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I had just turned 22, freshly out of NYSC, and a few months into my first job. It was at a federal government ministry and I was deployed to the minister’s office. By the curious civil service mechanism of passing all tasks to subordinate officers, I found myself at the bottom of the rung. The task at hand was to draft a speech for the minister to commemorate activities marking Nigeria’s observation of World Food Day, in line with the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation, FAO.

None of the officers above me made any input into the speech, and I could not get clear policy or research materials indicating Nigeria’s position.

In short, I was stumped, but resolved to produce a rough draft. The outcome was a four-page speech for the minister written entirely on my own, detailing what the situation in Nigeria was and what I thought government was doing to enhance food security through the effective management of water resources and irrigated agriculture.

I expected my superiors to trash what I had written and replace it with a proper position paper for the minister’s televised address. The speech did not only pass through unaltered and without additional inputs, but went straight to the minister who read it with a pious conviction on television and radio.

Next day, practically all newspapers in the country reported the minister’s address as a key policy of government! To say that I was aghast is an understatement. How can the simple essay written by a fresh employee with little experience, but more importantly, without serious research or considered opinions become government policy? My greatest shock came when I was commended for doing a good job. Then the speech was promptly filed away.

Little has changed

Government policy is still mostly ad-hoc. There are few master plans to guide the actions of government officials in line with public policy. There are few policies to streamline the operations of many government agencies, and where such exist, few officials are aware of, or even willing to work with them, if they conflict with vested interests.

Over time, I drafted what were intended as mere speeches that somehow became keynote addresses. Some of them reached the highest echelons of government and were presented as public policy. They were often written with minimal input from established frameworks because such guides simply did not exit, or where they did, were of little use. My disillusionment grew as I watched, listened, or read ordinary speeches meant for specific events substituting as public policy. This hastened my eventual departure.

In the countdown to the 2011 elections, the same contradictions are beginning to manifest from the campaign teams of the major aspirants. Informed writers are tasked with producing beautiful manifestos for aspirants, but as usual, these documents that should guide that candidate’s administration in the event of victory at the polls, will be discarded as soon as victory is announced. The candidates often do not contribute to, or even understand what they are pitching to the public; that is why they mumble and fumble through them.

Forgive the digression

The crux of this piece is whether there is a line between speech writing in Nigeria and policy-making. In ideal circumstances, every course of government action should be guided by well streamlined policy processes from initiation to completion.

Speeches and addresses should be excerpts from government policy in that sector. But because policy is often lacking in government, pedestrian speeches, keynote addresses, and even ordinary comments by government officials often end up being reported or even regarded as public policy.

Part of the problem may be because the public service has been unable to drop the toga of colonial heritage when it was dominated by Europeans on whom were concentrated executive, judicial, and legislative powers.
Succeeding constitutional reviews increased the stake of Nigerians at the helm of the public service until iIndependence in 1960. Independence was supposed to catalyse the evolution of the service as a national institution for spearheading the rapid transformation of the nation and modernising administrative processes.

But on a visit to the National Archives in Kaduna in 2007, I caught sight of a memo that was being scanned for digitization. A white colonial official had written it back in 1907, exactly 100 years ago. The same diction, style, and procedure are still in use today.

Then it hit me: a hundred years ago, the word of the colonial official was law. Today, the speech of a government official is public policy.