Nigeria Content Online

President Jonathan
has recently rolled out his ambitious roadmap for the power sector
ahead of the anticipated declaration of his candidacy in the coming
elections. The plan aims to place the private sector as the key driver
of the reforms and to attract an annual investment of US$3.5 billion
while delivering 7,000MW by April next year and 14,000MW by 2013. All
well and good. The devil, as the say, lies in the details.

The whole world
knows that Nigeria has never been short of great ideas. The gaping hole
in our national system is quite simply a lack of effective
implementation.

The failure to
deliver is not only a leadership problem; it has to do with the
systemic failure of bureaucracy, public policy and decision-making
systems. As a country, we have been largely bypassed by the New Public
Management revolution, which started in the United States about two
decades ago with its objective of reinventing government within the
paradigm of efficiency and results-based management.

According to the
Harvard neurologist and educationist Howard Gardner, “all leaders are
limited in what they can accomplish”. In rich as well as poor
democracies, leaderships require support systems that can help them
deliver on their mandates against the backdrop of increasingly critical
electorates. One of my most inspiring teachers has been the
distinguished Israeli policy scientist Yehezkel Dror. Several years ago
Dror called for a ‘new order of leadership’ — a new mindset anchored
on transformational leadership that is rigorous intellectually and
politically savvy and entrepreneurial.

Dror has been the
‘beautiful mind’ behind succeeding leaderships in Tel Aviv who have
managed to build a prosperous and secure democracy in a sea of
turbulence and hostility.

In a seminal 1986
essay, he developed the concept of the ‘central mind of government’ to
help enrich governance and decision-making at the highest levels of
leadership in a manner that promotes the collective interest while
providing overall strategic direction for government.

Britain under
former Prime Minister Tony Blair may have taken those lessons on board
in creating the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU). After his second
election victory in June 2001 in which the Labour Party won by a
landslide, Prime Minister Tony Blair solemnly told the great British
public that he interpreted his victory as “a mandate for reform…an
instruction to deliver.” Blair subsequently invited a noted academic,
Professor Michael Barber, to set up the PMDU which was located within a
few doors of the prime minister’s own office.

Several years
earlier Barber had been recruited to oversee policy implementation
within the treacherous British public school system which had, in some
parts, fallen to Third World levels. He seemed to possess the elixir
stone that changed things with remarkable speed. Exam results improved;
some of the inner city schools that had been largely Dickensian
hell-holes where pupils carried knives and guns were infused with a new
lease of life. Barber has serendipitously invented a new profession
that goes by the name of ‘deliverology’ — defined as a systematic
process through which system leaders can drive progress and deliver
results.

The PMDU’s brief
was to monitor the four core areas of the government’s strategic
priorities, namely health, education, transport and the Home Office.
With a staff of about 40, the PMDU operated as a ‘slim and mean’
outfit, with a proactive no-nonsense approach that held cabinet members
and senior mandarins personally accountable for performance.

While the focus was
on long-term strategic targets, the PMDU carefully cultivated
short-term wins considered crucial to gaining public confidence and
building momentum for greater success. Consideration was given to
setting clear goals design of a delivery map and delivery chain by
which all relevant stakeholders understand what they have to do,
trajectories mapping progress towards implementation, data and leading
indicators with real-time performance information, stocktaking with the
Prime Minister and the Cabinet and commitment to best practice through
continuous improvement of processes and systems to achieve success.

The PMDU has been a
remarkable success. Governments across the world have sought to imitate
its key features. The IMF has described the approach as a ‘frontier’ of
performance management in government.

Given the complex
challenges we face as a country, we need creative decision-making
systems that would enable leaderships deliver on their core mandates.
At the end of the day, Goodluck Jonathan will be judged on whether or
not he has delivered. The British PMDU model is as good a model as any
to consider.

The American
statesman Henry Kissinger famously remarked that political office taxes
intellectual capital. Many of our leaders seem patently ill prepared
for high office. Once in power, there is no time to engage in new
learning. But leadership does not require that one knows everything.
With regard to electricity and other critical sectors, leaderships must
be humble enough to defer to the talents who can cut through the
nonsense and get things done.

Destiny rarely provides such opportunities for statesmen to make a
difference. It would be tragic for our country if Mr. Jonathan ends up
just as another ‘cash and carry’ political prisoner to reptilian party
hacks and an increasingly imperious and rapacious governorate.