OPINION: The App With The Power To Sack Ministers

By Abraham Amah

On Monday August 21, last year, after 84 days of governing without a cabinet, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu inaugurated a 45-man cabinet to help him steer the ship of State and bring to reality all the fantasies sold to Nigerians during the campaigns that led to his emergence as Nigeria’s President. Perhaps, to compensate for the long wait, the President commandeered his ministers to start work from the Council Chambers where the swearing in ceremony took place because the task ahead was huge and required immediate attention, and urged them to build public trust by discharging their duties efficiently. I recall that FCT Minister, former governor of Rivers State Mr. Nyesom Wike rode from the Council Chambers in his new official car with the plate number FCT 01 to his office where he in turn summoned the staff of the Ministry of the FCT and charged them to brace up for the task ahead. Leadership by example, you would say.

During a retreat with members of his cabinet on November 1, the President once again reiterated the value he attached to performance in office and read the riot act to his ministers when he told them that their tenure is tied to performance, and said pointedly, “if you are performing, there is nothing to fear. If you miss the objective we review, if you don’t perform, you will leave us….Don’t be a clog in Nigeria’s wheel of progress.” In the course of the retreat, President Tinubu said that his Special Adviser on Policy Coordination, Hadiza Bala Usman would spearhead the Result Delivery Unit and closely monitor the performance of the Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, in the eight priority areas of his administration.

It is therefore no wonder that last week, Hadiza Usman’s Central Coordination Delivery Unit, CDCU in the Presidency launched an upgraded Citizens’ Delivery Tracker App, a digital platform that enables Nigerians to assess the performances of ministers in the President Bola Tinubu administration in fulfilment of her agency’s mandate to continually engage with Nigerians in growing our democracy by driving inclusive governance anchored on citizen-participation to promote transparency and accountability. The App which will be available in Google Play Store and Apple Store in the next month will enable all citizens to view the deliverables and key performance indicators for all ministries and assess the performance of each indicator in the eight priority areas of this administration.

Designed to inclusively engage the citizenry in contributing to Nigeria’s governance architecture, the initiative is very laudable and creative, especially given the penchant of political office holders to mistakenly assume that they are responsible to only one man, the President that appointed them to office, and not to the people, and so long as they can wave some convincing stunts enabled by the system that shields the President from the reality, the rest of us can go to hell and burn to ashes. Thankfully, the Citizens’ Delivery Tracker App has reconfigured the performance evaluation channel and placed it in the hands of citizens, rather than one man, to the extent that the President would have the courage to rely on the feedback which is delivered realtime online to take decisions on when to sack or retain Ministers and by so doing project his administration as being responsive to the will of citizens.

Given humanity’s near-total recourse to the dictates of digitech in the conduct of even the minutest ways of life, it is also cheering to note that we have come to the age where technology plays a vital role in the way and manner citizens can hold their leaders accountable without having to face the challenges associated with official hindrances created by bureaucratic red tapism. Moreover, the technology driven App would reduce human errors associated with performance evaluation and offer those being assessed a sense of reliability and comfort that the process is transparent to the highest acceptable limit.

While many people have questioned the relevance of the App in comparison with technologically advanced democracies, my concern is not whether the US, Britain, Canada or Singapore have similar Apps which they use to monitor the performance of their Ministers, after all, nothing says that they too cannot copy from us, in areas we have done better. My worries have more to do with our capacity to sustain such fantastic digitech ideas and deploy them responsibly to good use and I want to make sense of those concerns which have been expressed widely by capturing a few of our wonderful digital initiatives that worked elsewhere but were subjected to political considerations here, setting them up for failure from onset and how such noble initiatives are fraught with operational hiccups.

In December 2014, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, ordered commercial banks to commence the process of issuing Bank Verification Numbers, BVN to its customers and gave February 14, 2015 as the commencement date. According to the CBN, “the objective of the BVN initiative is to protect bank customers, reduce fraud and further strengthen the Nigerian banking system. Fraud is reduced because no two people have the same biometric information. Banks will therefore be able to check the features of a person doing a transaction against the record, which the bank has captured thereby correctly identifying the owner of an account.” In all of its avowed capacity to check fraud and financial malfeasance, it was a shock to hear the CBN on December 1, 2023, nine clear years after its start, order banks to disconnect millions of active bank accounts without BVN. How on earth did those bank accounts remain active if Nigerians who work in banks did not aid it and to what extent has BVN curbed financial crimes in Nigeria?

Then Minister of Communications, Isa Pantami issued a directive in December 2020 compelling Nigerians to connect their phone numbers to their National Identification Numbers, NIN, within two weeks or risk being disconnected from the networks. Ostensibly premised as a synergy to track criminals and reduce the growing cases of banditry and kidnapping that had laid siege on the country, the back and forth in that policy direction and its implementation have lasted for more than three years, without many complying, without many being sanctioned, and surprisingly with more successful and audacious acts of kidnapping and banditry and their negotiations for ransom conducted with sim cards registered with the fingerprints of Nigerians and above all, with no culprits brought to justice because the security agencies tracked them through their phone lines. Is it technology or politics that failed us?

Though located on the analogue platform as far back as 2004, SERVICOM, an acronym for Service Compact with All Nigerians, is a service delivery monitoring point established across federal government offices nationwide and according to its official website “is to promote efficient service delivery in MDAs to ensure customer satisfaction and to manage the performance-expectation gap between Government and citizens as well as other members of the public, on issues of service delivery.” In the past 20 years of its existence, Servicom as an agency of government is the worst example of how to deliver services to the public because its staff are the most irresponsible staff in every government facility they are stationed to monitor service delivery to the public. The feedback loop created between MDAs and the public using Servicom as a bridge is lacking and renders the effort of the government in that direction utterly unproductive and meaningless. Measured in terms of content and application, Servicom is the analogue version of the current digital effort of CDCU’s Citizens’ Delivery Tracker App and should give us a fair sense of how far we can run with this digital device in an environment of play that is almost analogue in orientation and performance.

In 2022, the government of President Muhammadu Buhari signed into law the much anticipated electoral reform law to usher in a new vista in the electronic management of elections in Nigeria through the process of accreditation, voting and collation of results from the polling booth level up to the national collation centre in the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC’s office in Abuja. Tied to the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System BIVAS, a digital device that eliminates rigging by almost a 90 percentile ratio, Nigerians cheered in unison that the era of election manipulation was over, and rightly so because other nations have adopted the same electronic voting systems and refined their electoral processes to the admiration and satisfaction of their citizens. After BIVAS was used in the conduct of the 2023 general election, Nigerians, both local and international observers were united in their assessment of the 2023 general election as the worst election ever conducted in the history of Nigeria. While other countries used technology to make a forward movement to political growth, we are stuck in our old ways of doing the wrong things and expecting the right results. Again I ask, is it tech or politics that failed us?

And to be fair to us, both as a government and a people, the only digitech application that seems to have worked effortlessly and served us well is the Single Treasury Account, TSA, conceived by the Goodluck Jonathan administration and given life by Muhammadu Buhari’s regime for the central collection of all federal government revenues across all payment channels. Goes to show that things work here when money is involved. For all the known and unknown reasons why the TSA is still working without friction, what we should understand is that anything we conceive and create to grow our country can work if we want it to work. By interpretation of the foregoing, our challenge is not the ideas we lack but the absence of the will and courage to do things right.

As Hadiza Usman and her team tinker with the Delivery Tracker App, Nigerians are earnestly waiting to take advantage of the App to begin to hold their Ministers to account, not to witch hunt anyone but to see how this particular platform can be used to scale the responsive performance of government. Nigerians are desirous to know the menu on the App and how to use it to bring development closer to the people. Ordinarily, I expect that I can use the App to report about an unmotorable federal road, a dilapidated unity school, or a non-functional ward in the Federal Medical Centre in my constituency, not necessarily to report the Ministers and ask for them to be sacked, but to draw their attention and for the immediate remediation or full reconstruction of whatever it is within a specified time.

Whatever President Tinubu uses the App to do, whether to assess and sack or retain his Ministers based on the feedback he receives from the App is entirely his prerogative but we should be careful to ensure that the feedback is not manipulated from the backend to promote non-existence and unverifiable performance. This is an opportunity for Nigerians to remain true to themselves and not use the App to promote ethnic bigotry and dish out information to tarnish the image of people they do not consider as their own. It is very certain that the conversation around the Citizens’ Delivery Tracker App is developing and would assume more dimensions in the coming months as Nigerians would also need to know the cost of the App and other issues about its transparency, flexibility and reliability.

 Amah a public affairs commentator writes from Lagos