State the functions and problems of public corporation.
Explanation
(a)Functions of Public Corporation include:
(i) Provision of essential services, e.g water, electricity.
(ii) to generate and provide employment for the citizens.
(iii) provision of some services that are capital intensive which ordinarily cannot be provided by individuals e.g electricity, railways, etc.
(iv) to remove the tendency to exploit the people if individuals were to handle such essential services.
(v) to be involved in the provision of some strategic projects and mainly for security reasons e.g arms manufacturing, minting, etc.
(vi)To be involved in revenue generation for the government, for e.g. NICON.
(b) Problems of Public Corporation are as follows:
(i) Frequent change of government: This can affect the efficiency of public corporation. It can produce or result in frequent and unreasonable changes of officials and this can affect the efficient performance of some of the public corporations
(ii) Victimization : There could be political victimiza-tion of officials of public corporation especially if the officials are not ready to dance to the tune of the party in government.
(iii) Inadequate qualified personnel : Most qualified technicians and professionals may not join any of the corporations probably as a result of poor conditions of service
(iv) Poor attitude to Work: Most of the workers display ‘ I don’t care attitude’, to work. They see the corporations as belonging to nobody and so poor attitude to work is the result.
(v) Red-Tapism/ Bureaucracy: People accuse public corporations of too much adherence to protocols or official issues.
(vi) Frequent political interference: This interference may come from the executive or legislative arms of government and this may affect the efficiency of public corporations.
(vii) Sectionalism and Nepotism: The ugly sides of these two monsters can affect the efficiency of public corpora-tions.
(viii) Ethnicity/ Favouritism: Both are playing major role in appointments of Board of Directors, Managing Directors and even General Managers to control public corporations.
9. Inefficiency: Inefficiency is the bane of most public corporations. They perform poorly and below expectation, for example, NEPA, Water Corporations, NRC, etc.
(x) Monopoly: Most of the public Corporations e.g NEPA, Water Corporation, etc, enjoy monopoly and some forms of protections from the state. In modern states, efficiency results from competition, inefficiency may result from monopoly, because of the absence of competition.
(xi) Delay in policy making and execution: This may come up because those involved in policy making and execution are many.
(xii) Wastages: Most public Corporations are accused of wastages and carelessness.
(xiii) Inability to generate enough fund for the government: The idea that public Corporations were mainly established to provide essential services to the people may not be fully true after all. This is because government may want them to generate enough fund from within in order to stay afloat and not to depend wholly on government subvention.