The concept of benchmarking, for optimization of resources in order to achieve efficiency and effectiveness, has been a neglected phenomenon in the Nigerian public sector. Nigerian governments are hardly accountable to the society they serve. Often times, government activities have been reduced to provision of social amenities such as roads, electricity and water but unfortunately, the efforts of the various governments are not matched with enabling performance indicators by which government could be evaluated and assessed. The paper brings to the fore the need to have performance benchmarking in the Nigerian economy nay, the public sector. The methodology adopted for the study was the review of existing literature approach.