Performance Evaluation in Politics and Governance — Part 1
There have been many attempts to diagnose the “Nigerian problem”. A lot of causes have also been named e.g. Corruption, Nepotism, greed, loss of values e.t.c. This article is about one factor in the Nigerian problem that doesn’t get mentioned as often as the big boys: an inability and/or unwillingness, to monitor and evaluate performance.
Nigerians have been accused of a certain anyhowness. Even we Nigerians often marvel at how crazy our systems are and how nothing seems to work. From our businesses to non-profits to public institutions, we see poor standards and even poorer results most of the time. A key factor behind this is an unwillingness to ensure that every intiative, action or operational activitiy is accompanied with systems and procedures to monitor effectiveness and efficiency. Even when these systems exist, there exists an apathy towards them. They are seen as a hassle and are easily overlooked.
I have noticed that most organizations do not have matured Performance evaluation capabilities. I consider a business/organizational capability to be a synergy of people, processes and technology aimed at achieving a certain function. For example, a firm’s HR capability may consist of its HR specialists (people), its HR procedures which may involve its recruitment process & talent management processes which may be simple and informal or complex and documented (processes), and the tools they use to perform their work which could be as simple as employee record book, Excel sheets or as high-end as SAP SuccessFactors.
One place this is a huge problem is in the public sector.The people part of this equation are the public and civil servant and for the most part (#NotAllCivilServants), do not seem motivated to monitor and evaluate the performance of policy, investments and institutions. You tend to hear politicians come out and talk about projects and initiatives they started as achievements. Let us be clear, these aren’t achievement the same way me leaving my house isn’t the same as me actually getting to my destination.
One clear example of this was GEJ’s recent statement:
This statement was hotly contentested on twitter as expected. But people also tried to list deeds to prove the statement true. See an example below:
Whether you agree or not, things were done. However, what is lacking is an understanding of whether the steps taken were effective or efficient in tackling the problems it was meant to tackle. This is what performance evaluation seeks to fix.
Another example is the various intervention funds disbursed by the CBN to governors (on the directives of the FG) to support SME’s in their various states. State governments collected the funds but till date, there are no reports on how the funds where spent, how SMEs who accessed the funds were accepted and how those funds have helped the SMEs so far.
Other examples also include governors listing the 100s of road they have built to the consternation of citizens who use the same roads. Or an ex-minister boasting about initiatives no-one agrees to have felt or seen.
A clear downside to this is that no one knows what or how to improve. Improvement implies that there is a knowledge or at least an estimation of how things are going. Currently for most initiatives and policies, (#NotAllInitiatives) new governments and new heads of agencies tend to be flying blind and so, it is easy for them to just scrap the initiatives and start theirs which will also not be evaluated properly.
Even the structure of Nigeria has not be properly evaluated, i.e have we performed well with this structure? It just seems at times that we just like to continue doing stuff for doing sake.
We all envy the excellence of the Germans, Japanese and other part of the developed world but yet most of us fail to accept the mentality that tries to ensure that every system is constantly monitored, evaluated and improved upon. This is the Check aspect of the Plan-Do-CHECK-act cycle. The fun part of this is the fact that these people take evaluation into consideration as early as the Plan stage (but I digress).
Phew: I am done with the little preamble now to start the main article…. oh, it is already a bit long :(
In conclusion, while most of the developed world realizes that evaluation is the oil of the wheel of progress, it seems here we see it as an “I too know” activity. The effects of that mindset are everywhere our eyes turn, The reasons for this are many: some intentional and others incidental. This is a mindset we need to change at all levels in order to grow.
In the next part, we will go into details about the causes and solutions of inadequate performance evaluations.I just wanted to lay some groundwork. Thank you for reading. You can also help by adding other instances where you’ve seen this or cases where the opposite applied.
