The successes recorded by the Board in recent times might not necessarily depend on the abundance of resources as many would want to believe. Rather, it depends hugely on God’s guidance, proper planning, prudent management of available resources and, above all, transparent allocation of such resources to needy areas. It is a normal singsong for many to pin their inability to deliver on basic expectations to scarce resources.
This could have been responsible for the erroneous impression of many that the huge remittances by the Board would lead eventually to slim purse and the neglect of critical infrastructure needs of the Board. Perhaps, yours sincerely had also feared that given the slim resources occasioned by the remittances, the many competing needs of the Board would be grossly neglected. However, as events continue to unfold from the date of assumption of duty of the current leadership of the Board to date, one has been left with a firm conviction that all things are possible for those that are transparent, prudent and selfless.
Today, Nigerians are witnessing several completed and ongoing projects all over the Board’s offices across the nation. The success story in the Board is because of its determined efforts and deliberate move to ensure that much difference is made. The result of which is seen in the number of projects like the mega Computer-Based Test Centres which keep springing up across the country on a scale that is unimaginable.
Apart from those being graciously constructed by the Nigerian Communications Commission(NCC), other Professional Test Centres (PTCs) and offices are being financed from the surplus approved by government to be retained by the Board. It is also from this internally Generated Revenue (IGR) that the Board annually finances over five hundred million naira approved staff spec ial allowances.
Similarly, the improvement on facilities, especially the offices, is to give the staff a sense of belonging as the Registrar of the Board, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, would always say: “The environment where one works defines one’s personality”. It is this maxim, more than anything else, that is probably behind the renewed drive to ensure that all Zonal and State Offices of the Board are gradually being made to reflect the status of the Board as one of the foremost examination Boards globally.
The transformation is witnessed not only in the realm of infrastructure, it extends to human capacity building in terms of the newly-enhanced welfare package for staff hitherto only associated with certain MDAs, among others. The fact remains that in spite of remitting almost all that had accrued to it, the Board could still boast of landmark achievements. This development also includes the massive transformation within the examination and admission architecture of the Board which had revolutionised its test delivery and selection process. All these demonstrated that an organisation can achieve all that it wants to achieve if it really wants to achieve them.
As such, that an organisation had not achieved its set goals could be owing to the fact that it is simply not determined enough to achieve them. Consequently, availability of resources or otherwise should not be the first consideration in designing a success template. As postulated in Policy Analysis, the steps to be taken in designing a workable success template is to verify, define and detail the challenges, establish evaluation criteria, identify alternative roots of addressing the defined challenges, on and on to the last stage which is implementation where resources are to be deployed.
The model adopted by the Board has more often than not, helped to ensure that its projects are delivered timely at the best cost and quality possible. In essence, the key issue in all these is that the Board manages what it has and by implication, it believes that in order to be entitled to more, it has to properly manage the little that has been entrusted to it.
- Coutesy: JAMBulletin, Monday 12, 2020
Tags: JAMB, JAMBulletin, Prof Is-haq Oloyede
