By Reuben Onyishi
(Ugoachataberu)
During the build up to the governorship election in Enugu State, Governor Mbah presented to the people in his written manifesto and viva voce in his campaign speeches, as he toured the 68 development centres in the state, an oxymoronic term, disruptive innovation. It even sounded absurd, for what could it hold for the people the innovation that is disruptive? Mbah had harped on disruptive innovation towards the exponential growth of the Enugu economy and the eradication of poverty in the state to zero percent headcount index, a means by which he would wrought unheard-of socioeconomic transformation. In his inauguration speech, he summarized it all in a terse term, business unusual. Even the syntactic disruption of the cliche, no longer business as usual, is a metaphorical reflection of the otherness he would bring to bear. The level of disruption would tingle ears, for it would be unprecedented.
Since the inception of his administration, Governor Mbah has taken steps in decisive decisions towards the dismantling of known debilitating trajectories, and headed for the road less travelled by. He would brook no sit-at-home, something to which the people had snuggled in complacency, despite its toll on them and the economy. Mbah would disrupt it, and bravely put it to an end, paving the way for investors to look in the direction of the state, the big elephant in the room having been escorted out. That done, Mbah, knowing in clear terms where he was headed for, caused an unprecedented Economic Growth and Investment Roundtable to happen in the state on 1st September, 2023, thereby holding for gaze the potentials of the state to local and foreign investors. Big businesses in energy, mining, agriculture, transportation, trade, ICT, and so on were closed. In April 2024, during the Enugu Economic Summit, humongous deals running into hundreds of billions of naira shall be concluded in practical terms.
While it is good to attract investments into the state, it would result in washing ones hands only to break kernel for the mother hen and its chicks, if the Enugu public servants and workers are not properly positioned and aligned to the developmental strides of the Mbah administration. It would amount to pouring new wine in old wineskin. If business as usual is allowed to have its way amongst the workforce, a mess shall have been made of the efforts of the Mbah administration to turn around the Enugu economy. The mindset and capacity of the Enugu workers have got to be immersed in Mbah’s pool of disruptive innovation.
No one knew what Mbah had begun to do with the Enugu Civil Service. While the war against sit-at-home was going on, and economic roundtable convoked, some persons for whom development begins and ends with road construction had begun to think that nothing was being done. Little did they know that Mbah’s disruption had begun to gnaw at entrails of bureaucratic bottleneck, dereliction of duties, absenteeism, laxity, unproductivity, corruption, anachronism, analogue and manual operations that characterised the civil service. Mbah set out to migrate the Enugu civil service from pipeline to platform. The ministries and 112 MDAs were surreptitiously migrated to e-platforms. It was a deliberate building of institutions that would run seamlessly without human interruption, something that would not depend on any administration. The Enugu workers were being trained and exposed to digitized operations. For instance, the ministry of lands was disrupted and migrated to a online platform where land Certificate of Occupancy is obtained within 72 hours. What obtains now is a paperless operational services by which many things are done at the same time, at a tap on the keyboard in line with demands of the 21st Century internet age. The rot was much but Mbah has cleansed the Augean Stable.
One place where unproductivity holds depth of negative significance is in the local government system. The local government is the graveyard of workers’ productivity, and this is not peculiar to Enugu State. It is only in the local governments that ghost workers far outstrip real workers. Yet the said real workers do not work in the real sense of it. Many are engaged in other businesses and report to their offices on pay day. Those who go to work at all shirk duties. They go to office at any time and punctuality has no place in their work ethics. All this results in unproductivity. For a government that hopes to achieve astronomical growth in GDP, this attitude to work is a cog in the wheel, and it accounts for why the Mbah administration has taken measures to rid the local government system in Enugu State of these ills.
Last week, the Mbah administration set up a ten-man Committee for Local Government Workers Physical Verification and Attendance to Work headed by the Secretary to the State Government, Prof. Chidiebere Onyia. This committee was charged with the task of tying a loincloth of work ethics and productivity around the rude waist of local government public service. The committee would do sting operations across the 17 local governments in the state with a view to verify real workers and their attitude to work. This is in line with Governor Mbah’s principle of governance founded on traceability, accountability and transparency.
With the proactive measures Mbah has saddled into the local government public service, the little foxes that beset productivity at the local government level have no more hiding place. The Enugu public service thus positioned, the developmental trajectories Mbah has mapped out in order to achieve his governance objectives shall smoothly sail through.
