“Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure” [Confucius] Everywhere you go in Africa, you are likely to hear people say “Our problem is not planning, but implementation.” People regale you with various examples of “beautiful plans” that were “technically perfect” but never made it to implementation. Indeed, the refrain “Our problem is not planning but implementation” receives knowing nods of approval from all and sundry and is generally taken as accepted wisdom. It is likely to win you loud ovation at any workshop or seminar in Africa. You could be forgiven for
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Monthly Archives January 2017
Nigeria Only Needs 6 Ministers. Sack The Other 30!
That got your attention, right? Preposterous idea, isn’t it? Or is it? Well, proponents of the Minimalist State argue that Government should only focus on Security, Health and Education, and leave everything else to the private sector to do. They will say “Let’s allow government to only have Ministers for Health, Education, Defence and Interior. That’s all! Everything else should be private sector run! Oh, alright then, let’s be generous and allow them Finance and Petroleum Ministers to make it 6, but we must really sack everyone else! Given the state of our economy, we really cannot justify spending money
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Those Useless Civil Servants
Those Useless Civil Servants First of all, I have finaly given in and joined Medium to save my readers the agony of my infamous 100-tweet tweet-storms. This post is my first and it was prompted by a tweet by @ManiPeters that some civil servants are untrainable. As always, I will start by providing some context, and my views will be based both on rigorous academic research and many years of practitioner experience. Of course, it wouldn’t have been authored by me if it was not somewhat controversial. Oh, and it may a bit long. The brilliant Nigerian political scientist, Peter Ekeh, wrote a
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