Beloved Friends and Colleagues!
- Taking responsibility for our actions or inactions has become an important demand today in most circles. People would like that people who are placed in-charge of things and offices take responsibility for the duty their offices confer on them.
Taking responsibility in this context means ,standing straight to one’s duties and obligations. It means being responsible for one’s actions, one’s office and to one’s assigned duties. Today more than ever before, the citizens of this country, for instance, are asking the moribund government of the day to take responsibility for the welfare of Nigerian citizens, protecting their lives and property.
- In the same way, the offices we occupy confer on us certain responsibilities. And each office has some ethics guiding its processes and practices. There seems to be no office without some guiding principles. It is therefore the bounden duty of those who occupy those offices to fulfil the requirements of those offices. They are expected to abide by the ethos of such office. That is what it means to be responsible for the ebb and flow of an office. Offices would not thrive and achieve their reasons of being if people placed in such gaps are not keeping to the rules of the games. For efficient and productive engagements in the offices, officers must stand ready for service at their posts of duty.
- In our organization today, a good number of our Staff are extremely productive, standing steady at their duty posts, delivering on their mandates, and making all of us proud. They are found in all our offices across the country. They are known by their works . Their units and departments, teams and colleagues know about them. They may be in the minority, but they constitute the life wire of the unit. In their absence, something and somebody is missing. Yet they are not often being handsomely rewarded. Sometimes they become stressed up and began to ask if they were sent to be punished or what? Some may be conspicuous while some are not. Others are in the public eye, while some languish in anonymity. In all, wisdom is known by its own.
- Yet a good number exist, that are good for nothing. They may have the experience, but a good number seem to be empty, making a whole lot of noise and polluting the environment with their sloth. They are troublemakers and do the organization no good works. And they exist in all the offices, across the county. They make the workplace environment toxic. They make no useful contributions. In their units and among their colleagues, they are torn in the flesh of the organization. They are often not at their duty posts. They are the first to complain of injustices. They leave the offices at will. They spend more days in an ‘illegal stepping out’, than one would ordinarily in an annual leave for a good and law-abiding staff. Yet nobody takes record of their truancy. Sometimes they are highly placed even among the ‘Ogas’ in the HQ. When suddenly you stumble at them unguarded, they begin to appear innocent and tell you pious stories and shower you with unimaginable compliments to divert your attention. These are foxes, that need to be weeded out of the system.
- Yes, some bad eggs must be weeded out of the system so that good trees might thrive and produce good fruits. I think the opportunity has been provided by the present opportunity to work in 3 states instead of 4 in the ACCESS project. Management must, therefore, do the needful to separate the goat from the sheep and help the system become more productive. People placed in charge of certain offices should be more responsible and accountable for their actions. Unit heads should be able to take charge of their units in justice and fairness. They should not be corrupt and collude with their colleagues to beat the system. Remember, every day is for the thief, but one day is for the owner of the house. Those who leave the offices on Thursdays and return on Tuesdays, as a routine in the Southeast offices, without any form of official permission or discussion think they are wise; but fate would soon catch up with them sooner or later.
- Some state Team Leads, and Unit heads have demonstrated gross incompetence in taking charge of their offices by trying to curry unnecessary favours and acquire some illicit popularity among the Staff in their states. They do not reprimand anybody. Nobody does anything wrong. Everything is in order. Yet they know that all that glitters is not gold. Yet some of the Leads, are cantankerous themselves, finding fault in everything and everybody. They too needed some attention in civility and relationship building. There are always ethical boundaries that gives support to leaders in steering the rudder of leadership in an organization like ours. Virtue, they said, lies in the middle.
- Friends and Colleagues, please, let us live and work in such a way that, when we meet one another, years after we had all left Caritas Nigeria, we would have the courage to look at one another in the face and say, hi, it was good while we were in Caritas Nigeria, it is well today, and our partings have been well made!
