Step Up Nigeria: President Goodluck Jonathan

As President Goodluck Jonathan is inaugurated today, he needs to prioritise and focus on reforms that will yield poverty reducing growth and lift millions of Nigerian citizens out of poverty. Improving governance would be a first step towards achieving this and it should be a key priority for the government. The following measures should be considered:

Public service delivery

1. It should no longer be business as usual for public sector institutions.  Public institutions tasked with the responsibility of delivering essential services to the people such as electricity, roads, education and health should be more transparent and accountable to the people. It would be necessary for these agencies at the beginning of the financial year to clearly state realistic targets and results they intend to achieve during the financial year. This should be published. This will create more awareness amongst people on how public funds are being spent. It will also make it easier to monitor and evaluate the performance of government agencies responsible for providing these key services. The new government should also make it a key priority to tackle the issues of slow budget implementation (more of this to follow in later post).

Enhanced transparency and accountability in budgetary allocation and expenditures

2. The president should re-introduce and enforce the regular publishing of monthly budgetary allocations to all tiers of government in widely read newspapers and on their websites. This should be accompanied by the publishing of its expenditures on a quarterly or annual basis.

Power Supply

3. The state has not been able to provide adequate power supply despite the billions of dollars that has been ploughed into the sector. The government has started in the right direction by privatising the power sector. The government should ensure that the privatisation process is transparent.

Management of oil revenues

4. The president should ensure that the Sovereign Wealth Fund is efficiently managed in a transparent and accountable manner. It should ensure that it strictly adheres to the Santiago Principles [http://www.iwg-swf.org/pubs/gapplist.htm]. Every investment and its returns should be publicly disclosed (see post on ‘How to make the Nigerian Sovereign Wealth Fund Transparent’).

Tackling Corruption

5. The new government should focus more on tackling the root causes of corruption. Patronage politics is one of the major causes of corruption in Nigeria. Reforming election practices will be a good start particularly on the issue of campaign financing. It will be good to have stronger legislation to prevent excessive spending by political parties and candidates during elections. Political office aspirants tend to spend a lot during elections and often rely on ‘god fathers’ whom they have to pay back using public funds when they are in power. The government should introduce measures such as allocating equal amount of free broadcasting airtime to each major political party during election campaigns. This will help towards reducing expenses during elections and the dependence on ‘god fathers’ which is a major cause of grand corruption in Nigeria.

In addition to tackling the root causes of corruption, the agencies charged with the responsibility of tackling corruption should also be strengthened through creating laws that would give them the independence needed to operate objectively.