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Foundation to train 3,000 public servants on leadership skills

The Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation is set to train 3,000 public sector workers in its public leaders programme over the next 30 years.

Chairman of the Foundation, Mr Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede said this at the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Foundation and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

According to him, the MoU is for the development of the Aig-Imoukhuede Public Sector Performance Index .

The MoU was signed on Thursday in Abuja by the Statistician-General of the Federation, Mr Simon Harry and Mrs Ofovwe Aig-Imoukhuede, the Executive Vice Chairman of the Foundation.

Mr Aig-Imokhuede said that the Foundation was driven by the need to close the unacceptable gap that exists between Africa and other continents in terms of the standards of living and future prospects.

He said that he believed that the reason for the gap was the huge under investment that had taken place in the public sector in terms of the selection and recruitment of those who go into public service.

“Also, its subsequent training and capacity building and indeed the reward structure and other elements of talent management that lead to high performance.

“So, we have dedicated ourselves at the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation to try to correct this.

“We have a goal actually, that over the next 30 years, we would have trained at least 3000 Nigeria public servants at the highest level of executive education available for public sector workers.

“And just yesterday, 50 Nigerians graduated from Oxford University’s flagship executive education public leaders programme.

“Our people, the people we know, the Nigerians we know what we can do and Nigeria will take its pride of place and that gap will be closed.”

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During the signing, Mrs Aig-Imoukhuede said that the organisation’s focus was on transforming the public sector for better service delivery.

She said that the index was being developed in partnership with the Nigerian Economic Summit Group.

“Now, what the public sector index is supposed to do is to assess the performance of public sector entities and to determine how their performance impacts the lives of ordinary Nigerians.

“We know you are statisticians, so you have all the information that Nigeria ranks quite low on the human development index across all the indicators.

“The three key indicators of life expectancy, per capita income and of education, we ranked very low.

“If you look at the countries that are performing well you will notice that there was a correlation between the performance of their public sector and the outcomes for their citizens.”

“So our focus with this index is to assess the performance of our public sector. What is it that is being done? Why are the outcome so low for our people, because if you do not measure, you cannot improve.”

She said that the second objective was to provide easy, accessible information for citizens to be able to see what the government was doing in a way that would be very simple for people to understand.

“If you look at more developed countries, citizen engagement is a key driver of government accountability.

“Accountability is one of the things that we need in this country, because when the government is accountable to citizens, it has an incentive to actually do better.”

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Harry said that the collaboration was timely because the NBS had recently collaborated with some other government agencies to try to assess the performance of the public sector.

According to him, this collaboration have recently been increasing by the day and it has really helped the organisation to reach a compendium of statistical information.

He also said that with the reform currently ongoing within the statistical system in Nigeria, he had no doubt that very soon there would be a paradigm shift in the way the public sector does business.

According to him, the Ministry of Budget and National Planning have also attempted to provide key performance indicators that will help to actually assess whether government agencies in various sectors of the economy are performing or not.

“Yet with all these efforts have not been able to actually get to where we are supposed to.

“So when we have initiatives like yours, it will go a long way in supporting what government is doing.

“Also, because of the drive and the kind of support that we usually enjoy from the private sector, we believe that your coming to provide the support will help to strengthen what the bureau and other agencies are already doing.”

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the Foundation was established in 2016. (NAN)

Monday Ashibogwu

Monday Michaels Ashibogwu is Editor-In-Chief of QUICK NEWS AFRICA, one of Nigeria's leading online news service.

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