| Stray Cat in a Mad Dog City |
|
 |
| Written by Mutti Yovbi | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Saturday, 16 February 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
It is difficult to know where to start to describe the feeling that one is living in nightmare world, brought on by working in too close a proximity with civil servants in Nigeria. I hesitated for so long to write this because I felt guilty about thinking so little of fellow Nigerians, people that if we had been introduced away from the work place, I would have had respect for and held in reasonably high esteem. It would be difficult not to show due respect for a friend’s parent, uncle or aunty. It would also be difficult to disregard or dismiss someone who introduces himself to you as Permanent Secretary of that or Director General of the other as a person of no consequence. Surely as the head of an establishment that would translate to a large corporate in the private sector, you would expect a certain level of capability and professionalism. One would therefore relate to civil servants with respect in other forums, not just because they drive expensive cars or are draped in expensive curtain fabric and matching jewellery but because you would expect your friend’s relative to have some of their attribute, especially if the friend happens to be smart and respectable. You would also assume that the Perm Sec or DG has something between their ears is why they are valued and paid handsomely from public funds. How else could they have risen that high if they had not been able to reasonably distinguish themselves by their demonstrated capability? I still hold many Nigerians in high esteem and will always defend our intellectual capacity proven over and over and over, both here and in foreign climes, where daughters and sons of the soil are being sought after to hold high office and where they are able to pick and choose what jobs they do just because they can. I  t is useful that people should be able to pick and choose what jobs they want but certainly counterproductive if employers are unable to objectively decide those they want to retain on the pay roll. Government establishments in Nigeria have been thrown into that unenviable position either by error or by design. The workplace that has resulted is a nightmare landscape where nothing but violence is done to the psyche of those employed and those who by misadventure find themselves in need of services provided by any government establishment. The system nurtures little demons who seek to do little else except do anyone in that crosses their path and hopefully profit in the process. The range of attitudes and attributes seen across the rank and file of government workplaces can have no effect except the detrimental, particularly to the society. We see the results all around us and constantly lament the failings of government. Government officials many times champion the lamentations, never mind that they are the ones responsible for administration and delivery of public service. This responsibility is shirked flagrantly and no one knows better how to pass the buck than the government employee. I would have remained in ignorant bliss did I not find reason to walk the hallowed corridors of government establishments this past year. Interface with staff cadre ranging from ‘security men’ through to commissioners exposed how putrid the underbelly of the administrative organs of Government. It is however, only a reflection of another part of its anatomy, the fish as they say, rots from its head. The first assault on my sensibilities came one morning when I arrived at work to loud altercation between colleagues. The two people – a man and a woman - around whom a crowd of co-workers had gathered were spitting feathers at each other and that close to fisticuffs as the man banged on the table threatening what physical injury he would do to the woman if she just tried that with him next time. There was no getting these two people to stop and the quarrel went on for another twenty minutes. I reported to their supervisor who characteristically arrived halfway through the day but he merely shrugged it off as one of those things. When I reminded him that in the civil service rule book this behaviour attracted summary dismissal, he explained that anyone that took it upon himself to invoke that rule was only looking for trouble warning me ominously about what connections people might have Such public fights soon became familiar as accepted conduct and I saw it happen in most very office I visited. It could be two colleagues, arguing loudly with each other or an official picking fights with or roundly berating a visitor to the office. What struck me was that supervisors viewed such conduct benignly. They always explained to me and asked me to understand that these people were only venting their frustrations. You cannot blame them was a constant refrain, they are so poorly motivated and Nigeria is hard. The hardness of Nigeria did not prevent these people from buying and selling everything from food to fineries in full view and at all hours of the workday, negotiating with vendors that peddled and displayed wares even on office desks. It did not matter if visitors waited to be attended, they conducted this business in public areas such that one would be forgiven for thinking they had arrived at a bazaar. Being very hospitable people, civil servants would invite you to join them, particularly if you show discomfiture. Their aim is not to ridicule but simply to put you at ease. The incident that took the Oscar was the Director I found eating eba with his fingers at his desk at 10:30 in the morning. The soup was a leafy green soup, very oily and smelly as our food often is. It suffused the room and the corridors with its smell, unpleasant in the circumstance since windows were shut and the air-conditioning going full blast. His surprise was that I was surprised that he was eating food of that nature at his desk, on which all manner of files and government documents was strewn. He did not stop but simply asked me to wait for him to finish. When I asked if he should be doing that, he said there was no rule against it and since no provisions had been made, he had no choice but to eat at his desk. His question for me was ‘can a man be effective on an empty belly?’ Since that question could not be answered with a simple yes or no, I took refuge in silence that ended with a gasp of surprise when I saw him wash his hands onto the floor. Unperturbed, he proceeded to wash his mouth out but thankfully did not spit that unto the floor. My experience in the civil service has been peppered by these strange and unprofessional behaviour patterns, manifested even by those whose office is by political appointment and therefore should model better behaviour given glowing résumés upon which their appointments are based. A chairman of a public board explained to me volubly why truancy amongst his staff was justifiable and why they should be forgiven for sleeping at their desks. Don’t expect much from them, he cajoled, they are used to working in this way. It did not matter to him, perhaps did not even occur to him that the responsibility for ensuring effective performance by his staff rests on him. He was after all little different because in spite of his position being a full time one, he seldom came in to the office except to attend meetings for which he got paid a substantial sitting allowance, over and above his salary. That work programmes are agreed and deadlines are set and missed meant nothing to the civil servants I worked with, whether they were senior or junior, important or inconsequential. The constant refrain was that you cannot ask us to carry out more than one task at a time, it is not done that way. We have to finish one thing first. This argument always left me perplexed, used to multitasking and working to concurrent deadlines as I was. Many times, I took the pain to explain that we were implementing a project and that projects by their nature are time bound and have set targets. It was an alien argument and fell on deaf ears, my private sector background was always thrown in my face as having prepared me to work in that manner and they would not join me in my folly. One of them asked me once if there was a drug I took that, in her words, made me so indefatigable. Try as I did to make them see my point, they tried even harder to convert me to their ways. I was told how I could creatively account for project funds and hounded to put up ‘proposals’ for bogus and over priced activities that government will pay for if they saw that it was coming from me. If you ever find yourself among them, look out and read carefully everything that lands on your desk. These people who are ordinarily averse to putting anything in writing and prefer that any transaction that has to do with money be verbally agreed, show no such aversion when it comes to leading you down the path of perfidy. Traversing the well-worn terrain of ineptitude and apathy daily and coming in constant touch with people entrenched in bad behaviour, it was inevitable that I would chafe sore thumbs and inflame nerves to rawness. Once in a regular while, interactions, like festering wounds, flared into searing tirades that spewed forth from the mouths of those that should know better. Many have been surprised to discover that I am not the ingénue of their first impression but this has only intensified the raging battles to get them to do things right, using their own words, to follow due process. Listening to the hour-long diatribe spattered with empty threats from a Permanent Secretary the other day, I wondered again how I came to arrive at this wrong address. It remains to be seen whether I will be able to make the civil service my home, I can easily count more than nine ways to sorrow but wonder if I will be able to find nine roads to follow, nine lives to borrow? Should I seize this moment to say goodbye?
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Last Updated ( Thursday, 24 April 2008 ) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
Services : E-mail news | 
RSS Feeds | Podcasts
Links: About the NVS | Contact Us | Terms of Use | Privacy & Cookies | Advertise With Us
All Rights Reserved. NigeriaVillageSquare.com
Posted by Robot| 16.02.2008 20:28