Lack of continuity in government policies behind implementation failure
By Nigeria vis-à-vis other developing nations shares a common characteristic of poor implementation of public policies. Policy implementation failure is undoubtedly a threat to sustainable development.
Going by World Bank latest report on Country Policy and Institutional Assessment for Africa (CPIA), an annual diagnostic tool that assesses the quality of policies and institutional framework as well as their ability to support sustainable growth and poverty reduction, Nigeria scored 3.2 out of a maximum score of 6.0 in its Overall CPIA index.
As a matter of fact, Nigeria’s CPIA index is lower than the regional average for West African countries, which stood at 3.31, the data show.
Landry Signe, a Fellow at Stanford University Centre for African Studies, recently stated that deeply-rooted corruption in public bureaucracy, lack of continuity in government policies and deficient human and material resources cause implementation gap (i.e. widening gap between stated policy goals and the realisation of such planned goals) among African countries.
Gbenga Ojewoye, a political economist, told BusinessDay, “Government policies fail because they are ‘clustered-concept,’ that is they are good on paper, but poor to implement.
“Lack of continuity in government policies has always been the bane of policy implementation in Nigeria. The problem is that every administration that is in power comes up with a new policy initiative instead of building previous ones.
“Since 1976, many public policies designed by the government have not lived up to desired expectation. Some literally died as a result of poor management, paucity of funds and a host of other factors, and the few existing ones are struggling to achieve their purpose.”
Despite how the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS) was beautifully crafted by the Obasanjo’s administration in 2004 to resolve the country’s developmental challenges through generation of job opportunities, creation of wealth, poverty reduction and reorientation of values, the Late Yar’Adua administration dumped the NEEDS policy for seven-point agenda.
The Presidential Special Scholarship Scheme (PRESSID) established by the Jonathan-led administration, which aimed to sponsor outstanding students for postgraduate studies in any of the best 25 universities in the world, was scrapped by the current administration, claiming dearth of funds to run the programme.
Yet again, the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme, popularly known as SURE-P, launched in 2012, with the goal of providing job opportunities for unemployed graduates in order to alleviate the impact of the partial petroleum subsidy removal on the populace, was quashed by the Buhari-led administration because of widely perceived irregularities in its operational process.
Rafiq Raji, chief economist/managing director at Macroafricaintel Investment LLC, told BusinessDay that most of these policies were not well intentioned at the formulation stage. In his words, “Every administration has four years to govern. It is impossible to make and implement long-term policies in that timeframe. This assumes that there is intent to do the right thing in the first place.”