jobs, pensions, and gratuities on the whim of a Head of State, they wisely opted to look after their interests only and relegated the business of governance to a secondary level on the totem pole of priorities.

There can be no justification for carrying out the business of governance in half measures. Any bureaucrat who is not prepared to give his or her best to the service of the nation should simply make way for those who will be more committed.

But let no politician think that this exonerates them from blame for causing pain to fellow Nigerians; this just happens to be the time to call out bureaucrats who hide behind seemingly unwary politicians.