By Akombo Aondona
If you have been quacking in your boots for fear over the recent news that President Muhammadu Buhari has decided to resuscitate his 1984 War Against Indiscipline (WAI), The Dream Daily can tell you to be merry.
And if, as it has been widely reported, President Muhammadu Buhari relies on the National Orientation Agency (NOA) to drive his renewed efforts to change the attitude of Nigerians through his recently launched Change Begins With Me (CBWM) campaign, which aims to instill public morality, social order and civic responsibility in Nigerians, the President is in for a great disappointment from the NOA.
To put it straight, the NOA as it exists today is in no good health to instill any morality, social order or civil responsibility in any Nigerian. In fact, the NOA that this reporter visited for a period of two weeks in the last month is in need of large doses of morality, social order and civic responsibility of its own. The NOA is in fact a study in how not to run a government office. It epitomizes everything that is wrong with public offices and services in Nigeria today.
While some have faulted the President’s atavism in the re-launch of WAI, now rechristened CBWM, there are millions of Nigerians who would agree that the country needs to firm up on indiscipline and social order one way or the other, even if not as strictly as President Buhari gave it to the nation between 1984 to 1985 as a military Head of State.
A media whirlwind of a sort heralded in the CBWM campaign. Above the din of the rhetoric however, one could not help but expressed some cynicism, given that government as an establishment in Nigeria has been high on promises and poor on delivery over the years. This, perhaps, played on the mind of the editorial department of this newspaper, hence its decision to test out the level of “Change” across federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs in Abuja.
This patriotic duty took The Dream Daily to a number of MDAs for a pilot study, including the NOA. Of all the MDAs chosen for this dry run, The Dream Daily met the highest shocking level of unpreparedness at the NOA headquarters in Abuja.
Our letter of intent was duly received and acknowledged at the NOA headquarters on… A week later, the drama of the absurd started. This reporter, who was charged with following up on the letter at the NOA, was shocked to his bone marrow when the NOA Registry could not find the letter submitted there. Perhaps unaccustomed to anyone checking on his or her correspondence with the NOA, registry officials at the orientation agency offered their apologies to the dumbstruck reporter and pleaded with him to check back the next day.
When this reporter told his editor of this development, the editor recalled a similar experience with the NOA in the past, and told this reporter that it would take a miracle to trace that letter. Nevertheless, he encouraged him to go back the next day.
As his editor had forewarned, the NOA shenanigans shifted to higher gears the next day. Again, the NOA registry could not find the letter submitted to them three days earlier. Straight-faced, NOA officials told this reporter to bring another letter. Shocked that the NOA that President Buhari relies on to drive the CBWM campaign could lose an official correspondence from a national newspaper going out of its way to support the “Change” agenda in a matter of days, this reporter refused to accept the audacious demand. An embarrassed official, purportedly the media assistant to the agency’s acting director general, intervened at the scene and told this reporter to come back another day.
By now The Dream Daily had realised that it was confronting the legendary, infamous inefficiency and dereliction of duty of the Federal Civil Service. However, this reporter agreed to check back on the letter in two days.
The chasm between the NOA of a public speech by the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media, Malam Garba Shehu, and the NOA dancing naked to the beats of official ineptitude before this reporter was alarming.
It would be recall that earlier this year, Shehu told the media that the NOA under its sacked former DG never supported the President’s Change Agenda.
Shehu stated this while announcing the administration’s decision to kick-start zonal town-hall meetings with Nigerians. The presidential spokesman had observed then that although the agency has over 773 officials nationwide, “I will say with all sincerity, that NOA was a source of worry for us in government; the people and the leadership never believed in what we are doing. They never believed in Change. They just folded their arms and watch us for the period.”
Going on to express optimism about a changed NOA under the Acting Director–General, Garba Abari, the President’s spokesman said: “I believe the new leadership would begin to formulate things for agencies like that”.
How wrong Garba Shehu is!
When this reporter returned to the NOA for the third time to follow up on his letter, he met the monster of officialdom fuming at his persistence. A cooked corn-chewing official of the NOA, who claimed to be the media assistant to the acting DG, pointedly told this reporter that the NOA has not found the letter. Without any sense of shame or remorse, he told this reporter to go and make a photocopy of his acknowledgement copy for the NOA to trace the lost letter some other day.
Realising that the NOA has simply lost an official letter written to offer support to the agency for such a project dear to the heart of President Buhari, this reporter strongly refused to make any photocopy to the self-acclaimed aide to the acting DG.
It was a dejected reporter who walked out of the NOA on this third occasion. “How could such a dysfunctional NOA rally anyone to support President Buhari’s CBWM initiative?” he mused in a heavy rain that has been falling all day in spurts and starts. “The sky could have been weeping for Nigeria,” he thought, “a cracked country which puts high hope to fix itself in a broken National Orientation Agency.” How sad, how bizarre!
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