All the government agencies mentioned by Mr John Ajiboye are perpetually involved in an internecine turf war that has absolutely nothing to do with service delivery. Their only aim is to retain and if possible expand their individual budgets. Each superfluous agency has its champions and protectors in both the Executive and Legislative arms of government. Hence the current impasse. The management and staff of these agencies with overlapping functions are certainly not so blank as not to see what Dr Orosanye (erstwhile Secretary to Federal Government of Nigeria) and his colleagues saw. The name of the game is to use all means fair and foul to maintain the status quo.
Let us take a few of the agencies one by one.
FRSC: This agency almost got away with its new scam surrounding Vehicle Registration, Vehicle License Plates and Driver’s License. Despite the strident public outcry and the intervention of the Legislature, the FRSC still had the temerity to go back to court to continue fighting the issue against WE THE PEOPLE. This is very strange indeed.
The POLICE: I wonder who will advise The Nigeria Police that in this day and age, the Central Motor Registry or CMR is not a place, like in a physical building, but an electronic data repository, the kind banks maintain and secure routinely. No Nigerian will trust The Police to properly archive any data for him. It is as bad as that. So long as The Police has unfettered access to the data, it has no reason to complain.For all the data at its disposal, when was the last time The Police came knocking at anybody’s door to announce “Sir, we have found your missing car”?
NIMC: By whatever name called, the NIMC has consistently had a bad reputation starting from the tenure of the late minister of Internal Affairs dinner etiquette at the table of governance became the topic of many editorials and beer parlour talk.
NPC: The results of the many enumeration efforts in the past by The Nigerian Population Commission has always led us into strange territories. Schools have been built in locations where there are very few children of school age. On the other hand inadequate health facilities are provided in localities with teeming population. How do we address this monster? One way is to entrench much deferred fiscal federalism without which Nigeria cannot make any headway. Since we pretend to copy the Americans, we might as well go the whole hog. I recommend that all personal income tax should accrue to the Federal Government. The demographic information derived from the tax returns will then constitute invaluable input for rationalising the raw census data.
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