Of course, repositioning them will not be easy, due to the poor state of our public service as a whole! It will involve restructuring each agency to be used, and streamlining the regulatory environment of the sector concerned.

The restructuring can start with technical guidelines by which each such agency should commence to restructure itself; and include retreats and other “hand-holding” techniques to create “reform firepower” in the agencies. The target should include the following:

1. Appropriate Staffing: A regulatory agency should not be an all-comers affair! The bar of entry into the agency should be relatively high, because the country will rely on the agency to innovate and craft solutions for the sector concerned. The key staff should ideally include persons with previous careers as strategists, catalysts, researchers, brokers, consultants, and policy managers.

Many of them should be actors (who can use imagination and analysis to direct and control events), as opposed to “reactors,” who wait passively for events to affect them. They should also include persons relatively new in the system, to enable the agency think “outside the box”, and be inclined to reassess existing traditions with “fresh eyes”. Transformational reforms are often driven by persons freshly appointed; and this was true for both the NCC and CBN reforms!

2. Flat & Focused Structure: Where, for example, anybody can walk up to anyone anywhere, and talk about anything; where someone can become a co-ordinating Director for a tenure, and then step down and become an ordinary Director, while a colleague takes over as the new co-ordinating Director; where support functions (such as admin and accounts) are supportive and firmly subordinate to the operational department; and where members of the private sector can easily come in on secondment, fit in, and later go back to the private-sector.

3. Credible, values-based culture: We must recover regulation from our civil service mentality, and from the realm of extortion and money-making! Good regulation is about proportionality, accountability, consistency, transparency and targeting! The organisational culture should inspire positive perceptions, confidence, accountability, and respect for regulation. The regulator should be a learning organisation, with a continuous appetite for knowledge, improvement, and the best global practices.

4. Code of conduct: The members of every restructured regulatory agency should be guided by minimum standards of behaviour that will promote public confidence and trust, and galvanise all stakeholders towards the intended reforms. It is wise to set out such standards as a formal “code of conduct”, which every member should sign, in a deliberate process intended to confirm unambiguously, each member’s commitment to the code.

As an example, when Dr. Sam Amadi was appointed Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) in 2010, one of the first things that interested him was to develop a code of conduct for his team, at a time that NERC was just coming out of an embarrassing corruption scandal. I got to know because I was contacted, and had the privilege of working with the new Chairman to develop a tough code appropriate for the team’s weighty national assignment.

Streamlining the regulatory environment of a given sector will involve ensuring that the sector has no overlaps of regulatory mandates (the kind that the Stephen Oronsaye’s Presidential Committee found to be widespread in our public service); that the regulator will not combine regulatory functions with service-delivery functions (as NIPOST does); that the sector has a clear, unambiguous regulator (unlike our maritime sector for which government has incredibly not been able to name a regulator, since 2005, when the ports were concessioned); and so on.

It is the job of our regulatory agencies to optimise their sectors. If we must have these agencies, we might as well insist they do their jobs!

Mr. GABRIEL ZOWAM, a risk management expert, wrote from  Edo State.