ISAAC OLUSESI writes that in Nigeria, Governor Gboyega Oyetola’s resourceful parley with the State of Osun bureaucrats is a commendable endeavour in transactional leadership.
In Nigeria, State of Osun, the straight conviction in Governor Gboyega Oyetola is that the state civil servants have strength of moral character, sense of justice, humanity, patriotism, disposition for peace, temperament for cooperation, commitment to work and productivity; the conviction, expressive in his appreciation of the state workforce for the support accorded his predecessor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, became clear-out at the recent parley Oyetola held with the Osun civil service chiefs at the government secretariat, Osogbo, the state capital.
The dialogue centred on how the productivity of Osun civil servants could best augment the meager monthly handouts to the state from Abuja and the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) increment as an antidote to the persisting scantiness of funds in the state. Oyetola’s resourceful confab initiative is a commendable endeavour in transactional leadership that would further surge IGR, workers’ welfare and productivity, implying achievement of efficient multifarious services to the governed to enhance their social and economic advancement. He knows that civil servants’ commitment to work would lead to high productivity, producing constant maximum result with minimum efforts and increasing governmental revenues for further development of the state. In the background to the Oyetola enterprise is an honest, just, dedicated, trust-worthy, peaceful, and morally upright, cooperative and intelligent civil service bequeathed to him by his predecessor in office. Both erstwhile Governor Aregbesola and incumbent Governor Oyetola are of the governing All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state.
For the records, civil servants of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) of yesteryears in Osun governance (2003-2010) inherited by the Aregbesola APC government in November, 2010 had unhealthy work orientation, characterized by absent-ism, frequent lateness to work, incompetence, insubordination to officers and visitors, abuse of office time and property, and all sorts of work-defeating behaviours rooted in indiscipline with impunity that encouraged corruption, ineptitude, mismanagement of scarce resources and inordinate refusal to submit to the restraints of orderly social contract, a destructive trend which consequently eroded ideal work ethics and stimulated a misdemeanor that devoted attention to nepotism and provocation in the civil servants of the PDP days, irresponsible attitudes that became anti-developmental, self-centric and materialistic which regrettably left the governed dehumanized and improvised, with grossly unpleasant effects on the Osun political economy.
Civil servants under PDP were treated to stick approach, coerced, directed, controlled or threatened to get them to work. Strangely, civil servants of the PDP dark atavism in Osun disliked work and exhibited at all times high penchant for indolence; and in rare cases where there was commitment to work, it was a commitment by carrot, corruptly induced that also merely satisfied their superfluous ego, meaning that civil servants were maladjusted under PDP government in Osun that itself was marked by social and political anarchy, chaos, and confusion.
And Osun under the Aregbesola–APC government would not watch the utterly disillusioned civil servants ‘kill’ the state. Aregbesola deployed orientation by re-trainings, workshops, seminars, conferences, rallies, lectures, talks that instructively reversed the unstructured, unworkable ethics in the civil servants’ work attitudes of the PDP era; and he inculcated in them such laudable practices as dedication, effectiveness, punctuality, interest and cooperation as integral components of public service ethics in the performances of their official responsibilities to the government and the governed. As corollary, the state workers became committed to the statutory policies, practices and rules that govern civil service and all through his 8year-tenure, Aregbesola maintained a disciplined public service with desirable orientation that induced harmonious and patriotic disposition in the civil servants and practically availed high quality services to the governed, the people of Osun.
Today, by his confab with the state bureaucrats, Oyetola, highly knowledgeable and marked by dedication, integrity, public accountability, social justice, openness to constructive criticism and sensitivity to political sycophants, praise-singers and such other opportunists, has taken invigorated dive, promising to further fire-up workers’ morale to enhance their productivity. He rightly believes, his government should attend to the needs of the state work-force to foster job satisfaction, work appreciation, joy at work, and job compensation through care for workers’ welfare to avoid frustration because disaffection and dissatisfaction stimulate a misbehavior pattern that corrupts civil servants, culminating in low productivity.
Hear him at the parley: “I appreciate your support for my predecessor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola and for standing by him during the last gubernatorial election which culminated in my eventual victory. I enjoin you to always seek productivity and such other things as prompt payment of salaries and welfare packages shall be added. You must all seek to merit what you earn. And you have to join hands with me to ensure significant increase in the internally generated revenue as what the state presently earns from Abuja is meager. Osun is a project that everyone must ensure does not fail. Service to the people of the state is the common objective I share with you and it is pivotal to the success of my administration.”
Osun workers should appreciate Oyetola’s conviction that the state public service has always lived up to ethical, moral and professional standards generally; and are law-abiding who would neither charge any gratification for the services rendered to the governed nor feed the public on any diet of falsehood. He should be appreciated for his democratic leadership, invoking consultation with his subordinates, the civil servants and inducing intelligent followership in them as collective efforts towards achievement of common objectives of serving Osun people. He’s not a cunning, unscrupulous politician in power like Thomas Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian politician (1469-1527) who states in his book The Prince: ”The end justifies the means,” meaning, it’s necessary for rulers to use immoral methods to achieve power and success.
Rather, Oyetola, like Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1702-1778), respectively, English and French Philosophers on ”The Social Contract and Self-interested Cooperation,” has a social contract with Osun workers, to re-motivate them in order to develop desirable work attitudes in the state workforce aimed at achieving high quality services. He’s not one given to making political statements, neither ambiguity nor a promise, Hobson’s choice. He’s also like Socrates (469 BC-399BC), Plato (427-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC) – all, the Greek Philosophers of “Disambiguation”. It is Oyetola’s intention to regenerate in Osun public servants a set of standard values, attitudes and behaviour to serve as valid, reliable and appropriate legal-ethical controls, conducive to high performances at work, he knows that protecting Osun workers’ welfare is sine-quanom to ensuring enduring democracy in terms of sanity and stability in the state political economy.
