Did you know that this is week is designated Customer Service Week, and that the theme is “The Power of Service”? It is often not so clear to many that every active person that is engaged in economic or social activity is involved in service, the creation, and the delivery of value that meets human needs.
Customer Service Week is a period during which organisations go out of their way to appreciate their customers, those whose interests and needs sustain the businesses. It is a period when companies all over the world that place a premium on brand loyalty take time to appreciate their customers for giving them the opportunity to serve. Such organisations recognise the fact that in a competitive world, the last customer that came could just have gone to the competition. Even now, that customer could walk away if he or she is not satisfied with the current quality of service. So the customer-conscious company takes every necessary step to keep customers while seeking more.
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That is in the private sector. It is not so in the public or civil service. The tragedy that has befallen service delivery however is that it appears to be dead in the public service: our ministries, departments, and agencies of government. Perhaps because of their monopolistic status, these agencies know that whoever comes to them for service has no alternative. Such persons should therefore be ready to be treated anyhow.
Have you had the experience when the person to attend to you in a public department gives the impression that you are at best an intruder? In some cases, many of the public servants you meet feel they are really doing you a favour.
Interestingly, when the nurse in public health care shuns great service, she complains of the police not protecting her family. When the police officer gets to the secretariat for his land title, he complains of being unfairly treated, just as the lady in the secretariat feels that teachers in public schools are not getting it right. So, who is to be blamed?
Like most leaders in Nigeria, many public servants beg to take up the job, only to turn around to become tin gods on their desks once they are offered the job. Some would narrate sad experiences that if these public servants are not tipped, nothing gets done and the purported public servants become lords in their offices, collecting royalty to do the jobs they are being paid for.
Some just abandon the job and take up their personal businesses. These include doctors employed in public hospitals who set up private practices, only to make referrals to their private hospitals or labs, where you can be better serviced at a benefit to them.
It is a fact that public servants in some sectors are more qualified and better paid than those in the private sector, at least in sectors like health and education. Yet we have a situation where private hospitals and schools replacing public ones. Why is this so?
Many private schools employ school certificate holders, NCE, and OND graduates. Check their products, and you discover that they are the best in every state of Nigeria, far ahead of the public school pupils where you have graduates, masters’ and even Ph.D. holders as teachers and heads of schools.
Why on earth would the product of teachers who earn between N20,000 and N50,000 per month as salary be better than those of schools, where their teachers earn multiples of these amounts? People would say it is management but I would say it is the people because these schools have heads and in fact are supervised by ministries. If private schools spend half of what the government spends on education, I bet you that Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Mack Jå and the best of the global innovators would have been Nigerians.
There is a federal government secondary school that, in a sane clime, should have been shut down or the entire management and staff disbanded. That is if the institution is run as a centre of excellence that will produce the future champions who will uplift this nation. That is probably not so, given the attitude of the teachers. By all standards, many of the people who teach in this school are everything else but teachers. Yet, the school remains.
Gone are the days when people say the rewards of teachers are in heaven. Today’s teachers want it now. There is nothing wrong with being adequately rewarded for service, but how many of the public servants today deserve the reward they currently earn. Like politicians, like public servants. They fight to finish on every appointment, not necessarily to serve but for the gains.
Away from the education sector, the mess is everywhere, right from the Governors’ offices to the judiciary which is supposed to be the last hope of the common man. Judges would sit immediately and issue injunctions on political matters but on matters that concern businesses that would create jobs and generate employment, they adjourn for years. On the issue of injustice, they look away.
It is easy to commit a man who stole a goat to two years’ imprisonment and a refund of the goat or monetary equivalent but we have seen cases of people stealing billions dragging for several years, even when the accused is not denying the loot and perhaps even when it is evident to the blind that there is a loot.
Little wonder that some have said that the law in Nigeria is to punish the weak and reward the strong…like in a jungle. Even animals are perhaps beginning to apply some sense of fairness and equity.
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