My most challenging period as HoS – Ogunlewe on November 02, 2013 / in Politics 1:27 am Prince Adesegun Olusola Ogunlewe, born on October 16, 1953, recently retired from active service. The Igbogbo-born prince formally bowed out of public service as the Lagos State Head of Service. He was made the HoS in May 2010, a position he occupied for three years, when he disengaged on October 10th, 2013. Ogunlewe, in this interview with Olasunkanmi Akoni, shared his experiences on his 34-year sojourn in the state public service and his plans after retirement: Excerpts The beginning I joined the public service of Lagos State in 1979 because I was brought up in public administration at the traditional level. I am privileged to be the last child of late Oba Festus Molaja Ogunlewe, the Adegoruwa of Igbogbo in Ikorodu Division. The post of a traditional ruler in itself is a public service. I witnessed the public administration at the traditional level all through my childhood. Prince Adesegun Olusola Ogunlewe I had my primary and secondary education in Igbogbo, Ikorodu. That gave me opportunity of being at home till about 16 years when I eventually completed my secondary education and got admission into the university. From my childhood, I learnt that the best place to touch was to work in public service. That was what encouraged me to join the public service of Lagos State after I completed my university education. The public service career is always challenging. As I have said, there is no end to human needs. As public servants, we were expected to make lives more abundant for all citizens at all time. I joined public service after my university education as a level 8 officer in the administration officer’s cadre in 1979. There are values of public service and once you understand and uphold those values, you will not find it difficult to move up consistently and gradually in your career. Values First of those values is, you all went to school to acquire knowledge. You must be able to apply that knowledge appropriately to your duties. Secondly, you must be hardworking because the load of responsibilities of public service career is very huge. Except you are very hardworking, you may not be able to cope with it. Thirdly, you must be honest in the course of discharging your responsibilities. You must be able to endure because the salaries are nothing to write home about, even till date. Fourthly, you must be able to render selfless service with a mindset that you are rendering service to God and humanity. Then, what is your remuneration will be secondary once what is uppermost on your mind is your belief and readiness to serve the people. These are the principles that guided my intention, and I did not find it difficult progressing in service and getting fulfilled at every point of my career. Of course, the whole essence of having a good government is to make progress and dynamism. There must be changes. When we started in the public service, there was no computer even though we had type writers or electronic type writers. Some of them were manual type writers to type letters; roll stencils and so on. But in this age, we have computers that work faster than type writers. We have oracle software that we used to process our human resource management. By mere pressing a button, we get information that would ordinarily take two or three weeks. Before, you could get it within twenty minutes. All these have made the system better than what it used to be. What it used to be was that our communication system was not functioning well. Rather than phoning somebody, you might go and deliver letters. But today, things have changed a lot. You can take advantage of short message service (SMS) or information and communication technology (ICT) through which you can send information out, not just to the public servants, but also to the general public. So, these are things that have made the difference between then and now.You have to be very hard-working to cope with the responsibilities of public service. Once you have an understanding wife who is ready to fill the gap when you were not around, you will find it difficult to manage your family. Let me give an example. I was in Governor’s Office for five and half years, serving as a private secretary to three governors. Then, before I got back home in thewould have slept. By the time I was leaving in the morning, they would still be sleeping. But then, my wife was there to take care of those gaps. She would prepare them for school. She would also bring them up from schools. She always made sure they did not feel my absence. It was during that period that I had three of my children. I have four children. Whenever we wanted to do child christening, I normally pleaded with the Reverend to be in my house by 7:00 a.m and by 7:30 a.m, we were done with the child christening. By quarter to 8:00 a.m, I would be back on my desk in the office. There was a particular child christening we had then; the governor did not even know about it because I was already in the office before 8:00 a.m. Once you know your responsibilities, you must be able to manage them with your home affairs, as a responsible officer. Experience as HoS Within the period I was HoS, our programme with DFID should have moved faster than where we are today. But all said and done, the programme is on stream. I would have loved the programme to move faster. Some of the policies we were expected to embark upon in implementing the programme are before the State Executive Council for approval. I would have loved the approval obtained before my exit from the public service. Currently, the state practice human resource management under general administration. Our human resource management is subsumed under general administration now. We intend to make it professional and with this, the state can have professional human resource cadre. That is before the council. We are moving towards e-governance. For us to achieve this, we need a policy to guide the use of the electronic equipment. And our plan is to have an ICT centre in place. This is also before the Council for approval. But I am sure that Governor Fashola will approve it very soon. Critical moments There are critical moments, especially when the doctors went on strike. Just about the time I became head of service in 2010, we used to have two salary structures in the state. We had one for the main civil service and the other for the tertiary institutions. But suddenly in 2010, the federal government came up with about five salary structures. I understand that it started in 2009. There is one for the mainstream civil service. There are two for the health sector. Instead of one for the tertiary institution, there are about two or three. We were not party to how those salary structures evolved. Ogunlewe Suddenly, all the institutions said we should come and implement them. And we said our resources were different from the resources of the federal government. In the military days, we all queue under the federal government to borrow whatever came out as salary structures and we implemented them. There were other states that could implement under the one-line structure of the military, and the federal government would come to the aid of such states. But under democracy, we are trying to run a proper federation. We decided to have a pay policy in place. So, we initiated the pay policy. We sat down with all the union and said henceforth whatever we would pay as salaries should be evolved within the state and that we should put our resources into consideration. The unions agreed, from there, the salary structure evolved. We have one for the doctors, one for other medical officers, one for the mainstream civil service and one teaching service. That is what we have been using since then and it has been able to calm all the nerves. The pay policy has not been properly considered and approved by the government. But the committee was able to come out with a recommendation that we are able to use and douse the tension at that point in time. - See more at: vanguardngr/2013/11/challenging-period-hos-ogunlewe/#sthash.6Vx00Nr4.dpuf
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 06:20:55 +0000
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