Effective management: Panacea to Nigeria’s problems

By Afe Babalola (SAN)

BabalolaThe word “management” has its roots in the Latin language. The verb “manage” is a derivative of the Italian word “maneggiare” (i.e. “to handle especially a horse”) which itself comes from the Latin word “manus” (hand).

It was, however, the French word “mesnagement”, later” used as “management” that actually influenced the development of the English word “management” in the 17th and 18th centuries.

In business and human organisational activity, “management” is usually used to mean the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals. Management, therefore, involves the core steps of planning, organising, gathering, selecting or employing and leading, directing and controlling an organisation or a group of people.

What to manage
As John Reh outlined in his management guide, the subject of management comprises of resources (people, equipment and materials), time (task declaration, dependencies and critical path), money (cost, contingencies and profit), scope (size, goals, and requirements).

But most importantly, each and indeed all of these factors including institutions, and policies must he managed effectively to ensure good result.

Effective management
According to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, governance is a process whereby public (or officers) conduct public affairs, manage public resources and guarantee the realisation of human rights.

In this regard, good governance is tested by the key questions: Whether they are effectively guaranteeing the rights to health, adequate housing, sufficient food, quality education fair justice and personal security.

An enterprise is effectively managed when it is run or organised in such a way as to yield or bring about the desired or intended result. An endeavour is only worthwhile if it leads to the destination projected by those who convinced it. A mission is considered a success if it achieves the goals set out by those who embarked on it.

I dare say, therefore, that there cannot be an effective management of any enterprise, people or country without an inquiry and a clear understanding or knowledge of their fundamental constituents in terms of potential needs behaviours, mannerisms and intractable tendencies and applying innovative and pragmatic ideas, principles and policies that meet them with cost effectiveness.

The key to economic success, says the World Bank, is in a globalised world which lies increasingly in how effectively a country can assimilate the available knowledge and build comparative advantage in selected areas with growth prospects.

Increasing the relevance of tertiary education and research in sub-Saharan Africa will enable the region to increase its comparative advantage by pushing the frontiers of technology through innovation, encourage diversification of products and services, and maximise returns from capital assets through more efficient allocation and managemen. Now, it is necessary to move quickly to acquire the higher order skills and expertise that will allow African countries to add value in existing economic activities and enter new industries and services.

According to Juslius Nyerere, the key to a government’s effectiveness lies in its closeness to its people and responsiveness to their needs and demands, its ability to coordinate and bring into a democratic balance the many functional and often competing sectional institutions; and the efficiency of the institutions by means of which its decision are made known and implemented.

This daunting task calls for uncompromising commitment, integrity and focus responsibility, responsibility, responsiveness and accountability on the path of the manager.

For a nation/state, the manager builder must have a blue print not only for discovery of but more for a recreation and recovery or resourcing of investment, development, and most important” of infrastructure.

What effective management is not
Effective management of any nation or people will not consist in the exploitation of such people. It will not entail their destruction through hunger, oppression, intimidation or other abuses of their human right in order to subjugate them to the whim and caprices of the ruler. A government which usurps the economic or political power of the governed cannot be effective by any standard.

If therefore, effective management or good governance, is the panacea or solution to the challenges facing the Nigerian nation, then it must make the simple natural syllogistical sense that ineffective management or lack of effective or good governance has been the bane of the Nigerian nation.

I will not travel far away to demonstrate that human societies and nation of men and women who have vision, one mission and one destiny can manage themselves and their resources and be managed effectively with minimal coercion responsible managers or leaders who have similar disposition and commitment.

Project Nigeria: A nation of strange bed fellows
The real challenge of the Nigeria nation, to me, lies somewhere far beyond its many incidental manifestations. It goes to the core fabrics of the nation as it were.

The Nigerian nation has a fundamental structural problem at its foundation. Here is a mass conglomeration of over 250 different, divergent and incongruent people not only in languages, but also in culture, social and political dispositions, sentiments, idiosyncracie, religion, and perhaps destinations. The majority of these peoples had diametrically opposed attitudes and approaches to life, living, death and nationhood. These differences were not in any way obscure even to the most unsuspecting inquirer.

But here we are, by that single original sin of 1914 the Lugards bundled all of us together for the sole selfish colonial interest. Ever since then, we have more or less been sitting “comfortably” on a keg of gun powder. This, to me IS the first and fatal management crisis in Nigeria. Failing to consider this crucial defect would amount to living an unexamined life, which philosophers admonish is not worth living.

Some parts of the country, which had already established well entrenched educational, political and economic systems were viciously stagnated under the guise of uniform policies.

One is not unmindful of the existence of similar differences in places like the United States of America, Indonesia etc. The salient distinction is in the fact that in America, for instance, the union was formed as a result of a common philosophy of the search for liberty, liberation and the actualisation of the solemn and sacred tenets of human equality and happiness, by the thirteen original English colonies of new England. Other members joined subsequently, the last of them being Hawai, which produced the first black President of the Union, Barak Obama.

This philosophy w; .J movingly articulated in the rip’ I “=iY;1tlnn nt­ Independence of 1776: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, government are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the governed……”

Western Nigeria: Calculated destruction of a perfect system
As I have indicated earlier, the Yoruba speaking part of Nigeria which constitute Western Nigeria, (now the South West) had already gone far ahead with an international model of democratic government. Indeed the old Oyo Empire was already so well organised as far back as the 17th Century.

According to Owolabi and Alagbe, In many ways, Oyo is perhaps the most interesting of the states and empires that emerged in the forest and coastal regions of West Africa.