Also FG/STATE cooperation, slow flip/flop courts judgements;
ABCDEFGGHI=Avoid Bribery & Corruption Daily Everywhere For Good Governance Here Immediately.
Please make copies of this for friends and foe. Stick copies on your notice boards at home, school, church, mosque, office, bedroom, classrooms, school hall, lecture rooms, your door, backpack, car etcetera.
Each of us can contribute to the anticorruption fight. Take the ABCD decision and invite others. If not we are responsible for any coming corruption started after today. Corruption is a human act, it is not ‘institutional’. Humans institutionalise corruption and corrupt the system. A building, a business or a computer cannot be corrupt. It is the humans in and using them who are corrupt. A corrupt person is a criminal and criminals stop their crime immediately when caught. They do not need a period of time to reduce their corrupt behavior slowly like being weened off the drug corruption. Today even after the new government change, there has been no attitudinal change. Buhari should suspend and sack the ogas allowing corruption. Only a united anti ‘B&C’ Campaign can immediately save us. Take the ‘Avoid Bribery & Corruption Decision Everyday’ – personal, collective, corporate and government. If not corruption will kill Nigeria.
President Buhari, please maximise ‘ease of doing business’ cooperation between states and federal government, cross-party. Please initiate a high powered, red tape cutting, multi-ministry Presidency based ‘Committee of FG/ State Cooperation’. This will give quick approvals and decisions on state requests for FG permission for state projects needing FG input like the wonderful Yar’Adua/Fashola led Lekki bridge. This will reduce the friction and powerplay reducing state development, time wasting and speed state progress. Beyond grandstanding politics do the federal government staff and politicians know that healthy states mean a healthy federation?
Still on time wasting. Wasting someone’s time is a calculated weapon of the devil and a sin. Everyone has a limited time on earth allocated by God. How dare you as governor, GM or gateman waste someone else’s God given time. Punctuality and precision are power. Time wasting is a harrowing strategy practiced nationwide and characterized by carefully concocted delays like waiting one hour to start meetings and programmes, taking time to give information, giving a 14 point information sheet one point each day instead of at once, go-come-go-come instructions, deliberately misplaced or ‘lost’ files kept at the bottom of oga’s or even the messengers draw , file is with an untouchable ‘Oga’, appointments given but the official is deliberately never-on-seat to sign off documents. These are a deliberate strategy to perpetuate the suffering of the citizenry beyond endurance forcing a bribe. Though the private sector is also corrupt, time wasting is a specialisation of government/civil service. The amount of time wasted is the main difference between the public and the private sector. The government and local secretariat, the worst places for ease of doing business, must be forced to cut the time for delivering services to citizens. To combat time wasting files must be easily tracked, alarm bells should ring if files are kept for too long by particular officers, appointments should be logged and adhered to. Date and time should be inserted in each and every file movement. Supervising Senior administration staff need to be appointed as ‘Time Wasting Elimination Officers’ to closely monitor the Daily File Movement Register and raise red flags for identified infringement. Indeed, the whole issue of time wasting requires a much higher profile in ‘easy of doing Business’ studies and strategies as time wasting is usually direct evidence of corruption, or incompetence for example in delivery of forms, a required list, the end product eg a license, permission, certificate or document. No anticorruption strategy will work while unsupervised staff can maliciously and without consequence block citizens’ access to services.
Identify how many new roads have crossed state borders opening new state zones and bypassing deliberately abandoned ‘FG roads’, deliberately left abandoned to keep states in check – subservient to a subversive FG? Instead we watched while the Ore Benin and Lagos Ibadan and other roads became death-traps and unmotorable without a whimper for fear of offending the FG. We cannot even signboard the millions of potholes with ‘Slow Down: Potholes Ahead’ for fear of offending the non-existent or criminally crippled ‘Maintenance Section’ of the Federal Ministry of Works. Our old regions were very successful as ‘economic zones’ and were successful at road maintenance, some lasting even 60 years till today and shaming modern day contractors and mocking corruption. Unfortunately, the cancer greed for power under the guise of military unitary government put its foot in the door of governance and refused to remove it from the pot of gold called the budget.
There is also time wasting in the legal world. The wave of legal reversals and flip flops especially in political cases are not amusing or merely an exercise in legal gymnastics. The reversals have tremendous costs in waste of both time and money and nation impact. Happily judges are increasing the fines for unnecessary delays and wrong prosecutions or frivolous legal arguments. Such fines should be increased and cover the total cost of the delays. These have cause and consequence for the entire political landscape as delays and further confuse the citizenry do not auger well for Nigeria. We are still awaiting the conclusion of the trial of an arrested person being accused of being an infamous kidnapper.
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