Nigeria is a country where the majority are jobless and the few who have jobs refuse to work” – Anebo Nwamu.

President Muhammadu Buhari raised on Monday at a Capacity Building Programme for Public Servants the long standing issue of our drooling and deficient work ethic. Buhari lamented that the civil service which was once one of the best in the Commonwealth, today earns a reputation “for inefficiency, low productivity, corruption and insensitivity to the needs of the public”.

Whatever reasons may be adduced for the downturn in the nation’s bureaucracy: a downturn which mirrors the familiar narrative of a once great country humbled by predatory leaders, such a diagnosis must include a slumbering work ethic. Let me elaborate. If you do a quick count of public holidays of countries around the globe, you find that the United Kingdom has 8 annually, United States 10, South Korea 16, and Nigeria tops the list with 26. In our case, the figure of public holidays does not include those declared by state governments illustrated by the announcement in Borno State three weeks ago of a holiday to mourn the deputy governor of the state who died recently. In other words, we are a nation brimming over with off-work days, considering that each holiday is usually preceded by self-declared ones by workers especially when they coincide with festivities.

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There are other tell tale signs of self indulgent, lazy and unproductive attitudes in our work places, public and private. It will be interesting for example to find out how much work actually gets done when offices are not shut down by holidays or by strikes. An indication of low output is the number of days or weeks which it takes for files to move from one office to another, not to mention the frustrations encountered by foreign and domestic clients who have to conduct business in the country. As the opening quote sourced from Anebo Nwamu who recently retired from the public sector informs, many of those who hold down jobs approach them with a negligent attitude with serious consequences for service delivery. Before pursing the topic further however, I digress to enter two short takes.

Unsurprisingly the recent public declaration of assets by the President and the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, has attracted considerable attention nationally and internationally. Although, it has been mentioned in the ongoing conversation that the laudable initiative should have been extended to the spouses of the helmsmen, the exercise remains trend setting, not least for the shocking simplicity and austerity of Buhari’s personal assets. Even the Washington Post was sufficiently enticed to refer to him as “Africa’s least corrupt leader”. Least corrupt? That is a quibble to reserve for another day; what should count for now however, is that the President has earned the moral leeway to call corruption by its name. If the anti-corruption crusade is not to end up as Buhari’s personal agenda, then more state officials in the ruling All Progressives Congress should follow the example of the President, not minding the fact that the Constitution does not require a public declaration. There is the point too that what is important is for the Code of Conduct Bureau and civil society to compare what is declared now with the exit declaration mandated by law. If we do not do this, the exercise descends to mere public relations.

The second take concerns the governance debate that has broken out about the performance of Lagos State governor, Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode. His critics notably the Peoples Democratic Party insist that he is virtually invisible while his spokespersons commend his interventions. A careful perusal of the growing literature on the topic suggests that Ambode has been working hard rather quietly to achieve a paradigm shift from the elitist preoccupation of his predecessor to hitherto neglected areas such as education, health and the alleviation of the stress of afflicted persons. For examples, such interventions as the timely settlement of the arrears of pensioners’ claims which piled up under his predecessor, renewed attention to manpower and infrastructure in primary education and healthcare may not be glamorous work. They are however important and remedial if the chant of “Eko o ni baje” is to become a signature tune for rich and poor alike.

To return to the subject of national idleness, it is striking that the ascent of countries like South Korea and Singapore to industrial greatness was underwritten by their prodigious, sometimes punishing national work culture. South Korea has some of the longest work hours in the world as her workers put in 47 days more work than their United States counterparts each year. The introduction by that country recently of a one hour nap for workers was to cushion the effect of long hours of work. In that country as in Japan, work is not just routine application of efforts but a striving for perfection and excellence. Hence what we have is a far cry from the desultory application of workers in this country which is passed off as work. The predictable result is sub-standard production in virtually every department of our national life. In the education sector, where many lecturers and teachers do not prepare lecture notes and often give out outdated materials as instructional stuff, we have managed to create a concept of Nigerian education that is inefficient, inelegant and unsuitable for the global market place.

In other words, sloppiness, inertia, and inattention at work redefine our national character as one of nonchalance and stark mediocrity. The decline of the civil service noted by Buhari is a consequence of this kind of negative syndrome. If you look around the world, you’ll find that leaders in the political and corporate sectors inspire their countries by diligent application to duty. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, may not be his country’s most hard working leader but he told a journalist not long ago that to stay ahead of his assignment, “I get up pretty early in the morning and I start work before I get dressed”. Do you want to look at Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister who made the cover of Time Magazine recently? He has legendry work habits and attributes his long hours of work and little sleep to his practice of yoga, Modi recently had a running battle with senior civil servants who come to work at 11am and go at noon time for a long lunch session. He is doing a lot to upturn the indolent and laid back work habits of his country’s public sector.

If Nigeria must move away from its current groove of arrested development and poor productivity, our leaders must initiate new work ethics. Buhari should do more than lament the torpor in the civil service; he must recreate it and other national institutions in his image. An initial step will be to make a linkage between productivity and reward more explicit than it is now. The national honours system must be redesigned to capture a new work ethic.

Finally, the introduction of performance contracts which are monitored and the mending of infrastructural hitches in the work place are crucial to the suggested reform.