The Governors’ Performance Index developed by the Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies to assess the performance of state governors is clearly a useful tool for advancing our understanding about how governors are working to meet the expectations of their people. In an increasingly crowded and noisy democracy like ours, it is also a useful measure for how governors could avoid or at least circumvent the distractions and diversions of politics to focus on service to the people.
Given the ‘fierce urgency of now’ to deepen democratic governance in our country and hold those in power accountable to the people, CIAPS’s monthly CGPI can be rationalised as the Centre’s modest contribution to making our democracy work.
However, given that governance is a process rather than a single event, it is difficult to understand how a closed-ended, monthly timeframe can be used effectively and objectively to pass judgment on how a governor can be best or worst (CIAPS used the word least) performing. There is a reason why our system of democracy provides for a four-year tenure for political office holders.
Of course no one has to wait for four years to pass an opinion on any state governor. People pass opinions every single day. Those opinions are fluid, however, and could change as instantly as they are made. This is where the difference comes – between mere expression of opinion and an opinion built on research that is grounded in the scientific process. The latter shouldn’t look or be seem to look as simple and impulsive as the former.
Take the variables that CIAPS used in its famed CGPI assessment. According to the Eagle Online, the variables include payment of salary, new projects, education, security and leadership by example. Can a governor be best or worst simply by paying or not paying the salaries of government workers for just one month? And even where possible, is the initiation of ‘new’ projects every single month a be-all and end-all or is it their execution and their ultimate benefit to the greatest number of people? How about a project that was initiated back in January, for instance, but will take up to December to come to fruition and perhaps even longer to flower?
Here is my take: A ‘monthly’ index cannot be a necessary and sufficient ground for passing sweeping judgments about how governors can and do perform.
This is even more so in the case of Governor Ibrahim Gaidam of Yobe State, one of the five governors that CIAPS rated as belonging in the ‘least’ CGPI category for October.
It is doubtful if CIAPS’ researchers actually took the trouble to test their hypotheses on the ground. Although they do not necessarily have to be in Yobe to make their assessments (and these are subjectivised assessments by the way), an understanding of the political economy and operative environment in which Governor Gaidam works is a helpful tool for how CIAPS can take in the big picture and footnote its assessments with helpful caveats that would isolate and categorise insurgency and security-compromised environments.
For five years, from November 4, 2011, Yobe has been trapped in the midst of a ruthless and senseless Boko Haram insurgency. Boko Haram, of course, is not peculiar to Yobe. Borno State is perhaps the worst hit. But given the scale of our resources and the size of our population, Boko Haram’s destructive activities are as acutely felt in Yobe State as they are anywhere else.
Throughout this period, Governor Gaidam has remained resolute in his determination to partner with security agencies to stymie and destroy the capacity of Boko Haram as a fighting force. He used meagre resources that should be used for other services to provide logistics support to the security agencies and allowances and financial support to the security agents on the ground. Gaidam is perhaps the only governor that has made paying a token one million naira to the family of every security agent killed in the line of duty and N500,000 to every security agent injured in the line of duty a standing policy.
The Yobe State governor also regularly enlists the support of community, religious and political leaders in mobilizing the people in support of peace and security.
Yet, although the Yobe State Government has spent and continues to spend humongous amounts in its effort to restore peace and security in the State, Governor Gaidam has never defaulted – not for once – on the payment of workers’ salaries. Since the governor came to power, there was not a single month that Yobe workers were owed their salaries. When states were rushing for federal ‘bailout’ funds to pay their workers recently, has anyone seen Yobe go on its knees? And if salary payment is one of the variables used in the CGPI, why isn’t Governor Gaidam recognised for regularly paying Yobe workers’ salaries? Why isn’t the comments that security agencies make about his consistent and continuous support to them being used as a measure for how he is helping to restore peace and security in the State?
If a single month is enough to measure what governors do in the education sector, then CIAPS is clearly unfair to the Yobe State governor. In October, the governor has paid the salaries of all teachers in the State, provided feeding to boarding school students, met running costs of all the agencies ministering to the education sector and provided replenishable items that schools needed.
Those are basic services that the Yobe State government provides; so basic the government does not need to herald or spin about them. But we know this is not enough. The governor believes that education is the currency of today’s economy. So, a lot more needs to be done. This is why he’s taken a long-term approach to doing what needs to be done to put Yobe’s education sector back on a sound footing.
And if the size or scale of a state’s resources are contingent on the volume of services it can provide or the scale of infrastructure it can put in place, Yobe under Governor Gaidam cannot objectively be described as ‘least’ performing. Across Yobe State, despite a very light purse, Governor Gaidam has built roads that continue to link communities and provide a linchpin to businesses; he has built water supply systems that people use across the State every single day. The governor has equipped the newly built hospital in Damaturu above all its peers, and Yobe’s healthcare system is now undergoing steady but fundamental upgrades.
A research work on Conflict and Health titled ‘Health service resilience in Yobe State, Nigeria in the context of the Boko Haram Insurgency: a systems dynamic analysis using group model building’ by Alastair K. Ager and others published under Open Access Research has further accentuated the point that Yobe is indeed making steady progress in the health sector. The researchers noted that “the political will of the Yobe State Government to strengthen health provision – through lifting a moratorium on recruitment and providing incentives for retention and support of staff – has supported a recovery of health systems functioning. Policies of free-drug provision and decentralised drug supply appear to have been protective of the operation of the health system”.
Clearly, this research finding point to Governor Gaidam’s leadership and his commitment to making sure that Yobe’s healthcare system works for the people of the State.
Governor Gaidam has also established, expanded and upgraded facilities at the Yobe State University to the extent that the University is now rated as the ‘fastest growing’ in northern Nigeria. He has provided jobs to tens of thousands of youths including those with only a minimal or no formal education. And although there is so much work to be done, there is no gainsaying the strides that have been made so far by the Gaidam-led administration.
Considering the volume of challenges that still stand to be met, no one is complacent about the need to roll up our sleeves. And citizens have a right to be led accountably by their leaders. In all epochs, social and political pressures are a necessary part of the growth process in a democracy. They are healthy and they are helpful to leaders all over the world.
But however we look at it, research institutions, such as those which undertake periodic studies on social conditions, have a duty to be above the fray, to be objective in their analyses, to be thoroughly scientific in the tools they use, to regularly uphold the integrity of the scientific process and to not theorise sitting down in Lagos!
. Bego writes from Damaturu Yobe State.
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