Special Adviser to the President on Policy and Coordination, Hadiza Bala Usman, speaks on economic policies of the President Bola Tinubu administration and other national issues in an interaction with journalists. ‘LAOLU AFOLABI brings the excerpts:
What basically does your position entails?
My role is special adviser to the president on policy and coordination. As the name indicates, there’s a component of it which is policy. There’s another component which speaks to coordination. As we started putting together administration to institute the structure and the implementation mechanism, we are working on developing a large monitoring M&E structure across the board for all the ministers. The president has a list of identified priorities, eight-number priority areas. And in these areas, we have worked on developing deliverables for each ministry. So each ministry has details of its deliverables which are linked to a priority. And within those deliverables, their key performance indicators, we got all of this arising from the policy advisory council report, the national development plan that Nigeria has 2021 to 2027. We have various components of policy documentation on which basis each sectoral deliverable was defined, in order for us to, as I mentioned, structure, our monetary mechanism.
We worked on scheduling bilateral engagements with each ministry. So, of the 35 ministries that we have, we have engaged each ministry and made submission to them detailing their deliverables. Each minister with his team has looked at the deliverables, reviewed them and we’ve had one-on-one technical sessions of the team. The permanent secretaries, the head of their planning directories have looked at it. We felt the need for the ministers to take ownership of these deliverables. We felt that it was important for them to have a key understanding of what their mandate entails. So, logically, we know that you have a mandate as a minister, you are appointed and given your mandate, you go to the ministry, you receive your ministerial briefings, your handover notes and you have your own vision of what you want to do. And the ministry in itself already has work plans of what it’s planning to do.
So merging that and looking at deliverables that arose from the Policy Advisory Council, we have now reviewed them in totality and reduced it into key performance indicators. We’re having a retreat at the first week in November, and that is where we’re going to further conclude on this KPIs and deliverables on which basis the president is going to sign a performance bond which each minister and that performance bond would be what we would use to monitor effectiveness and how much a minister is able to deliver.
The other side of it is that, we have looked to ensure that all of these deliverables form part of our 2024 budget. So the MTEF has been developed and the MTEF contains the content of exactly what the sectoral policy thrust are. And they are detailed to recognise what the administration intends to do within these four years. And we’ll be taking it annually. So the budget circular that is being issued to the ministries provides clearly that your budget provision needs to be in line with the deliverables that has been detailed and accepted by you. We also felt the need to allow for 2023 for the ministers to be in preparatory mode to look at what it is that they need to have done to conclude on their planning. And all manners of assessment will commence in 2024. So Q 1, 2024 would be the time when we’re going to commence an assessment of the ministries and which would at that point have the budget 2024 budget in place. So really, that is the work that has been done in the last eight weeks to get things in line.
Are the performance bonds going to come with penalties? How will it not end up barking without biting?
One of the things is consequence management. There’s a whole section of consequence management that the president is going to implement, which means inability to deliver on certain mandates will attract a consequence. We’ve also recognised the interplay and linkage between sectoral ministries and their own aspect of deliverables, because in certain instances, your deliverable is tied to another sector, another ministry. So our job in coordination is to ensure that we de-bottleneck all of that, to allow each minister to focus on delivering core activity. Consequence management is a huge part of it, which the president will implement because, at the end of the day, it is his mandate, his own deliverable and his promise that he needs to ensure it’s been done. And any person that has been so appointed by the administration is a tool for him to achieve that. His inability to achieve that will definitely attract a consequence.
What will the consequences be?
We haven’t concluded on what the consequences are with Mr President, but clearly everybody understands that inability to perform and deliver would attract a consequence. The strengthened consequence management mechanism is what Mr President would deploy at our retreat and unveils what that would entail. But as you mentioned, without a strong and implemented consequence management framework, we would be really back to square one, where people are getting away with what they’re doing. The other part of it is baseline. A lot of data may not be available in certain sectors, but we have looked to engage civil society groups to also partner with us to provide us with this baseline data. That way, we know where we’re starting from. Our assessment would commence with a particular baseline that speaks to the understanding by civil society, by the government itself.
We’re also very careful about ministries putting low targets for themselves. It’s one of the things that you put a very low target so you’re able to achieve. So we have assessed the targets they’ve given us. We’ve looked at what is expected of such targets, having ensured that you have all you need, meaning you’ve budgeted for an activity, you have all the approvals necessary for that activity, all the areas that are interacting with other sectors have been de-bottleneck for you. So you have no basis sort of not to perform.
Regarding unveiling our targets, we are going to do that at our retreat. The retreat will unveil our consequence management and also unveil our data in terms of what it is. We have expectations, as I mentioned. We also want to have citizen assessment. So there’s a component of our monitoring and delivery aspect that engages the citizens. And we are going to have the citizens to work with Mr President in understanding and providing feedback on what has been done. So for example, we have the deliverables for the finance sector, which speaks to clearly on the policies and we’re going to have that unveiled in the public. So, all Nigerians would now be able to provide us feedback on the fact that, ‘oh, this deliverable has not been met.’ So we seek to ensure that the larger scope of monitoring and assessment and evaluation does not just sit with government for us to monitor ourselves, but we also want to have citizens be part of the assessment. So when we say, for example, we’re going to develop X number of jobs in the digital economy, we’re going to have it out there. And we would have citizens assess us and citizens send in their own assessment to determine what has been done. The exact details for each deliverable for each ministry will be unveiled at the retreat. The assessment will be determined based on the resources assigned to each ministry. The president has given that sort of marching order for everybody to hit the ground running in recognising that we are at a stage where all hands must be on deck and all hands and more, I’ll say, needs to be on deck too.
On the issue of dichotomy between monetary policy and fiscal policy, even trade policy, how will you ensure there is coordination?
There’s clarity in the linkage between monetary, fiscal and trade policies. We understand the huge interrelation more, recognising the issue of foreign exchange, the need for us to attract. So we’ve identified that and the interrelated coordination mechanism has been developed. We note that some of the data and indices that we have for those sectors are at a very low stage. We’re working to see how we can improve it.
You seem to have so much on your table. Are you going to have representatives in each ministry?
So my assessment would be in ensuring that there’s a full buy-in from the ministries and all. And, as I keep saying, tracking and monitoring are key to what we want to achieve. There are delivery task teams in each ministry. So each ministry has delivery task teams that work with them. So each ministry has identified a delivery team within that ministry. And they’re the ones that work with the central coordination and delivery unit that would harness and mop up what is required. Each ministry has delivery units that work with the minister and with the director for planning and research, to ensure that this is done, but importantly, mainstreaming it across the ministries and also mainstreaming it to the department and agencies of government. There are department and agencies that fall outside of ministerial supervision. So we’re also working on setting up their own delivery mechanism where whoever is sort of chairing in certain instances, vice president chairs these agencies boards and some are under the secretary to the government, which we’re also working to see how we can mandate to make regular report progress on what they’re doing to the president or the chief of staff.
We are working with the priority areas. So our focus in is delivering on those priority areas. Even those priority areas are large, it’s teamwork. It’s not one person. I may be the special adviser, but I work with a strong team working on the sectors and also the larger knowledge and capacity that sits in the ministries, department and agencies that we look to have them be the owners and drivers. No matter what we do as political officeholders, if we don’t mainstream our vision and our ideas in improving governance, we will not be able to have that delivered. So there is, I think joint ownership and core sharing and being part of the clear vision.
There are some of government’s policies that seem to be improving in ranking but on the streets, nobody is feeling them. How do you guard against this?
That is why I mentioned the issue of citizens’ feedback, meaning that you can’t be improving if citizens don’t feel it. So one is the app, which is project-based. We are now working with our development partners to see how we can develop a mechanism for supporting non-project-based performance. Importantly, this stakeholder’ feedback is what we encourage to have citizens telling us what has not been done. Also, within the deliverables of each ministry is stakeholder engagement, meaning sectoral, stakeholder engagement. So you are mandated to have town hall meetings within your sector, you’re mandated to engage stakeholders within your own ecosystem to ensure that they have a knowledge, a buy-in of what you’re doing and are also effectively supposed to monitor you. So in the ministry of defence, for instance, they might be able to hold quarterly stakeholder engagement where they are providing information to Nigerians on what they are doing on security. One of the things that we raised also is data on security. We had one of our resource persons that is a civil society expert on security. He had his own data on insecurity. The Ministry of Defence has its own data too. So we agreed on the need to harmonise and have one data gathering mechanism. It’ll not be the data itself that’s harmonised, but the modality and mechanism with which the data is gathered, so that when we can come to compare. So these are the sort of things that we seek to do.
Can you tell some of the development partners that you’re working with?
We have a team of technical consultants; we have Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, which have been supporting the CDCU. We also have our own consultants that we’ve hired, private sector consultants, to help us. We are not quick to always go for resource or technical patterns, but having our own team, having an understanding and ability to drive this, which is what is being done with the ministerial task teams in each ministry on the deliverables, the delivery unit for each ministry to sort of cascade the knowledge sharing, that way we’re not always going back to consultants or development partners. But they [consultants] bring to us international best practice, knowledge sharing, get sectoral experts to come on short terms to train the staff and have that knowledge sharing. We also have to enable institutes that are also working with us in conceptualising all of these frameworks that we’re working on.
What influenced the president to a policy coordinator? Why did he appoint you?
I think as a president, you have the clarity on ensuring that you have coordination in your government. And that is, I think, something that any leader would really want to do that. So having policy and coordination advisory is an important thing coming into an administration, trying to sort of mock up policy positions that are interrelated and ensuring that there’s that linkage and connection. Because, in a lot of instances, some of our inability to perform speaks to the fact that there are other attendant policy positions that are not being done or are interrelated and they’re conflicting. Really, I don’t know why he chose me, I think that’s a question that should be reserved for him on why he chose me. But it’s evident that that role is very important for any government to succeed – recognising that coordination is a key enabler in delivery in governance.
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