The Director General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR), Mr. Dasuki Ibrahim Arabi, has said that some of the reform policies their agency helped to champion have started yielding good fruits.
According to him, the Bank Verification Number (BVN) and Treasury Single Account (TSA), among others, which are BPSR’s brain child, have made public expenditure and financial management to become almost cashless and paperless.
Arabi, disclosed this at a ‘One-day Implementation Workshop on Electronic Documentation Management and Digitisation’, organized by the Institute of Information Management (IIM), in Abuja.
He said: “The FIRS is 80 percent almost there. The Central Bank is almost there too. The Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) is almost there. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) is almost there. And we have seen a lot of movement by the judicial arm of government towards digitalizing court processes, especially after COVID-19.”
The BPSR Director General, explained that though COVID-19 is a disaster to humanity, it was something that their Bureau welcomed.
According to him, the advent and persistence of the pandemic to leave the shores of the country, is even making their advocacies on critical reform policies and government programmes easier.
He said the outbreak of COVID-19 compelled many public and civil servants to become creative, hence embracing Information Communication Technology (ICT) in performing various tasks and delivering effective services.
Mr. Arabi, further stated that the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation has directed that all agencies of government must digitalized all their records.
“And right now, they are in the process of coming up with a virtual meeting policy which shall be approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC). Once that happens, then I think the journey is officially on. So, we have to get out of our comfort zone and become more creative. That is why the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation has gone ahead to expand the size of reform coordination department to enhance innovation in order to simplify service delivery in the country,” he said.
Aliyu Umar Aliyu,
Principal Information Officer (PIO),
BPSR.
