Osinbajo: Nigeria needs well-trained public servants for effective service delivery

Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo says Nigeria needs to develop well-trained, knowledgeable, and well-motivated public servants for effective service delivery and excellent performance.

Osinbajo said an unmotivated and unskilled workforce — in the age of digital technology and economy — would undermine economy and development projections.

In a statement issued by Laolu Akande, Osinbajo’s spokesman, the vice-president said this on Thursday while receiving 49 graduands of the pioneer cohort of the Africa Initiative for Governance (AIG) & Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government (AIG-BSG) Public Leadership programme in Abuja.

The programme is sponsored by the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation.

Osinbajo said it was vital to provide cutting-edge training to public servants because once public goods cannot be delivered effectively, development suffers, the commons are all at risk, and the overall quality of life of the people is undermined.

Speaking on developing Nigeria’s human resources, especially in the public sector, Osinbajo stated that while the government formulate several policies, they always fall short at the implementation level.

“Our governments have never been short of ideas, policies or roadmaps. Indeed, we have some of the best written and most insightful policies on practically all issues, but we sometimes fall flat on implementation. The reason is the quality of the human resources that we deploy in the public sector,” he said.

“Unlike in the private sector, where usually the profit motive makes it imperative to provide relevant and cutting-edge training to ensure that staff is well equipped to deliver on targets and KPIs, the public service usually has traditionally taken an approach, the result being a bureaucracy unable to develop, but more importantly deliver on government initiatives and programmes.”

In addition, the vice-president stressed the need to build values of integrity, honesty and transparency in public service.

“Why do systems anywhere in the world uphold basic notions of honesty, transparency and integrity? It is because it makes economic sense; dishonesty undermines the entire enterprise,” he said.

“We must also understand and disseminate our rules on governance in such a way as to make it clear that petty or grand corruption kills progress and will destroy the nation’s best.”