The Bureau of Public Service Reforms has been honoured with a Pan-African Public Service Award in recognition of the Federal Government’s reforms in the Civil Service.
Dr. Joe Abah, the Director General of the bureau, made this known to the News Agency of Nigeria in Abuja on Tuesday.
Abah said that the bureau had also received an award of good excellence in service delivery and an award for the proactive disclosure of procurement information.
He said: “We helped Nigeria to win a pan-African award in public service excellence, which was awarded by the Centre in Administration for Development in Morocco.
“Two members of staff also received presidential commendation for excellence in the civil service.
“We were voted the most transparent agency in Nigeria in terms of procurement by the public private development centre.
“And recently we were given an award for good governance by the Institute of Service Delivery and Good Governance.
“We have had a lot of recognition for the work that we did this year.
“In terms of the actual work itself, we’ve made a lot of progress in a number of areas, particularly in our reforms of agencies.
“We focus on ensuring that our agencies can work better.
“We’ve also done significant work to try and reposition our ministries starting with those six ministries that are affected by merger.”
Abah said that the bureau had in time past struggled to ensure the implementation of the Steve Oronsanye report.
He said the bureau had pushed for the implementation of the report, which had experience some setbacks.
He said: “Although, we’ve pushed hard, we’ve done all the work that we can do as a bureau, the decisions are with our bosses as to when the actual implementation of the rationalisation can begin.
“That is not surprising given that this issues are intensely political, but we maintain the pressure to ensure that we rationalise the number of agencies and parastatals that we have.
“Also, we try to do a bit more to educate even our bosses that the reform of agencies does not necessarily mean closing down some agencies.
“There are some that we can merge; there are others like NTA and FRCN that we can commercialise to make sure that we reduce the burden on the public budget.
“There are others that we can do the staff auditing like the River Basin Authority all across the country, just to make sure that they have the staff they claim they have.”
Abah emphasised that the restructuring and reform of agencies do not necessarily mean closing them down and throw everybody out in the street.
He said the agency would break the communication gap in order to make decision making easier by the bosses.
However, Abah called on the Bureau of Public Procurement to share information and intelligence with the Presidential Advisory Committee on Corruption by trying to put in place a coordinated anti corruption strategy.
He said: “We have seen the efforts of the EFCC, ICPC and Code of Conduct Bureau.
“However, corruption is beyond EFCC.
“It is difficult to perpetrate corruption without procurement funds.
“So the Bureau of Public Procurement is a very important aspect of the anti-corruption campaign.
“We will make sure that the agency shares information, intelligence and ensures that the presidential advisory committee on corruption takes the lead in that regard to coordinate national action plan on corruption.”
He, however, said the anti-corruption strategy of the Federal Government had been effective as it had been able to generate about N4.6 trillion into the government coffers.
Abah urged Nigerians not to lose faith in the country.
“The country belongs to all of us; we need to join hands to drive improvement in our country,” he said.
NAN.
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