COST OF GOVERNANCE ON ECONOMIC GROWTH IN NIGERIA (A CASE STUDY OF RESIDENTS OF AKWA IBOM STATE)

COST OF GOVERNANCE ON ECONOMIC GROWTH IN NIGERIA (A case study of residents of Akwa Ibom state)

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1    Background to the Study

For any society to make progress there must be a government to run its affairs. However, citizens would perceive government as a burden when its recurrent expenditure is repeatedly higher that its capital expenditure, which should impact positively on the economy, especially in the areas of employment generation, investment and other activities that induce growth. This is the challenge that stares Nigeria in the face. It is now incontrovertible that the cost of running a democratic government is high in the country. This is aptly demonstrated in this year 2012 budget. While N2.472 trillion was proposed for recurrent expenditure, that is a figure prompted 72 per cent of the expenditure profile, N1.32 trillion, representing 28 per cent, was proposed for capital projects. Nigeria is currently in need of development like most other nations of the world. The dream of development for the improvement in the living standard of the people seems to be fading away. This could be ascribed to the inability of the various governments in the past to effectively utilise the available scarce resources to accomplish the desired goals of development in the society and one of the major reasons for this state of affair is the high cost of governance in the country.

The high cost of governance in Nigeria is seemly worrisome when we consider the fact that government expenditure in the past has not translated into any meaningful development in terms of the improvement in the lives of the people, this is because Nigeria still ranks among the poorest nations of the world. It has been observed that the prosperity of any nation hinges on efficient government. This is because it is the responsibility of the government to help in sustaining the social contract that binds every member of the state or country together. In a bid to overcome the challenges of high cost of governance, successive governments in Nigeria, since the return to democratic rule in 1999, have talked about the need to reduce the country’s high cost of governance as this will make more funds available for development. The irony of it is that rather than reducing it, every new government seems to increase it further than it inherited from its predecessor to the detriment of development and the people in one way or the other.

The United States, the most powerful and richest country in the world, has a comparatively slimmer and more cost-effective bureaucracy than Nigeria. It has less than 20 federal ministries and secretaries of state (equivalent to our own ministers). The British cabinet is smaller than that of Nigeria. And spending on the public service in Britain is undergoing savage cuts currently to reduce the cost of running the country. I can only think of two or three countries that, because of their huge size, have larger bureaucracies than Nigeria. But despite the huge size of its bureaucracy, top heavy with an inverted pyramid structure, Nigeria really does not have an effective public administration. This accounts for its poor budget implementation. Its bureaucracy remains weak, incompetent, and ineffective. A slimmer bureaucracy is likely to be more effective in implementing the government’s economic programmes and easier to control.

COST OF GOVERNANCE ON ECONOMIC GROWTH IN NIGERIA (A case study of residents of Akwa Ibom state)