What is your citizenship worth?

Introduction

Against the backdrop of the on-going dialogue on the essence and structure of the Nigerian state, I have decided to reproduce a revised version of the paper that I presented last June on the value of our country’s citizenship. Though still fairly lengthy, the new text is considerably shorter than the original.

I. Identity value of citizenship: meaning and significance

Ever since our emergence as an independent nation on 1st October 1960, our single dominant concern has been how to safeguard our country’s sovereignty and maintain its territorial integrity. Yet, achieving the dual objective (of preserving state sovereignty and territorial integrity) warrants that the time, the resources and the energies of the state be channelled towards one and only one end—that is, the enhancement of what I, for lack of a better phrase, termed the identity value of the Nigerian citizenship in 2001.

Enhancing the identity value of citizenship requires, at the minimum, running an open government, a government that gives voice to the people and provides the whys and the wherefores of its decisions. It demands restoring public trust in the state and its institutions. It entails convincing the citizen that the Nigerian state is better equipped than any alternative arrangement to guarantee access to what makes life worth living—be this personal security, food on the table, potable water, clean air, sound health, electricity supply, gainful employment, affordable housing, or basic human dignity. Above all, it demands that the individual who values his/her rights and freedom does nothing to devalue the citizenship of his/her compatriots.

It is fair to ask what is meant by ‘identity value of citizenship’. As I saw it back in 2001, the average citizen—the one to whom voice must be given—has options as regards objects or symbols with which to identify. Depending on the circumstances prevailing at any point in time, the chances are that the citizen will juggle conflicting–national, ethnic, religious, sectarian, generational, and as is becoming increasingly obvious, partisan political–loyalties. Although highly unlikely, s/he may identify wholly (that is, hundred percent) with our country, Nigeria.

The probability of identifying unconditionally with, and bearing true allegiance to, Nigeria will be high where the benefits are seen to outweigh the costs. In other words, the “identity value of Nigerian citizenship” will rise (say, from zero to between 0.6:1.0 and 0.9:1.0) where, in return for the fulfilment of basic obligations, the Nigerian state assures the citizen full and equal access to individual and civic rights. While it is true that the state at no time sat down with any of us to negotiate and sign a formal ‘social contract’, it is safe to assume that having coaxed or coerced the citizen into surrendering a fraction of his/her rights, like the right to do as s/he pleases without regard for the consequences for others, the state is under obligation to safeguard the residual rights. By residual rights I mean the ones left with the citizen after the state has appropriated those that s/he, the citizen, does not need except to threaten or annul other citizens’ rights.

Where the state appears unable or unwilling to provide credible answers to dominant concerns—especially, concerns for personal security, for equal and unimpeded access to essential services, and for unhampered exercise of rights that neither imperil nor annihilate opposite numbers’ rights–the citizen will inevitably look for support elsewhere. If the state slackens in its primary role—in particular, the role of guarantor of personal security, satisfier of basic needs, and guardian of rights, due process and the rule of law—it will of necessity have to compete with non-state actors for the citizen’s allegiance. Among the state’s rivals for the citizen’s soul are ethnic lobbies, vigilante groups, ethnic storm troopers, patronage-seeking geo-political zones, proselytising religious orders and sects, entrenched economic interests, politically active community leaders, and influence-peddling party chieftains and godfathers.

If, as implied in the preceding paragraphs, the average citizen has issues and constantly pleads to be heard on remedies, what channels have been created in Nigeria to receive and process grievances? Does the Nigerian state have mechanisms for considering the citizen’s complaints/petitions such that recourse to external, non-state bodies (like tribal councils and solidarity fronts, houses of worship, secret cults or the ‘deep, invisible state’) would be considered superfluous? Is the capacity to give voice to the people built into our machinery of government, and are the operators conditioned and eager to apply this capacity to hear what the people are saying prior to fulfilling their legitimate demands? This question, simple as it may sound, is not easy to answer. One way to answer it is to start with the challenges facing us as a nation and then proceed to examine the policy and service delivery responses to date. The gap between the challenges and the responses would, with varying degrees of accuracy, indicate how far the state has gone in listening to the citizen or, at least, in appreciating the gravity of his/her situation.

II. Nigeria’s state formation and maintenance challenges: an assessment of magnitude and adequacy of response

Not many of us appreciate what we have. In fact, left to a good number of us, Nigeria, a “mere geographical expression”, would be immediately disbanded and then carved into separate and autonomous ethnic nationalities. Each time things do not go our way, the first question that comes to our mind is why the state, in its present form, should continue to exist. I see evidence of this myopia in many online and offline posts commenting on the series of crises facing our country in recent months.

In my humble opinion, now is the time to begin to rethink our view of our country as a “colonial creation” which is destined to crumble sooner than later, and instead see it as a potential Tiger currently wrestling with temporary setbacks. Nigeria, as we already know, is endowed with a huge reservoir of natural resources, notably, petroleum, tin, iron ore, bauxite, manganese, as well as fertile and arable land. With a population of between 140 and 150 million, most of them young and energetic people, ours is clearly the largest black nation on planet Earth. Yet, rather than turn our natural endowments and our enormous size into our own advantage, we have made choices which consistently draw us back, and prevent us from realizing our full potential. The attitude seems to be if my tribesman can’t be chief of state, let’s smash the state and be done with it once and for all!

Instead of pulling together, our compatriots have formed the habit of drawing apart and boxing themselves into ethno-religious Bantustans. The only time they come out of seclusion and self-marginalization is when booties–mostly posts, contracts, and money–are about to be shared and failure to come out and claim one’s “rights” spells grave danger, the danger of losing out to those we consider politically active but “undeserving” stranger elements. If truth be told, each one of us jealously guards his/her rights, but is not averse to confiscating, trampling on, or extinguishing his/her neighbour’s rights.

While acknowledging the efforts that our leaders are making to forge a nation out of heterogeneous nationalities, we must also realize that their success in accomplishing the herculean task depends largely on every Nigerian’s preparedness to buck the trend and make new and hard choices. At the minimum, we have to resist the temptation to set one ethno-sectarian group against another, all in an attempt to acquire or retain power. We also have to depart radically from a disturbing practice that has gained traction in recent years. This is the practice that sees the annexation and unaccountable management of the public space as the endgame of power, and not the accumulation of productivity gains much less the enhancement of Gross National Welfare (GNW).

I have no doubt in my mind that many of our leaders are fired by the highest ideals. Nonetheless, when confronted with loud and insistent demands from powerful blocs, even the most public-spirited among them will be tempted to sacrifice excellence and lean towards mediocre solutions—that is, solutions addressing the immediate concerns of an assertive and organized minority but at variance with the preferences and long-term interests of the public at large.

Under normal circumstances, our country’s heterogeneity should be a source of our strength. Heterogeneity should foster openness and pluralism. Regrettably, it has, in the hands of cynics, turned into our albatross. On the pretext that they are championing the interests of “their” people, howsoever defined, strongmen and transactional leaders have established their suzerainty over the public space prior to personalizing and manipulating government structures, acts and decisions. Seeing politics in every object, the strongmen have neither the time nor the patience for the application of incrementally rational, let alone the more ambitious rational-synoptic, decision-making techniques. Rather than optimize where the information available is both reliable and complete, or ‘satisfyze’ when the information is momentarily adequate, they dispense with commitment to rationality entirely. Substituting their own judgement for facts and reason, they willfully present the interest of a few as the interest of all.

Politicization rears its ugly head at different stages of state formation, but most especially at that of personnel recruitment. A public service post falls vacant, but before open competitive processes are exhausted and candidates are transparently assessed against the expected deliverables, an all-out war breaks out pitching one interest against another. Strangely, the combatants are not the people at large but the candidates and their backers, mostly, party chieftains, political godfathers, self-appointed spokespersons of ‘marginalized’ communities and of ‘geo-political zones’, religious leaders, and sorcerers retained for spiritual reinforcement. Each contesting bloc never gives up until it applies methods fair and foul to have its man on the job.

It is not just the appointment process that tends to be politicized and shielded from public scrutiny. Where up and coming nations apply rational decision making techniques to maximize the benefits of public investment in various sectors and to “satisfyse” a wide and steadily expanding cross-section of society, our country has perfected a system allowing only a few politically powerful groups to dictate policy directions and to decide how public policy should supposedly be implemented.

Like other critics, I have blamed external institutions, like the World Bank and the IMF, not only for usurping national policymaking powers but also for shutting the people out of the policy process. However, it is not the World Bank that took away our people’s voice—the voice that came with the attainment of independence in October 1960. It is not the IMF that told us to shut up and come to terms with SAP then being forced down our throats. What gradually replaced our policy-making autonomy with servitude is aversion to independent thinking. What gagged us and rendered us speechless for long is plain abdication of domestic responsibility for the design of rational, innovative and context-specific policies. The effect of abdication is compounded by our leaders’ eagerness to stand aside and let distant, unelected and unaccountable bureaucracies take the blame for the design and implementation of anti-people policies.

For no matter how one looks at it, the neoliberal doctrine underpinning our macro-economic policy for more than two decades has become the perfect scapegoat for the hardship inflicted on the masses. With their fingerprints wiped clean of the externally formulated doctrine, the internal beneficiaries of the “supply side” growth strategy have succeeded in foisting a plutocracy on the people in place of the democracy promised by our founding fathers. Under the pretext of liberalizing the economy, powerful interests have taken earth-shattering decisions with little consideration for public preferences or long-term repercussions. Dazzling us with PowerPoint presentations and arcane growth statistics, the backers of “trickle-down” policies constantly remind us that steadily improving fiscal and macro-economic balances are an indication of how far we have gone on the road to progress and everlasting happiness.

As they try to convince themselves and the rest of us that our life is getting better, proponents of “lean and mean” government proceed with unseemly haste to sell off public assets at give-away prices; ‘monetize’ public service benefits; cheer landlords on as they prey on renters and grab sizeable proportions of the ‘monetized’ benefits; transfer the ownership and governance of swaths of territory to private estate developers and speculators; withdraw agricultural subsidy; impose cutbacks in the health, education, and infrastructure development sectors; and treat corruption and criminality with kid gloves. Even if these acts enable us to post accelerated growth rates, it is highly unlikely that the benefits would ‘trickle down’ fast enough to ameliorate the masses’ wretched conditions.

III. Service delivery gap: the case for citizen voice and empowerment

Outside providing an environment conducive to the exercise of individual suffrage rights, granting the eligible beneficiaries unimpeded access to service is by far the most trustworthy method of empowering the citizen. Unfortunately, this particular method has yet to find favour in our country. The practice over the years has been to regard service provision as a favour to be extended to acquaintances or well-connected citizens.

In his day-to-day interactions with the MDA or its field agents, the citizen who manages to find his way through the bureaucratic labyrinth is unlikely to scale the obstacle courses awaiting him/her at every turn. Unless s/he knows who is in charge and meets the decision-maker in the right mood, s/he should brace for surprises and frustrations. If s/he is looking for information (like a guide on eligibility for a particular service, the procedure to follow to access the service, the number of forms to fill, and the sequence in which to follow up cases with multiple layers of authority), the citizen must make time to attend to business himself or ‘outsource’ the task to ‘expediters’ working on retainer, only-pay-only-served/OPOS, basis.

Since the average MDA is unlikely to be on the information highway, the citizen can neither contact it by e-mail nor leave a message on Facebook. The only exception is when applying for e-passports outside Nigeria. Even then, the applicant cannot be sure that s/he will easily find the appropriate link or complete the transaction smoothly and on time. For one thing, the website is unlikely to tell up front which operating system the applicant needs to register, log-in and submit or retrieve his/her application. Since the portals and the fields are unlikely to be designed based on an easily comprehensible logic or a particular sequential order, the applicant will spend hours flipping from page to page and scrolling up and down long-winded but unhelpful instructions.

If the citizen decides to send a letter the conventional way, s/he should not count on her/his mail being delivered by the postal staff, or if delivered, to be read and replied, as in days gone by, by one of the “obedient servants”.

The citizen should get used to the idea that the MDA would unilaterally decide what services to provide, when, how, and at what cost. The supplier of the services, big men and women in their own rights, would not consult the citizen-consumer when formulating performance indicators. The service providers will unilaterally set performance standards (including time, cost, and quality standards). In the unlikely event that the MDA decides to promulgate Customer Service Pledges and Charters, it will not seek the beneficiary’s opinion on product quantity/volume, unit cost, and delivery deadlines. Since the citizen’s assessment (of the timeliness, cost-effectiveness, quality and reliability of services, as well as courtesy of delivery agents) does not count, he should not expect to participate in beneficiary feedback surveys any time soon.

If the preceding judgment of the existing service delivery mechanisms seems overly harsh, let us examine available empirical evidence on our country’s rankings on two key indicators of quality service, that is, ease of doing business and international competitiveness. Based on criteria applied and the data gathered by the World Economic Forum as well as focus groups’ perceptions of business laws and regulations across countries, we can quickly rule out the possibility of even one African country making the list of the top ten most business-friendly in the world. Africa’s top three entries in 2009/2010, Mauritius, South Africa, and Botswana, placed 31st, 32nd and 38th respectively worldwide. Nigeria was not even on the list of the top 100 most business-friendly countries in the world.

When the bar was lowered and Nigeria was assessed along with other African countries, it placed a distant 17th, well behind Swaziland (that was ranked 10th in Africa and 108th globally), Seychelles, Ghana, and of course, Botswana, South Africa and Mauritius! In case anyone is wondering, our examiners did not act arbitrarily. They did not score us low because they hate our tribe, Nigeria, that is, but because our performance simply fell short when measured against verifiable indicators. The criteria applied by the World Economic Forum include:

• The complexity of the operating procedure, the length of time, and the minimum capital required to start a new business;

• Complexity of licensing, regulatory and inspectorate procedure;

• Property registration – the procedure, time and cost involved in registering business property;

• Taxation and fees regime – Level and amount of tax paid, the number of hours spent preparing annual tax returns and the impact on profit margin;

• Ease of cross-border transactions;

• Ease/difficulty of enforcing contractual obligations (integrity of law enforcement and judicial authorities, and link between police-cum-judicial procedure and access to justice).

The recent years’ impressive GDP growth (from the 2 percent growth rate of the early 2000’s to the 7.40 percent of 2011) underscores the inanity of reliance on materialistic measures of progress. At the very least, the figures mask the challenges facing the average citizen as s/he seeks access to what makes life worth living. Measured against every known yardstick, and regardless of the rising growth rates, the standard of living of the average Nigerian has declined steeply in recent years. Due largely to defects in our service delivery systems, our people are yet to feel the impact of economic growth.

In the first place, our economic performance itself is not as robust as it could possibly be. In terms of international competitiveness and per capita productivity, Nigeria lags behind less-populated countries (like South Africa, Mauritius, Botswana, Egypt, Ghana and Swaziland). Thanks to constant devaluation of citizenship or ‘human capital’, our country’s 2011 GDP of $420.8 billion is below South Africa’s $564.0 billion. Nigeria’s 2012 GDP per capita of $2,700 is measly when compared with Botswana’s $16,800, Mauritius’s $15,200, or South Africa’s $11,300. At a time when South Africa’s high technology exports accounted for between 5 and 7 percent of total manufactured exports, Nigeria exported virtually no technology—whether high, intermediate, or low!

Energy use per capita in Nigeria, an oil exporter, stood at 718 kg in 2002, in contrast to South Africa’s 2,505 kg. At the same time, per capita electricity consumption was 68 kWh, as against South Africa’s 3,860 kWh. In 2009, Nigeria’s electricity production stood at 18.82 billion kWh while consumption was pegged at 17.66 billion kWh. This is in sharp contrast to South Africa’s generation of 257.9 billion kWh and consumption of 234.2 billion kWh in 2012. Total installed capacity in Nigeria was 5.898 million kW compared to South Africa’s 44.26 million kW.

The social welfare indicators are particularly depressing. With a 2011 score of 0.471 on the human development index, Nigeria was ranked 153rd in the world. This places it far behind Libya, which ranked 64th in the world with an HDI score of 0.769, Mauritius (the 80th and HDI of 0.737); Gabon (106th, 0.683); Egypt (112th, 0.662); Botswana (119th, 0.634); South Africa 121st, 0.629); Ghana (135th, 0.558); and Swaziland (141st, 0.536). Nigeria trails Cameroon (150th in the world with HDI of 0.495); Madagascar (151st, 0.483), and Tanzania (152nd, 0.476)!

In contrast to 1980 when the proportion of people in poverty was 28.1 percent, by 2005, the percentage had risen to 65.6. Economic liberalization might have brought productivity gains, but it has also widened the gap between the new rich and the chronically poor. Due to restricted income mobility, close to 60 percent of those currently living in poverty, are likely to remain trapped there for the foreseeable future.

In 2003, average life expectancy was 45 years (two years lower than the African average of 47 years). In 2010, Nigeria recorded an infant mortality rate of 72.97 deaths per 1,000 live births, which compares rather unfavourably with South Africa’s 42.15 deaths per 1,000 live births. Nigeria allocated a mere 5.1 percent of its 2010 GDP to the health sector, compared with South Africa’s 8.9 percent. Nigeria also ranks low in terms of access to roads and rural infrastructure; food and nutrients; potable water; sanitation; basic health care; detoxification, rehabilitation and counselling of drug addicts; services geared towards promoting consistently high standards of primary, secondary and tertiary education; provision of disaster/emergency relief; job creation; as well as detection, investigation and control of crime.

Youth unemployment is a troubling phenomenon. According to the Bureau of Statistics, the proportion of unemployed Nigerians as at the first half of 2011 was 23.9 percent (or approximately 14 million), a figure higher than the 10 million (or 21.1 percent) recorded for the same period the previous year, and the 19.7 percent in 2009. Unemployment was highest among the active sections of the population–that is, youths aged between 15 and 24 as well as adults falling within the 25-44 year age bracket. It was also more pronounced in the rural areas than in urban centres. The states that were most badly hit by unemployment in 2011 are Yobe (60.6 percent); Zamfara (42.6 percent); and Niger (39.4 percent) .

The social distress that accompanies sluggish growth and the adoption of harsh economic policies cannot but conspire to threaten the fabric of society. Denied gainful employment opportunities, the youth turn to crime, lend support to extremist causes, or join crowds rented for the purpose of spooking political opponents or threatening community peace. Unemployed youth look for escape in psychogenic drugs which make them willing accomplices in the perpetration of violent crimes.

Thus, no day passes when the print and the electronic media do not report high crimes and gross misdemeanours. If it is not suicide bombers attacking police posts and places of worship one minute, it is armed robbers raiding banks and invading private homes the next. Drug trafficking and addiction, ritual killing, and other instances of anti-social behaviour compete for space on newspaper pages and for air time.

Our country’s security lapses have predictably been blamed on the Nigerian Police. Victim perception surveys and eye-witness accounts reveal that Nigerians are likely to be more dissatisfied than nationals of other countries with the quality and timeliness of police response to crime alerts. In contrast to the 45 percent dissatisfaction rate reported for other African countries, 51 percent of the Nigerians surveyed in 2008 had no confidence in the ability of the police to come to their rescue when victimized.

The police have been accused of cuddling criminals, fingering witnesses and divulging their informants’ identities. When they should be out and about securing our neighbourhoods, police men and women troop to the highways extorting monies from law-abiding citizens.

That corruption thrives in the police is by now uncontestable. Corruption is as rife in the police as it is endemic in our country. With regard to the police, corruption starts with the manner constables get selected for beats, and officers get posted to strategic commands. The cronyism that pervades high-level political recruitment also undermines the integrity and impairs the effectiveness of our law enforcement agencies.

Corruption is of course only one side of the story. Inadequate investment in police protection is another plausible explanation for the growing security lapses and policing failures. Police units are chronically short of detective, investigative, information and communication resources. The force is short of experts in finger printing and forensic analysis, cyber crime investigation, and criminal profiling. Even paying for stationery is a headache at police stations, a headache that the police gladly pass on to their “customers”, mostly complainants and accused persons. Where criminals roam the streets brandishing sophisticated weapons and terrorising citizens, the police lacks the wherewithal to respond fire for fire. A police formation in Lagos State was so short of money it had to rely on the generosity of a philanthropist to provide common toilet facilities. A police constable who dies in the line of fire cannot rely on the state to care for his surviving dependants.

Unfortunately, when law enforcement institutions are too incapacitated to secure life and property, self-help and vigilante justice take over. This spells danger for citizen trust in government, for quality of life, for internal security, and for our corporate existence.

IV. Giving voice to the people: the way forward

Enhancing the identity value of the Nigerian citizenship is clearly the most effective strategy for empowering the people and giving them voice. The success of the strategy nonetheless hinges on the adoption of at least four measures, notably, promotion of civic responsibility and of popular participation in governance; strengthening accountability, transparency and public integrity mechanisms; granting and broadening public access to information; and providing public service training institutions the resources they might need to integrate citizen concerns in the design and implementation of capacity building programmes.
Popular participation in governance

My brief does not include identifying the measures necessary to safeguard the average Nigerian’s suffrage rights. Still, it will not harm in the least if our leaders begin to reflect on ways of making the people’s votes count. It is only where the value of the citizen is fully acknowledged that a serious effort would be made to defer to the sovereignty, and heed the voice, of the people. No-one would dare intimidate the electorate, or hold the latter in contempt, where it is the electorate that actually decides the outcome of contests.

Until that day comes when people’s power really begins to count—that is, when one ethnic group’s voice is not cynically stirred up to drown out another’s—we may begin a thousand-mile journey with a few tentative steps. As a first step, we need to undertake a critical review of our local government and decentralization policy, paying particular attention to how far the policy accommodates the voice and aspirations of the people.

As part of efforts at safeguarding the rights and freedoms of all citizens, the career public service should, as a matter of priority, promote equality of access to public goods. In pursuit of this objective, it should recruit consultants knowledgeable in the design and implementation of customer/citizen-centred quality service initiatives.

Needless to add that to have a public service which is truly committed to prompt and efficient service delivery, there must be a strong demand from citizens for dignity, for equal protection under the law and for the observance of rights that are consistent with rights afforded by the citizenship of a democratic society. The different publics could count on access to quality service when they actively engage the MDAs and seize the latter on client concerns and preferences.

While pursuing its rights, each segment of the public must not lose sight of its civic obligations, particularly, the obligations to respect the right of others, to obey the law of the land, and to expose arbitrary and corrupt tendencies wherever such tendencies are sighted.

The corruption menace and citizenship worth

Quality service is not a done deal just because the MDAs’ clients want it that way. Quality service will in fact remain a pipedream unless and until we boldly confront that bogey called corruption. As Professor Adebayo Adedeji once noted, a leader who vanquishes the forces of corruption is more than half way to the finish line in the development race. The Asian Tigers (like Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore) did not begin their march to greatness until they had subdued corruption and indiscipline.

In Nigeria, corruption goes beyond the offer and/or acceptance of bribes, and takes different forms—including the diversion of public resources to personal or partisan political ends, the manipulation of procurement or recruitment processes; favouritism at recruitment interviews and at other staff selection stages; plain nepotism; sale of official secrets to the highest bidder; inflation of contract prices; influence peddling; extortion; subversion of internal processes to serve external interests; wilful castration of institutions and processes; falsification of records; divided loyalty/conflict of interest; solicitation of political or other high-level backing to frustrate due process or to interfere in lawful performance of official duties.

In its 2011 report, Transparency International notes that Nigerian civil servants took bribes amounting to N450 billion (roughly $3 billion) during the 2010/2011 fiscal year alone. It consistently ranks the country low on its Corruption Perception Index (CPI). The situation is so serious that nothing short of a radical surgery would do.

Besides diverting resources away from productive ends to the underground, sponger economy, corruption constitutes a clear and present danger to state and personal security. A proportion of the bail-out funds released to revive the Nigerian Railways and kick-start our economy went into private, but so far, untraceable, accounts. The pension scheme was imperilled by the acts of a few unscrupulous elements. The Police Equipment Fund which was created to revitalize our policing services (and safeguard our security) was itself raided, but the raiders are yet to be duly held to account. The National Identity Card project which would have provided information vital to internal security failed to take off despite changes in regimes and notwithstanding the huge chunks of national resources pumped into it. The project was derailed by corruption.

Above all, corruption ridicules our claim to sovereignty. Cases that our courts failed to decide satisfactorily sometimes ended in foreign jurisdictions to the embarrassment of Nigerian citizens.

Corruption thrives because of the general feeling that its perpetration carries little or no consequence. The high-profile investigations and the show-trials have promoted widespread cynicism rather than convince the public that the anti-corruption war is real and ongoing.

Access to Information

Corruption takes place either in the dark or under the radar—far from the prying eye of the public. The only way to expose what is hidden is by making information available. The citizen ought to have access to information on government policies, programmes, budget outlays, expenditure items and outcomes, as well as the criteria applied in deciding matters affecting, or of interest to, the citizen. Fortunately, the National Assembly has enacted a Freedom of Information Act. The question is whether our compatriots would take advantage of the Act to ask questions about how and in whose benefit they are being governed.

Building critical service delivery capacities

Since quality service calls for new types of skills, attitudes, systems and procedures, the management development institutes (like ASCON, Public Service Institute of Nigeria, and university departments of public administration) should organize tailor-made training programmes for various classes of service delivery agents.