PROMOTING EFFICIENCY IN GOVERNANCE THROUGH THE USE OF LEGISLATIVE INSTRUMENTS

by

Mojeed Olujinmi A. Alabi

Professor of Comparative Constitutionalism

Provost, College of Law (Ifetedo Campus)

Osun State University, Nigeria

Being the 6^th Annual Service Lecture of Moses Inaolaji Aboaba Trust Foundation (MIATF) held in Osogbo on Friday, 3^rd February 2024

(PROTOCOLS)

I must specially appreciate the organisers of this annual event for deeming it fit to extent the invitation to me to deliver the 6^th in the series of lectures devoted to the promotion of the ideals of good governance, ethics and professionalism in the public sector in honour of no less a personality than our No. 1 public servant in Osun as a State component of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The name Moses Inaolaji Aboaba had rung bell since our days in the secondary schools although I did not have the opportunity of knowing Baba, albeit from a far distance until, consequent upon the promulgation of Decree No. 10 of 1991 by which the presidential system was introduced into the local government under the Transition without End of the Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida regime, I was appointed as the Secretary to the Local Government (SLG), Ejigbo Local Government and Chief Inaolaji Aboaba was to reach the zenith of his career as the first Secretary to the State Government and Head of Service upon the excision of the present Osun State from the old Oyo State on the 27^th day of August 1991. I could not therefore but be elated when I received a call from an unknown number that turned out to be that of an equally enigmatic personality within the civil service architecture of Osun State in person of Elder Adelowokan inviting me to deliver this important lecture. Of course, I immediate recognised Elder Adelowokan who worked together with us at the onset of the current democratic dispensation as the Head of Service at a time that I was the Speaker of the Osun state House of Assembly under the regime of the sage, Chief Bisi Akande, Governor, Osun State, 1999-2003. The story of my being here won’t be complete, however, without recognising the role of Chief (Professor) Jones Aluko who constantly put across to me the need to honour this invitation. Chief Aluko was my first encounter with the civil service when he was the Secretary to Ejigbo Local Government at a time that his wife was my teacher at Ansar-Ud-Deen High School, Ejigbo. Even at that very young age, I saw in Chief Aluko and secretly adored him whenever I had the course to be at the Local Government Secretariat. With his neatly kept beard, he was always in suit, projecting to me the image of a public servant that I would have loved to cut for myself but for the fate of finding myself in academics, politics and legal practice. Meeting Chief Aluko at Babcock University as colleagues in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration convinced me that I had not really departed from the course to which I had sought for myself as a youngster. In any event, my training in Political Science and Law, and practical experience in politics, has kept me within the precinct of public sector governance, which squares with the broad theme of today’s parley.