If you have been in Nigeria or interacted in Nigerian circles on social media in the last one week, you must have come across the video of the Lagos State Commandant of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, Mr Obafaiye Shem who, when asked what his organization’s website on an interview with Channels TV, stuttered and finally gave the address as “ww.nscdc that’s all”.
The video, which has long since gone viral, has spawned countless jokes, songs, images and even t-shirts to become one of the top internet memes in a very long time. It was shocking that someone in the 21st century could not give a complete web address. It was more unbelievable considering the fact that it is the website of his organization he leads he was asked to state.
But beyond the comedy, it is important to understand what the gaffe of this top government official, on national TV nonetheless, means.
There is no denying the fact that Shem’s blunder is a great source of embarrassment for his organization and all Nigerians, for which he has been suspended by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, under whose supervision the NSCDC falls under, in what I would call a kneejerk reaction.
Shem’s IT-illiteracy is not an oddity in the civil services of Nigeria, either at the federal level or in any of the 36 states of the federation. On the contrary, it is quite the norm. Our civil services are littered with personnel for whom technology stopped in the 1980s with the latest model of typewriters. Many cannot operate basic computer programs such as the Microsoft Office suite. And the painful thing is that they cannot be bothered to learn.
This extends even beyond IT skills but to general self-development as a government employee. It is one thing that is very deficient. Civil servants have no incentive to continually develop themselves so that they can be ever valuable to their ministries or agencies. A basic aptitude, general knowledge or current affairs test for civil servants today would unearth a can of warms that would leave us in shock for weeks.
This is because in our civil services, the emphasis is neither on service delivery nor on the value being added. We have come to see government work as our right, where even if we do not work, we cannot be sacked. It starts from the fact that employment is rarely done on competence, but on connections (aptly named ‘man-know-man factor’ in Nigerian parlance) and on the out-dated policy of federal character so as ‘not to leave any region or state behind’. Promotions, even to the very top of the civil service are also predicated on these two major factors.
Where there is no competition, there is no incentive to be competitive. If our civil servants know that their being in a job depended on their competence and how much value they add, they would continually develop themselves so as to prove their value to their organizations.
Also, Shem’s interview is an insight into the leadership structure that exists in government agencies and ministries, where all the knowledge of how the organization works is vested in one man – the oga at the top. Once the top boss is not on seat, nothing moves. Everything grinds to a halt until he is back to re-issue orders. It was evident in the way he kept referring to his ‘oga at the top’ in response to what the NSCDC website is. It also showed, in many ways, his loyalty to his boss, which sadly, will take him further than whether he knows the organization’s web address or not.
It is about time that a new model of leadership came to be in government agencies; one in which no one man hoarded all the knowledge and appoints himself as lord over his subordinates. Leadership by itself largely deals with developing people around oneself, and giving them room to make decisions rather than turning them into mere robots to carry out orders and instructions is an important component of it.
Let us not just turn the #MyOgaAtTheTop spectacle into a comedy and then go back to the way we were before. We should seize this as an opportunity to beam the searchlight on the professionalism of our civil services and push for its reforms, so that our civil servants would be highly competent in the discharge of their duties.
Only this would prevent such embarrassing moments from recurring.