Public Sector Financial Management: A Case Study of Selected Parastatals

Abstract

In any economy, there is existence of two different kinds of goods and services available to the economic units. These goods and services are categorized into the private and social goods. The private goods are those goods that the private sector (companies and individuals produce and provide for the consumption of the people. While the social goods, due to their nature and absolute importance in meeting the welfare needs of the economic units are being produced and provided by the government). The government thus handles the provision of such goods as electricity, water, education, roads, communication media and what have you, in its different parastatals or ministries. This paper is interested in electricity, postal services and communication media of the governments' provision of social goods. As have already been mentioned, government parastatals are solely owned by the government and the provision of fund for their operations is the sole responsibility of the government except for few ones that are now commercialized, like Nigerian Telecommunications Limited, For the past years, the issue 0 f inefficiency in the performance 0 f government parastatals has been related with inadequate financing by the government and mismanagement of fund. Due to the problem of inadequate financing by government, parastatals have gone commercial in their operations like NITEL and NEPA, while others arc tending towards privatization. The core of this project is to research into the financing of NEPA, NIPOST and NITEL being the sole generator and distributor of electricity, provider of postal services and communication media in Nigeria, likewise as organizations of government parastatals with a view to evaluating their performance as regards their statutory financial management and so on. One of the writer's problems in this research is that these selected parastatals as organizations do not have current published financial reports and this research was based on the materials acquired from the organizations. The writer therefore made use of both primary and secondary data. The writer observed that government parastatals got their finance mainly from the federal government, in forms of loans, grants and budgetary allocations and from other foreign financial institutions. The delay and bureaucratic process involved in these and getting approval for contracts and obtain timely supplies of imported requirements have always drawn the clock backwards for these parastatals in term of performance. The government should therefore realize that the inadequacy of facilities and equipment in parastatals goes a long way in ' inhibiting the efficient performance of the establishment concerned and make necessary arrangements for urgent provision of funds for adequate acquisition of facilities and equipment such as transformers, vehicles etc . Funds for maintenance should also be made available to these organizations. These findings and recommendations are discussed in details in chapter six. It should be noted in this research work, of the writer's continuous use of the word NEPA, NIPOST and NITEL which are abbreviations for National Electric Power Authority, Nigerian Postal Service Department, and Telecommunications Limited. This is due to limitation of space Nigerian