Effective identity management or the lack of it in the past has usually brought on much waste to Nigeria. Now in the present, the country appears firmly fixed on ending the obvious wastage in its public service through the latest link-up with Software Company, Oracle, who will be applying innovative tools to block further misspending.

The coming together with Oracle is expected to aid “efficient payroll administration and qualitative citizen-centred service delivery” based on what a press release by the State House on Monday, September 4, 2023, has shown.

President Bola Tinubu is making a move to address all the issues just as he has done one time while he was the governor of Lagos State in the southwest of the country. The president levelled up about his desires in a meeting at the State House with the Global Vice President of Oracle, Mr. Andres Garcia Arroyo. Having experienced success the first time out at a sub-national grade, surely, there is a reason to give Oracle a go on a federal scale.

“I have tested Oracle and it has worked for our success,” the president says.

“In Lagos State, what we did in effective collaboration with you, has been copied across the states of the Federation. We can only build our institutions with accurate data and cutting-edge data management capabilities that are reliable and effective. We can only rely upon our human resources for excellent service delivery to Nigerians if they are well-trained and ready to learn.

“The transfer of knowledge is essential for our nation and the continent. In this government, we believe that the only way to build our country is a bottom-up approach and from one single sheet of paper, we can create an end-to-end solution for public administration that will rid our service of its worst tendencies in favour of effectiveness and reliability.”

Nigeria’s public service payroll probably looks inflated sometimes, and President Tinubu has made curbing such a primary point of concern. He has had to ask himself a question; Where to finance funding for infrastructure when up to “1% – 2% of the population is consuming all the revenue?”

Perhaps, this proactive thinking early on in his administration will finally bring on the needed load-shedding that lets internally generated revenue go around.

Oracle’s offer of “a free national diagnostic of the present situation in the public service” by VP Andres Garcia Arroyo is no doubt a way to kick things off.