The Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reform, (BPSR), Mr. Dasuki Arabi, has presented a gold plaque to the Nigerian Electricity Liability Management Company (NELMCO), for its performance in public service delivery after undergoing a successful organizational self-assessment process.
According to a statement by the Principal Information Officer at BPSR, Aliyu Umar, Arabi while presenting the award, said the organization had fulfilled and met the necessary requirement in line with the self-assessment tool (SAT) adopted by the bureau, scoring NELMCO 86 percent for its transparent operations and liabilities management.
“Following the validation of assessment of NELMCO by the bureau, NELMCO performance was rated as consistently meeting expectations in all essential areas of responsibilities,” he said.
Mr. Arabi said the self-assessment was an opportunity for agencies to recognizes their weaknesses and strength as it will help guide them in service delivery.
“As I said, the self-assessment tool is giving them the opportunity to see their weaknesses and see their strength. We have jointly assessed the agency, we have noticed lots of issues and problems that they need to address, we have guided them, we are going to provide a team of resource persons including our in house resource persons that will help them implement recommendations, and after six months we will come back to see how far they have gone. But, as I said NELMCO is one of the points of success in public service delivery in Nigeria. We are happy with what we are seeing, and we are celebrating them” he said.
He however disclosed that the bureau had a target of assessing a hundred agencies but as a result of the novel pandemic their activity has been limited as they have only covered fifteen agencies. He said the assessment was a move to push for a revolution in public service delivery.
“The circular says every government agency, if not for the Pandemic we would have covered by our plan about 100 agencies by the end of June. But as government offices are opening, we are going to restart the program. So, before the end of the year, we hope to cover about 50 agencies”.
“We want to see a revolution in public service delivery, and improvement in quality of public service delivery and in consonance with the open government partnership that Nigeria is committed to, open service delivery just as the charter says” he added.
However, the Managing Director of NELMCO, Mr. Adebayo Fagbemi, while speaking to reporters said, the agency’s success was due to its ability to save N91billion and clearing liabilities of the defunct PHCN that accumulated before its privatization in 2013.
“We developed a model and that model we refer to it as a Triangular Verification Model. As you are aware, we inherited debts of the entire defunct PHCN which amounted to N914 billion, so that model we put in place will enable us to conduct due diligence on the inherited debt”.
“From that model, we were able to save N89 billion on behalf of the federal government and then through the discount solicitation window we saved another N1.8billion so when you add that up, we talking about almost N91 billion that we saved for the federal government,” he said.
Also present at the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Power, Didi Walson-Jack, commended NELMCO for their exploit in public service. “I am glad to know that NELMCO is the first agency that presented itself for this exercise. It is our delight that an agency of the ministry of power has received the gold level certificate.”
She also called for the continuity of NELMCO beyond the stipulated 2022 timeline, urging BPSR to deploy its staff to other power agencies and the ministries.
