Having watched Dr. Tunji Olaopa labour quietly in the trenches in the last decade without an expectation of being rewarded, I held back tears when a colleague gave me the news that President Muhammadu Buhari was going to confer on him the National Productivity Order of Merit Award (NPOM) for all that it is worth, at long last.
Tunji Olaopa does not cut the picture of a classroom academic but very few scholars have influenced discourses on public administration and the general public space like he has done within the past two decades. I had a singular opportunity of reading over two dozens of his publications and can conveniently distil two themes in his intellectual adventure; namely, his treatise on public administration, and his intellectual interventions in public discourse and good governance in Nigeria. Evidently, Olaopa‘s seminal arguments on public administration are emanations from his doctoral thesis, his general experiences as a career civil servant and his stint with the bureau of public service reforms, an agency which he conceptualised in 2003 and which raison d’être was to provide technical backstopping to the re-engineering of the nation’s public service.
A cursory glance through his works reveals an uncanny passion for public service. These include dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles and monographs such as Public Administration And Civil Service Reforms In Nigeria (2008), Innovation And Best Practices In Public Sector Reforms (2009), Public Service Reforms In Africa (2010), Managing Complex Reforms: A Public Sector Perspective (2011) and the Nigerian Civil Service of the Future (2014) and The Joy of Learning, the life and times of Professor Ojetunji Aboyade.
On the civil service, Olaopa traced the history of the Nigerian civil service to the colonial service which was in force during the early years of Nigeria‘s independence. A potpourri of indigenous officers and expatriates, the colonial model civil service was designed as a mere secretariat of government business, but the need to expand its scope and replace the expatriates with local workforce gave rise to series of reforms and challenges. According to Olaopa, the height of this disarticulation in the nation‘s service occurred during the almost four decades of military rule. The regimented mentality and the customary command-and-control style of the military severely rubbed off on the psyche and operations of the civil service. The noticeable manifestations of systemic weakness were over-expansion of the service, unification of erstwhile regional services, nepotism, corruption etc.
The colonial model started well in Nigeria and flourished up to the early post- independence years when the system opted for the replacement of expatriates under the Nigerianization scheme. Although the expatriates were known for dedication and professionalism and even inspired the pioneer Nigerians who took over from them, the service was to witness a steady decline in quality service delivery and professionalism especially from the middle of the 1970s due to unhealthy inter-service rivalries for managerial talent and spurious promotions. The dynamics of manpower utilization which hitherto relied on planning, forecasting, budgeting and control broke down as even job designs, description and performance were determined by nepotism and other shady factors. In fact, such critical condiments of the public service such as officer deployments, job classification grading and posting became manipulated by politicians and senior service officials. The practice was for some unscrupulous officials to attach an occupational classification to a staff just to get the staff graded far beyond his mates. The author opines that it was this “character of the state” that dampened the competence and efficiency of the public service.
Every succeeding regime grappled with reforms to ensure the much-needed transformation of the Nigerian civil service from merely ‘administrative to managerial culture’ to ensure optimal productivity.
He offered strategies to plug the yawning gaps that have short-circuited the reform trajectory of the civil service. These gaps include: policy gaps, capacity gaps, process gaps, performance gaps and resource gaps.
The depth of his arguments reveals him as an expert-insider; his works interrogate the dynamics of the reform of the civil service in Nigeria and calibrate the very essentials that would reinvigorate this all important institution of the government which is plagued by corruption, disarticulation and systemic weakness.
On his adventure in public discourse, Olaopa upped the scale above typical Nigerian public commentators; he is not an armchair critic, but a purveyor of facts and solutions. Various writers have appropriated social criticism as a vehicle to protest those elements of the society they feel ineffective, dysfunctional or corrupt. Areas such as bureaucracy voyeurism, big government, racism and human rights often take centre stage in such essays. In recent times, such writers captivate the reader with not only their lamentations on societal problems but take care to convincingly demonstrate solutions to such problems and attempt to refine the people’s feelings about the society in which they live. The mindset of social critics in Nigeria can be understood as they are irked that the country has potential for greatness if only things are done the right way. The expectations which drive such critics to protest can be captured in the lamentations of Chukwudifu Oputa when he submitted that “Nigeria is great in size, great in population, handsomely blessed and richly endowed by a kind and prodigal providence with almost unlimited natural resources. The challenge is for all of us to make her even greater than nature portend…but if, and only if we are disciplined”
With the array of his research works, Olaopa‘s contribution to the pool of knowledge on public administration is not in doubt. No comprehensive research or reading can be achieved on the Nigerian public service without a footnote on him. It is intriguing that this feat was achieved by a supposedly busy permanent secretary in the nation‘s civil service. Winston Churchill once said in his famous epitaph on Joseph Chamberlain that one mark of a great man is the power of making lasting impressions on the people he meets. Another is to have handled matters during his life that the course of after-events is continually affected by what he did. Here, one is wont to see the portrait of Tunji Olaopa squarely in this description.
It is these uncommon traits and his propensity to contribute more to the uplift of the Nigerian public service that inspired his recognition for the coveted National Productivity Order of Merit Award for 2015.
Although this one comes as an addition to the numerous feathers in our subject’s cap, the person giving the award this time around is President Buhari – the no-nonsense, austere Nigerian leader who is credited with integrity and a focus on merit. He has been called by history to clean up Nigeria. The quintessential Buhari would not say well done unless one merits it. He is not known for frivolities. He must have noticed a man who combines excellent service with turnkey research output to re-engineer and strengthen the public service.
- Dr Afaha is a lecturer in the Dept of History and Diplomatic Studies, UNIABUJA
