Follow Us on Google
From campaign promises to quarterly targets, public scorecards and consequences for failure one of the most striking features of Prince Adewole Adebayo’s policy document, ‘Farewell to Poverty and Insecurity’ is not merely the scale of what he proposes to do, but the emphasis he places on how the government should deliver, measure and account for what it promises.
At the heart of the blueprint is an idea that could represent a significant departure from the familiar culture of governance in Nigeria, and that is that government must be managed for results.
Adebayo’s proposed presidential delivery and performance office, baseline audits, quarterly milestones, public reporting and corrective mechanisms for programmes that fail to meet their objectives point towards a model in which the government is not simply expected to announce policies, release funds or commission projects, but to demonstrate that those interventions have produced measurable improvements in the lives of citizens.
It is a philosophy that seeks to change the relationship between the government and the people.
Under such an arrangement, a presidential promise would no longer end with the announcement of a policy. It would begin with a baseline: Where are we today?
It would then be followed by a target: Where do we intend to be?
There would be a timeline: When should we get there?
There would be an assigned responsibility: Who is accountable for delivering it?
And there would be measurement: Did it happen?
Where the answer is no, the proposed corrective mechanism introduces another important dimension, which is that government should be capable of recognising failure, correcting it and holding those responsible to account rather than allowing failed programmes to continue indefinitely simply because they were government initiatives.
That is potentially a profound change in the philosophy of public administration.
A president on the clock
The underlying conception is that the president should not function merely as the country’s chief political figure, but as its chief delivery officer.
Ministers and government agencies would not simply be custodians of portfolios. Their performance would be connected to clearly defined objectives.
Agriculture would have measurable outcomes. Electricity would have measurable outcomes. Healthcare would have measurable outcomes. Education would have measurable outcomes. Employment would have measurable outcomes. Security would have measurable outcomes.
And citizens would have a means of knowing whether those outcomes were being achieved. This shifts the emphasis from activity to impact.
A ministry could spend billions of Naira and still fail to improve the lives of Nigerians. A government could commission hundreds of projects and still leave the underlying problem unresolved.
Adebayo’s proposed governance model attempts to place the emphasis on the final question: What changed?
The power of a baseline
The baseline audit may be one of the most consequential elements of the proposal.
Other News
Before promising to transform a sector, the government must establish its actual condition. How many Nigerians have reliable electricity? What is the real employment situation? How many functional hospitals exist? What is the condition of federal roads? How many children are outside school? What is the actual productive capacity of Nigerian industries? How much food is being produced? How much is being imported? Without reliable baseline information, governments can claim success simply by presenting selective statistics. A baseline creates a reference point against which progress can be measured. It therefore gives the citizens something more powerful than a political speech – a basis for verification.
Quarterly accountability
Nigeria’s political culture often operates on four-year electoral cycles. Governments make promises at the beginning of an administration and are frequently judged near the end of the tenure. A quarterly performance system changes that rhythm. Instead of waiting four years to discover that a programme has failed, the government can potentially discover the problem within months. If a target is being missed, why? Is the funding inadequate? Is the responsible agency failing? Is legislation required? Has the original policy assumption proved wrong? Has the economic environment changed? Should the programme be redesigned? This is the logic of management applied to governance. It treats public policy as something that must be continuously monitored and adjusted rather than something announced once and defended indefinitely.
When government reports to the people
Perhaps, the most important dimension is public reporting. If performance information is genuinely made available to Nigerians, citizens will cease to be passive recipients of the government’s claims. They will become participants in the accountability process. The farmer can ask whether agricultural targets are being achieved. The entrepreneur can ask whether the promised business environment has improved. The student can ask whether education targets are being met. The patient can ask whether healthcare outcomes have improved. The electricity consumer can ask whether the promised increase in power supply has materialised. In that sense, transparency becomes more than publishing the government’s documents. It becomes putting the government’s performance before the people, continuously and measurably.
Failure becomes signal not secret
There is also something particularly important about the proposed corrective mechanism. No government, however competent or well-intentioned, will get every policy right. Economic conditions change. Projects encounter obstacles. Forecasts prove wrong. Institutions fail. Policies sometimes produce unintended consequences. A mature system of governance should therefore not assume that every government programme will succeed exactly as originally designed.
The more important question is whether the government can identify failure early enough to correct it.
That is the dimension Adebayo appears to be bringing into the governance conversation. It is a shift from a culture in which failure can be explained away to one in which failure becomes information requiring correction.
Turning good intentions to system
This may ultimately be the most interesting aspect of Adebayo’s proposition. Presidents come and go. Political slogans change. Ministers change. But the institutions can survive individual administrations. By proposing a delivery and performance architecture around the presidency, he is attempting to turn what might otherwise be personal good intentions into an institutional system of governance.
The system would constantly remind the government that this is what you promised, this is where you started, this is where you should be, this is what you have achieved, this is what you have not achieved and this is what you must do differently. That is a fundamentally different conception of public leadership.
The real test
Whether Adebayo would ultimately be able to implement all the ambitious objectives contained in the blueprint remains a question that must be tested against Nigeria’s fiscal realities, institutional constraints and political environment. But the governance philosophy embedded in the blueprint deserves attention independently of individual policy targets.
It proposes that the value of government should be judged not by the eloquence of its promises, the size of its budgets or the number of ceremonies it holds, but by the measurable improvement it produces in the lives of citizens.
That is perhaps the new dimension Adebayo is bringing to the governance debate. It is a proposition that says the Nigerian presidency should not merely govern. It should deliver. It should measure. It should report. It should listen. It should correct itself.
And, ultimately, it should place its record before the citizens and allow the evidence to speak. If that philosophy were to become institutionalised, the most significant legacy of the blueprint might not be any single promise about electricity, jobs, education, healthcare or security.
It could be the establishment of a political culture in which a promise creates an obligation, an obligation creates a target, a target creates responsibility and responsibility creates accountability.
In that model, the presidency would no longer simply be given four years to explain what went wrong. The clock would start from day one.
