Lack of good management, bane of national dev. -Don

A Professor of Economics, University of Ibadan, Ademola Ariyo, has described lack of good management as the most deadly virus that could afflict any nation.

Ariyo said this while delivering the first public lecture of the Faculty of Management Sciences, National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) in Lagos titled “ Budgeting and Nigeria’s Sustainable Development; Some Key Management Imperatives”.

According to him, this explains why despite abundant resource endowment, Nigeria currently wears the toga of paradox of ‘a rich nation, poor people’.

Ariyo noted that the transmission mechanism is the enduring culture of budgeting mismanagement, which was being sustained and aggravated with the proverbial “oil curse’’.

“We also believe that these problems amount to wages of two sets of `management sins’ that Nigeria has been committing persistently since its independence in 1960.The first set is what we called fundamental management sins, namely lack of collectively owned, long term national economic goal/interest. The other being lack of long term planning.

“These two led to the inevitable secondary management sins which are unproductive, organizing and coordinating functions, as well as poor performance monitoring, evaluation an reward functions,’’ he said.

The don also added that the persistence and severity of both categories of management sins were usually fueled and aggravated by the elites’ selfish exploitation of the peoples’ rich ethnic and religious diversity.

He added that it had become a tool for encouraging extractive behaviour in promoting ethnic, religious and sectional interest groups.

“Our national budgeting had been on the receiving of these management sins, hence the persistent chronic mismanagement of or abundant national resources,’’ he said.

Ariyo noted that Nigerians as a people must always be interested in finding management solutions, rather than political or other mundane, primitive solutions to the country’s national issues and challenges, especially those concerning the utilization of the country’s abundant national resources.

He added that it was regrettable that Nigeria currently lacked the formal declaration of a specific, long term consensus –based national economic interest or goal.