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Reflecting on my approximately thirty years of work in the organised private sector in Nigeria, one thing that is clear is how so like my previous seven years of work in the federal civil service the former was. Yes, 30 years ago, there were no senior staff retreats or strategy sessions in the federal civil service – the Buhari administration made it a thing where one of our big consulting outfits (we will return to this theme) regularly awarded it outrageous performance scores. Neither were there personnel who had clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs) attached to their job functions. Nor was any civil servant’s pay tied to these measures of performance. Career fast-tracks for high-octane staff were unheard of. Because of this, certain “bad belle-types” continue to argue that much of the lingering underperformance of our public sector, is the consequence of these deficiencies. What is measured, is what gets done, remember? On the upside, the civil service had those examinations designed to pick over performers from middling staff as they progressed up the work ladder.
Still, I think the dominant inclination in the debates around how to raise Nigeria’s productivity is to estimate too highly the value-addition from the many sacraments that we use to distinguish work practices in the private sector from those in the public one. Take the regular strategy/management retreats, for one. I am the first to admit that these have the cadences of an evangelical Christian revival crusade to them. The most successful of the invited consultants are the equivalent of the churches’ “men of God” – imaginative, divinatory, and Mosaic when you include the tablets of mission-speak that they are duty-bound to leave behind. Nonetheless, quarter-on-quarter, after these performances, the business faithful return to their places of worship, enact the same rituals with as much intensity, and then religiously mourn their business’ continuing loss of market share and its share price’s surrender of market confidence.
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The KPIs, on the other hand, are consistently an exercise in wishful thinking. To understand why, you simply need to remember that they are conceived in the extremely impulsive conditions that the Nigerian economy has always been. Unmoored buoys, then? Advocates of the utility of KPIs still insist that despite their sundry drawbacks, they, at least, provide mutually agreed markers around which coordinated activities within the businesses that rely on them may coalesce.
And those performance-based wages? The jury is still out on their efficacy. And this not just because of the shifting grounds on which the KPIs that inform them are based. Nor as a result of how bendy the KPIs turn out to be in the hands of management’s ever-changing views of what they prefer to measured. Economics literature suggests that compensating only middle-level managers and above, these reward schemes emaciate workers with lower skills – i.e. workers whose functions most of these workplaces feel comfortable outsourcing for far lower wages.
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Is then the distinction between work practices in our organised private sector and the public sector one without any real difference? Do the preceding concerns bear out the conceit that only the infusion of private sector work ethics into the public service can improve the performance of the local economy? Imagine making a CEO of a Nigerian bank the ranking minister on the management of the economy, when his only claim to competence as he rose through the ranks in the bank was his deposit-raising abilities – in other words, how well-off his contacts are, or the sacrifices and offerings he bore in order to raise the deposits?
If our private sector ethos would not materially help our ailing public sector, what of the prospect from infusing personnel from the big consulting outfits (the same ones who awarded the Buhari administration exceptionally high marks in its management of the economy) into the public sector? The main argument, here, is cultural: this cadre having been exposed to global best practices should be in a better position to engineer a culture bump wherever they go.
I met quite a few of these at work. Including the Harvard-trained MBA who would send his staff to go scour for discarded phone recharge cards on the street next door to help him retire his phoney phone bills. Much later came the fancy C-Suite habitant whose understanding of business management rested entirely on paying Islamic clerics (those ones who reputedly only sit on cowhide) to recite daily prayers for him.
My work path was strewn with these types of people. And yes, they are scarcely different from the rest of us. They kiss arse as fluently. They luxuriate in the fawning uncritical attention paid them by their subordinates. In their reckoning there is neither distinction nor difference between their respective organisation’s financial resources and their salaries. And if the domestic incentive structure were not comprehensively distorted, most would suffer a run on their businesses, and an implosion of their share prices.
Our culture, I am told, is one reason why there are no consequences for bad behaviour in this country. While this may be true, we are not going to fix our collective problems by entertaining the myth that our cultural failings present Manichaean alternatives: a desirable, private sector practice; and a supplantable public service character holding back our progress. Across the economy, Nigerians have a very bad behaviour problem.
Uddin Ifeanyi, a journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
