Category: Wednesday

The administrative history of the Nigerian public service will definitely not be complete without the mention of Mr. Allison Ayida. Indeed, just a mention will be a serious disservice to the historic role that this astute administrator played in the attempt to reconfigure the public service system, as well as put the Nigerian project right back on track administratively. Like the legendary Simeon Adebo and Jerome Udoji, Ayida belonged in what we affectionately, and with a bit of nostalgia, refer to as the golden years of public administration in Nigeria. And even more so, he was one of the “notorious” super permanent secretaries whose roles in the prosecution of the Nigerian Civil War have been the subject of positive and negative analyses. Together with Ahmed Joda, Ime Ebong, Ahmed Joda, S. O. Wey, Phillip Asiodu, and so on, Allison Ayida played a significant and crucial administrative part that had a lot to do with their vision of the Nigerian project, as well as the professional credentials they had acquired as public administrators.

Allison Ayida had just left us for the beyond. He was 88 years old. This is not a lamentable fact because he not only lived to a good age, and lived well also, but he played his part in the Nigerian national drama. He was a patriot, by all accounts of that term. He was there right at the beginning, and in the very engine room of the Nigerian state as one of the British-trained bureaucrats who had the unenviable task of steering the Nigerian state through the murky waters of the postcolonial realities which the British colonialists themselves had engineered. Paradoxically, Allison Ayida, like Simeon Adebo, Jerome Udoji and the rest of the first-generation pioneers, was invested the best that the British administrative training could muster. The crop of first-generation administrators were the best. They were professionals who were properly inducted into the ethos and values of what it means to be public servants.

Unlike Adebo and Udoji who came to the public service, largely self-educated with English and law degrees respectively, Ayida was very prepared intellectually. In the early 1950s after a stint at the King’s College, Lagos, he proceeded to the equally prestigious Queen’s College, Oxford where he got a Bachelor’s degree in the most prestigious Politics, Philosophy and Economic (PPE). A quick word about this course. The PPE was established specifically as a multidisciplinary course that was targeted at preparing students for the public service. And this explains why the course turned out to be a very great hit for those with the objectives of making a mark with their country’s administrative machinery. Over the years, the PPE has had such notable figures like the late former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, three former prime ministers of Britain (Harold Wilson, David Cameron and Edward Heath), three former prime ministers of Australia, and so many others from around the world. An incredible combination of a sound intellectual background as well as a solid practical professional orientation produced Allison Ayida as who he turned out to be. And those were the days of brimming patriotism on behalf of a country that was fought for with an immense arsenal of hope and optimism that defeated the colonialists’ reluctance.

By the time he returned to Nigeria, after his father’s death which cut short his search for another degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Nigeria was already well into the postcolonial trajectory that was to shoot him into the very centre of the unfolding drama. He made the tight list of permanent secretaries that General Aguiyi Ironsi collected as part of the Federal Executive Council. He was in charge of a very critical ministry—Economic Development. That was exactly where the focus of post-independence development was. It was the ministry where the military had to receive the best education about how to take Nigeria forward. And Ayida had the benefit not only of a reputable background, but also of a crop of colleagues—Alhaji Musa Daggash, Phillip Asiodu, Abdul Aziz Attah, S. O. Williams, Sule Katagum, M. A. Tokunbo, H. A. Ejeyuitchie, and so many more—who had a grasp of their various posts and departments, and who were equally dedicated to the service of putting Nigeria on a sound postcolonial administrative footing.

Working for Ironsi already means that optimism had been eclipsed for Nigeria. The hope of a smooth transition was already endangered. But not for these technocrats. They saw beyond the military to a Nigeria that could still realize her objectives as a nation. Then, as if the sudden desperation enabled by the 1966 coup was not enough, Allison Ayida and the rest of the bureaucrats watched with mounting horror as the country was thrown into the tension of an approaching war. While Gowon and Ojukwu sparred and traded words and political altercations, Ayida and the rest of the technocratic teams calculated the costs of impending war on a nascent state that had barely got its administrative credentials and development planning together. The war eventually happened, and Ayida found himself in the cabinet of General Gowon right from the commencement of hostilities. There were a lot to be done administratively, first, to prevent the war from being fought; and second, to reconstruct the Nigerian state after the war ended.

Becoming a super permanent secretary was a necessity. Allison Ayida and the other super permanent secretaries were circumscribed by enormous historical conditions defined, on the one hand, by military dictatorship and its monolithic command structure. On the other hand, they were pressed on every side to restore a nation that had fought a civil war and required rehabilitation and reconstruction on a large scale. They became “super” because they lived in an interesting but unpalatable time which tasked their patriotic sensibilities and their professional capabilities to the limit. Nigeria was about to go to war and these public servants were confronted with the unenviable task of fashioning a policy framework for war time and post-war Nigeria. For instance, there was a pending issue of drafting the second national development plan which was ongoing with the crucial assistance of the renowned economist, Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade. The impending civil war therefore provided a severe cloud of limitation around which these professionals needed to work.

But like the gold that becomes refined when taken through the furnace, Allison Ayida and the other super permanent secretaries turned their well-honed professional capacity and patriotic fervor came to the rescue. And there was no dithering. Several political commentaries have been written about the supposedly notorious roles played by Ayida and his colleagues in advising Gowon about the war. There is, I think, a simple explanation for whatever course of action they advised Gowon to take. Ayida and his other technocrats had a vision of one Nigeria whose unity must be preserved. Their professionalism as public servants demanded it. Ayida must certainly have debated nation building, development dynamics and postcolonial realities with his tutors at Queen’s College and at the London School of Economics. With the war, he faced the stark realities of the discourse of his education and the most critical challenge any public administrator could ever face.

A fundamental question my reform mindedness imposes upon me is: What was the state of the public service system during the war period? In other words, how did the public administration dynamics up to the point of the commencement of the war facilitated a capability readiness that enabled the super permanent secretaries like Ayida to adequately prosecute the administrative dimensions of the civil war and the challenges of reconstruction that followed? An answer to this question requires deep historical reflections and serious empirical analysis. Yet, we can hazard an answer from historical trajectory. The public service system had been under protracted reconstruction ever since it was inaugurated in 1954. The reform dynamics picked up before independence and immediately after because the system had to be made ready for the postcolonial realities which the colonialists did not design the public service to engage. Indeed, we can even hypothesize that the public service system itself was complicit in the ensemble of events that led to the war. For instance, there is a relationship between the failed development planning and the incapacity of the public service to implement development policies.

Ayida, as an astute technocrat, could not have been blind to this internal dysfunction of the very system he had dedicated his life to. Not all technocrats or bureaucrats have the keen sensibility to detach themselves from a system in which they are insider in order to be able to distinctly analyse its fault-line and shortcomings. Ayida’s professionalism and deep sense of service did not permit that. For instance, like Adebo, Udoji and the rest of the pioneers, he must have seen the encroaching and steady decline of the system. When the 1975 public service purge happened, a wrongheaded move to downsize the system, Ayida must have equally felt the urge to downsize his integrity credentials in order not to me rubbished by a system that threw so many into the unemployment market without any post-employment package to smoothen their retrenchment. However, these breeds of professionals were trained too well not to substitute their integrity and spirituality for filthy lucre or even the existential challenges of making ends meet.

Thus, after the war ended, and the Nigerian state resumed its engagement with the issue of development and other postcolonial challenges, it became obvious that the public service had not yet arrived at any optimal capacity that could anticipate and deal with any present and unforeseen challenges. What precisely were Ayida’s thoughts about the 1971 Adebo Commission’s recommendations and the 1974 Udoji Report? Now this is a very interesting seminal question because it pinpoints the crucial nexus between an objective intervention in the administrative dynamics of past reforms and a subjective analysis of their merits and demerits. The 1994 Ayida Review Panel probably furnishes us with an adroit combination of both. It seems logical that a technocrat who was a core part of the glorious years of the public service in Nigeria would recommend a wide-ranging reversal of the 1998 Dotun Phillips Report. But then, even a system that was optimally functional required constant reforms to bring it up to date with the challenges of democratic service delivery. Ayida and his panel failed the test of re-form or reinvention. Rejecting the laudable recommendations of the 1988 reform, especially with regards to professionalism, efficiency and accountability was like throwing away the baby with the bathwater. The failure of the 1988 reform does not mean the ethos its recommended were not crucial to the reinvention of lost glory, inspite of the conception-reality gap in its idea of professionalism and the politicization of the office of the permanent secretary, which were of the mark.  Indeed, I am still amazed when I engage senior colleagues who saw the glorious days of the civil service in Nigeria and the optimism they have that if only we could reinvent the bureaucratic model of the era, then that would be all Nigeria needs. That optimism goes against the grain of contemporary reality, public administration research and the immense complexities that underpin change management in the knowledge and information age 21st century; as well as what the Adebo Second and Final Wages report of 1971 saw in the inadequacies of that bureaucratic model even at the height of is success. Without the national values system that propelled the Adebos and his ilks and given what public administration demands in this new age, we cannot be so simplistic and presumptuous about the immense changes that public service profession and management system have witnessed and the devils in the details of its reengineering. We need knowledge, creativity and continuous learning to get public service in Nigeria out of the woods.

Yet, Allison Akene Ayida was operating with the sensibility of a patriot. He wanted to contribute the best that his profession allowed him to add to the untangling of the complexities of nation building in Nigeria. He also had to suffer the indignities that those who stuck to integrity and professionalism as the most important credentials they could read into the priestly vocation of the public service. For Ayida, and the other true professionals of the lost era, serving the people is much more honorable than serving their pockets. We remember Allison Akene Ayida today for that singularity of purpose in pursuing the national project and the eventual glory of the Nigerian state.

• Olaopa is a former

Federal Permanent Secretary

 & Professor of Public Administration

tolaopa2003@gmail.com

tolaopa@isgpp.com.ng

The fundamental question I want to address in this essay is simple: Has the Nigerian civil service system significantly reformed since 1974? Any administrative scholar and professional will immediately see why this is a very difficult question to answer either way. This is because it is not just that easy to present an unqualified affirmative or negative answer to a nation’s entire administrative system. There is no nation that will ever remain the same if it does not pay any attention, no matter how minute the reform attention is, to the health of its public service. This is because it is the public service that serves as the fulcrum on which any government will ever make the state run efficiently. And this is even all the more so for any state that aims toward democratic governance and development. Indeed, the notion of a developmental state that is cogent for third world developing countries is founded on the idea of a functional and constantly reforming public service.

Nigeria falls squarely into this category. The Nigerian civil service system has been in the reform business since 1954 when it was inaugurated before Nigeria got her independence. This is because the founding fathers were immediately confronted with the challenge of making the Nigerian state meaningful for the teeming populace who were motivated to join the fight for independence on the premise that it will signal the beginning of a good life for them. The story of Nigeria’s existence since independence has belied that promise. From a terribly managed civilian rule to the long night of military rule, Nigeria has gone from one bad governance programme to another which has given Nigerians a very bad deal with regard to the kind of governance that would empower and transform their existence. Yet the civil service system has been injected with some of the best reform ideas and paradigm that could ever be infused into any administrative system anywhere in the world.

In Nigeria’s administrative history, the pre-1954 and pre-independence reform efforts are cogent because they constitute the proper foundational refection on how the civil service system could be made relevant for a newly independent developing countries that is already challenged by the reason of its plural nature as a multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious and multilinguistic society. Within this context, it became immediately obvious what role the public service was constituted to play in ameliorating the expected fractional conflicts that would no doubt engulf the emerging nation. From 1934 to 1954, seven commissions were put in place: Hunt Committee (1934), the Bridges Committee (1942), the Tudor-Davies Commission (1945), the Harragin Commission (1946), the Smaller Commission (1946), the Foot Commission (1948), and the Phillipson-Adebo Commission (1953). As is to be expected, these commissions were burdened with the administrative issues that any colonial and soon-to-be-postcolonial civil service system would face—cadre, promotion, compensation and remuneration, as well as the fundamental issue of the nature of the civil service. Between 1954 and 1960, there were altogether four reform commissions: Lidbury Commission (1954), the Gorsuch Commission (1955), the Mbanefo Commission (1959), and the Newns Commission (1959). Cadre and remuneration still remained major issues for the emerging civil service to contend with. However, one significant issue that spilled into independence was the “generalists” and “professionals” distinction that remained the bane of the public service efficiency unfortunately up until today.

However, it is one thing to inject a system with fundamental reforming ideas, but an entirely different thing to follow up on the optimal implementation of these ideas and insights in a way that transform the system into a democratic service delivering mechanism. Nigeria has had the best of reform commissions and committees but their recommendations and their possible effectiveness have been swallowed up within the political context that pays lip service to reform but lacks the ultimate will to see it through. The administrative system has thus been progressing in fits and starts, but it has not achieved the reform optimality that would have made the Nigerian civil service a transformed professionalized institution with the capacity readiness for democratic service delivery to Nigerians.

1974 is a fundamental administrative year in the history of the Nigerian civil service. It was the year that Nigeria got its first major opportunity to fundamentally rethink the civil service system and lay its foundation on groundwork of productivity and optimal performance. The Udoji Commission came into existence as a result of the recommendations of the 1971 Adebo Commission that was set up basically to iron out the thorny wage and salary issue that kept recurring since 1954. However, this Commission got caught up in the deeper managerial challenges raised by the 1968 Fulton Report set up in the UK to reassess the efficiency problem of the British Civil Service. The Fulton Report is regarded as the “high watermark of managerialism”, as well as the theoretical foundation for the New Public Management (NPM) revolution. The Report was set up to reflect on the possibilities of the Weberian administrative system within the context of the imperatives market system. The Adebo Commission was therefore compelled to confront the issues of an appropriate organisation and structure that would energize the efficiency profile of the civil service in Nigeria. In other words, wage and salary are just symptoms of a deeper administrative malady Nigeria needed to engage with. However, because it had its specific objective, the Commission recommended the establishment of another commission to focus on organisational and structural matters.

The Udoji Commission tackled its terms of reference head on. As at the time it was set up, the Fulton Report was already six years old, and thus Chief Jerome Udoji had the full complement of the debates and discourses as well as the administrative responses to the Fulton Report. The Udoji Commission saw the fundamental problem of the civil service in Nigeria as that of an administrative inflexibility that finds it hard to respond to positive changes. Its Main Report therefore advocated the need for a total reassessment of the Nigerian Civil Service and its capacity to internalise and adapt global best practices. The Commission was also bold enough to tackle the generalist-professional issue when it recommended a new style public service infused with “new blood” working under a result-oriented management system operated by professionals and specialists in particular fields. There was also the need, according to the Report, for standardization of conditions of service, increase in public sector wages, a unified and integrated administrative structure, the elimination of waste and the removal of deadwood/inefficient departments, but with the caveat, that the wage component, in terms of phasing, should follow the managerial and systemic changes recommended.

Like the Fulton Report before it, these cogent recommendations never saw the light of the day! Any time I write about the Udoji Commission and the ill that befell it, I usually take a pause because I am always consumed by a deep sadness at the great opportunity for renewal and rebirth that Nigeria missed. We had an opportunity to transform a colonial heritage into a truly postcolonial administrative machinery that could have been sufficiently empowered to take on the development challenges of a developing Nigeria. The military administration that received it preferred and implemented the wage component of the Udoji Report rather than its deeper recommendations for managerial transformation of the system. The reform reputation that ought to have dignified Chief Udoji’s name was damaged by a superficial wage issue.

This administrative tragedy was compounded in 1975, the year of the infamous purge of the Nigerian civil service when the Murtala-Obasanjo administration retrenched thousands of public servants unceremoniously. Let us attempt to put this purge in perspective. The most damning issue with the purge was its political undercurrent and the caliber of highly revered administrative mentors that were affected. In another breath and as a result of the Nigerianisation Policy and the choice of representativeness over merit as the operating criterion of the system as well as state creation and its attendant institutional multiplication, there was a massive recruitment exercise that ultimately bloated the public sector and deprived it of an efficiency capacity. It therefore became possible to have too many people doing too little work. Efficiency went overboard, and development suffered. It is therefore sound administrative thinking to work within the demands of downsizing the system at the lower level if it ever hopes to retrieve an efficient optimality. However, downsizing is not cheap, as it requires a post-retirement package that should be factored into the downsizing process itself. This translates into giving those to be eased out a soft landing after they have left service. The military regime at the time was oblivious to all this administrative necessity.

Unfortunately, the ripple effects of the administrative insensitivity that attended the 1975 purge has remained with the civil service ethos since then. Those humiliated out of office took with them the true concept of selfless service and the culture of deferred gratification. And those left behind immediately became pragmatic in their understanding of the logic of the system—since the system does not reward honest service and productivity, it is better to reward oneself at the expense of the system itself. The culture of immediacy therefore became the central source of the dysfunction that crept into the public service post-1975 and by extension, took with it long-term thinking. The ghost of Udoji and his Report have come to haunt the Nigerian public service! And we have been trying since the return of democracy in 1999 to exorcise this ghost. All the other post-1974 reforms—Phillips (1988), Ayida (1995), Obasanjo (1999), Yar’Adua (2010) and Jonathan (2011)—have had to pay the price of not only the missed opportunity of reforming the productivity dynamics of the civil service system, but also of a system that keeps scrambling to reform itself.

It is clear to me that the system has still not got right the productivity/performance/output-driven framework within which most performing public service in the world now operates. And so, for the public service to pick up a reforming rhythm that is truly in sync with Nigeria’s democratic experiment, then the starting point would be to commence a reflection on the administrative ideology that undergirds the public service as is right now. All our administrative reforms have been carried out within the Weberian administrative structure. But then, the world has moved on to the neo-Weberian! It is time to get Nigeria’s reform right. Reform is not just about tweaking the system for optimality. On the contrary, it is more about reflecting on what the underlying ideological and administrative framework of the system ought to be and in what direction one wants its objectives to be directed. The Weberian administrative philosophy has served its purpose but is not yet exhausted. But contrary to expectations, the New Public Management has failed as a replacement. Neo-Weberianism is a testament to the creative association between the traditional system and managerialism. It is high time Nigeria enters into this era of administrative experimentation and creativity.

• Olaopa (PhD) is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, tolaopa2003@gmail.com