With the economy squeezed of cash and multi billion naira in salary arrears plaguing most states of the federation, you would wonder why so many people still jostled to be governors. Well, elections are over, governors have been sworn in and fresh terms have commenced.
This, of course, is the easy part. Running the state is the job and it will be tougher now. Not only will it not be business as usual, an entirely new template is required. Any state that cannot earn far more than the federally-allocated funds is doomed.
This is why reading Ben Ayade, the new governor of Cross River State declare that he would run the state like a business, one thought it’s the way to go (Vanguard May 29, 2015). My government will do business, he said. It is a fallacy that government cannot run business; his government will run big businesses. He will restructure the civil service to make it businesslike. He will commoditise and commercialise government. His Ministry of Works will have to do the work; his permsecs must be ready to don jeans and T-shirt and get on the shop floor, get on the pay-loader. We will have fewer white collar jobs and more green collar (agric) and blue collar (factory) jobs…
Wow, great idea but carrying out such mass reorientation will take some doing; a paradigm shift.
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