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Tag: Nigerian civil service

  • Reforming the Nigerian Civil Service: My struggles, my pain, my triumphs (VI)

    Reforming the Nigerian Civil Service: My struggles, my pain, my triumphs (VI)

    When I entered the Nigerian Civil Service in the eighties, it was clearly a decade plus after the administrative pioneers left, but the bureaucratic culture had fully taken hold; the civil service system was already in a free fall. John Galbraith, the famous US economist, was right when he noted that ‘It’s much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.’ We can also adapt this by saying that it is easier to lament the predicament of the civil service system than to get into the trench of fabricating the solution to it. Euclid, the Greek mathematician once remarked that “there is no “royal road” to geometry.’ There is equally no such royal road to reforming the civil service system in Nigeria. The decision to commit to administrative reform did not come easy; the rot and decline had been there before I even made the decision to go to school. But my curiosity got the best of me, and I wondered: What led to the present situation of a civil service that was adjudged one of the best in the Commonwealth in the late 60s and the early 70s?

    When I eventually decided on researching the civil service in Nigeria, I knew that I was not just an intellectual motivated by an abstract situation; I was also a practitioner. Thus, as a civil servant-intellectual, I had the unique opportunity to confront theory with troubled practice. Hence, there was no way I could be an idealist with his eyes in the starry sky. I had my feet on the trembling ground of bureaucratic malfunction. My research focus was therefore motivated by a statement of Marie Curie, the French physicist: ‘One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.’

    So, seeing that the civil service system in Nigeria has become what it has become, what is to be done? This is one of the most difficult questions in the whole of history? V. I. Lenin seemed to be the first to ask the question in relation to the Russian Revolution he led in the 19th century. Within the context of administrative reform in Nigeria, this question cuts into two complementary questions-Where is the civil service headed? How can it get to where it is headed? One of the commendable contributions of the last three Nigerian governments to reform thinking in Nigeria is the formulation of the National Strategy on Public Service Reform (NSPSR), a reformulation of the public service reform strategy put together in 2003. I consider this document an irreducible reform blueprint for a simple reason: it has the weight of historical reform hindsight behind it. The vision behind the NSPSR’s framework of reform is beautifully simple: A world-class public service delivering government policies and programmes with professionalism, excellence and passion.

    I have been too long in the civil service not to however understand that this vision misses out on an antecedent but fundamental goal-the urgent need for a sustainable paradigm shift in productivity. The challenge of productivity in Nigeria brings to the fore the glaring absence of a national productivity paradigm around which Nigeria’s governance trajectory can be computed as a strategy for mitigating a nascent culture of institutionalised waste in human resource management. Good governance should really be premised on the capacity of the Nigerian state to efficiently and effectively provide adequate goods and services that will constitute the dividends of democracy for Nigerians. But then the task of governance itself has a subtle way of undermining the possibility of an effectively calibrated national productivity framework that affects governance.

    What are the challenges of national productivity that Nigeria faces? Let us outline just three indicators: a) the challenge that Nigeria faces as a resource dependent mono-cultural economy is one of harnessing resource efficiency to accelerate growth in the economy; b) the average output of the Nigerian workforce reflects, unarguably, low marginal productivity of labour even as national productivity is much more than just labour productivity; and c) given the relationship between productivity, performance and service delivery on the one hand, and the fact that government consumes considerable tax resources as perhaps the single largest employer of labour and provider of services in the economy on the other, Nigeria will hardly advance beyond the capability and productivity of its public service.

    The summary of the predicament is that the cost of governance undermines the efficiency of national productivity. And this unbridled cost automatically generates institutional waste of such enormity that it multiplies and invades every aspect of the Nigerian administrative institutions and processes. If the vision of a world class public service is necessarily subordinated to that of instigating a national productivity paradigm shift, then the next question jumps at us: How can the civil service system be reformed to achieve such a critical national goal? Twenty seven years in the civil service is too long for me not to generate an understanding of what the trajectory of reform should look like. For Theobald Smith, ‘Research is fundamentally a state of mind involving continual re-examination of the doctrines and axioms upon which current thought and action are based. It is, therefore, critical of existing practices.’ Thus, my first research conviction is that the reform of the civil service system cannot be backward looking; it cannot be directed towards regaining the status of the service in the 60s and the 70s.

    On the contrary, the civil service system must be reformed to becoming a new public service characterised as (a) fast moving, intelligent, professional, information-rich, flexible, adaptable and entrepreneurial; (b) less employee-focused and rule-driven, deliver quality service; (c) performance-focused, accountable and inspired to uphold the vision of a transformed Nigeria; (d) capable of creating the policy climate that will unlock the energy of the private sector and other sectors and to install a new productivity paradigm in the national economy; and (e) operated by multidisciplinary team of new generation public managers and project teams. The new Nigerian public service would be backstopped by a four-point reform agenda.

    The first is the urgent assemblage of a new generation of public managers dedicated to the agenda of a new productivity paradigm. This becomes important because the new public service requires those who understands what it means and can strategically drive it to excellence and efficiency. The ‘new professionals’ therefore must be leaders, rather than mere administrators, with all the emotional, intellectual and cultural capital required by such a complex system as the Nigerian public service. The new public managers would not work in the capacity of transactional leadership which is essentially a problem-solver; thermostat for regulating the administrative temperature, especially when standards are not met. Rather, the leadership would be based on a shared transformative capacity which is necessary within the governance network that the 21st century reform must conform to.

    The second point on the reform agenda is even more critical. It involves reengineering the MDAs management system into performance-oriented, technology-enabled and social compact or accountable business model. This becomes the institutional model that the new public service professional must work with to deliver on the productivity objective. This implies that there is a need to rethink the ways and manners in which government business is carried out if the MDAs are to become more strategic and less bureaucratic in service delivery. As they are presently, we made the point earlier in part five that the MDAs are operating simultaneously under two contradictory business models, the Weberian and the neoliberal. The challenge is to streamline the business model into a neo-Weberian framework that creatively takes the best of the new managerialism and the old Weberian models.

    The third point of reform involves reorienting the public service into a rebranded and ethically-focused profession. At the heart of this rebranded public service are ethical standards like integrity, honesty, accountability, transparency, and the sense of responsibility that ensures that there is a readiness to explain how decisions are made. This could be achieved by taking serious the imperative of re-professionalization. This implies a change in the culture of doing things which cannot occur simply by changing regulations, structures, processes and technology, but by changing the orientation of public servants through a robust competency-driven, competitive, people-centred re-professionalization scheme. This re-professionalization process constitutes a prominent dimension of the performance management system. This process involves, for instance, the need to evolve a new career management system leading to the acquisition of officers with capacities and skills in specialised fields of knowledge.

    The final point requires, as a specific performance issue, strengthening and leveraging Public-Private Partnership to facilitate and deepen effective and efficient service delivery. This is predicated on the fact that (a) government does not have the capacity to do everything that will make the citizens’ lives worth living; and (b) government cannot afford to achieve the little it could by being rule-bound, unresponsive and inefficient; it requires a fundamental change that will make it lean, decentralised, effective, creative and responsive; and there are little resources available to government to do anything. The way out is to explore the possibility of a functional division of labour that brings the private sector into the development agenda of the government.

    Every serious agenda deserves attention, and a reform agenda all the more so because reforming the civil service system in Nigeria is the first condition for national development. Nigeria has had three governments since the inauguration of the democratic dispensation in 1999. The PMB administration is the fourth, and is more suitably positioned, and more favoured by administrative history, to oversee the required overhauling of the Nigerian public service. the change agenda of the new administration has the specifics of its tasks and responsibilities cut out for it.

     

    • Dr. Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary

    tolaopa2003@gmail.com

    tolaopa2003@yahoo.com

    www.tunjiolaopa.com

    Abuja

  • Reforming the Nigerian Civil Service: My struggles, my pain, my triumphs (V)

    The first brutal fact I confronted when I joined the civil service was its complex operational frameworks, and unfortunately its pathology. I came in when the Nigerian civil service had already imbibed, to the fullest possible extent, the disenabling bureaucratic culture. The complex operational dynamics of every civil service system all over the world had begun to overwhelm our own system, and like we said in the last part, the system itself was not prepared for the challenge of change. The rule of the officials had commenced, and to borrow the title of Michel Crozier’s book, the Nigerian Civil Service became a ‘bureaucratic phenomenon.’ As it became immediately obvious to me, as the bureaucratic complacency became entrenched, and the official procedures became multiplied, the citizens became more excluded from democratic transaction, and became more disenchanted.

    From the mid-70s, the Nigerian Civil Service had already got a bad name.

    We all have experienced the red tape at one time or the other-the clerk painting her fingers while people wait impatiently on the long queue; the official who complicates a simple matter of getting a license because he wants a bribe; moving from one office to the other trying to track a file; the annoying list is endless. Peter Enahoro, the veteran journalist, considers the civil servants as trapped within their own institution: ‘Civil servants are also a compromise between incivility and servitude. They are inherently uncivil and economically servile. The civil servant is underpaid, which makes his service equivalent to servitude. On the other hand, the civil servant takes a razor-sharp tongue to work with him and will snap like the jaws of a crocodile at the least provocation. Thus, while he is not civil, he is a servant. It is a rare compromise.’

    It took me a while before I would begin to understand that the public service has a deeper professional pedigree than what we today see all around us at federal and state secretariats all over the country. By the time I had embarked on the doctoral programme, it dawned on me that the public service is actually a vocation, a deep spiritual calling that requires a deep service to the public. Of course, this is difficult to accept within the contextual bastardisation which Enahoro referred to as ‘uncivil servitude.’ But the simple question that would bring enlightenment is: where did we derive the concept of ‘public service’ from? And why ‘public or civil service’?

    The civil service, which predates the idea of modern government, derives essentially from a vision of ensuring social order from an administrative coordination of human affairs. Since its beginning in the ancient Egyptian society, the public service has been perennially faced with the urgent need of confronting the complex task of managing public affairs through the ingenuity and creative acumen of a manager who understands the dynamics of management and how it can be directed in a manner that impacts positively on the citizens of a state. Those that were chosen to serve the pharaoh, a demi-god in ancient Egypt, were required to go through a special scribal education that was partly a lesson in administrative responsibility, partly an induction into patriotic enthusiasm, and partly a cultural enlightenment.

    I had to understand Plato and Weber to come to a full realization of what service as spirituality means. The first time I read Plato’s Republic, as a young secondary school boy, it struck me as a fundamental political manifesto. It was a philosophical reflection on how to tame political disorder in a state. But Plato had a higher intention if his Republic would be better than Athens. Plato was convinced that if a state must work to deliver the goods to its citizenry and maintain harmony, it must also be strongly fortified by a cadre of managers and experts who know what they are doing. Plato definitely had more intellectual resources and political complexity than the pharaohs. And, still smarting from the judicial murder of Socrates in the hands of public servants, Plato knew that the depth of philosophical diligence must be reached if the Republic must have a public service that is true to the most fundamental principles of the state. And he deployed educational, psychological, metaphysical and epistemological resources to ensure that.

    But it is to Max Weber that I must give the intellectual credit for the groundwork that reveals the public service as a vocation. With his theory of the modern bureaucracy, Weber outlined the specific relationship that ought to exist between the public servants and the government. His sociological legacy consists in giving us the template for what he called the ‘ideal-type’ bureaucracy which can serve as the rational basis by which ‘actual type’ bureaucracies, public or private, can be assessed for the rational attainment of the goals of the organisation.The idea of bureaucracy, for Weber, is based on the notion of legal-rational authority; an authority which employees recognise as legitimate. The framework of the legal-rational authority privileges written rules and procedures. Each position in the bureaucracy has its duties and rights, which are clearly defined; rules and procedures are laid down to determine how the given authority is to be exercised. Bureaucracy therefore promises a stable organisation, despite the fact that its incumbents come and go. Weber’s ideal-type bureaucracy emerged as neutral, hierarchically organised, precise, continuous, disciplined, strict, efficient, reliable and ultimately inevitable in contemporary society. The bureaucracy was to become technically the most efficient form of organisation. And in Weber’s sociological, Plato’s philosophical and the pharaoh’s cultural vision, the public service was to become a vocation.

    And the first condition for such a vocation is that the public servant must be apolitical in a manner that shields him or her from political patronage that could colour his or her administrative judgment. This is what Joseph Schumpeter meant when he remarked that ‘bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.’ As history has shown, it is a very short step from administrative service to administrative dominance by officials. As vocation, the public service was to be a spiritual calling, a profession that would consume the affections of those committed to it. A profession becomes a calling or a vocation when it becomes integrated within an ethical framework and is therefore attached to larger vision and purpose beyond itself. It is in this sense that a bureaucrat is ‘called’ to serve the state and a purpose beyond him/herself.

    Beyond the rigid intellectual framework of my doctoral dissertation, I did not need to look to pharaonic Egypt, ancient Rome or 18th century Prussia to encounter those who are public servants par excellence-Nigeria had its own golden era of public service professionalism whose foundation was laid by die-hard public servants: Simeon Adebo, Jerome Udoji, Sule Katagum, S. O. Wey, Ali Akilu, Allison Ayida, Phillip Asiodu,  Ahmed Joda, Ime Ebong, Yetunde Ighodalo, Francesca Emanuel, Tejumade Alakija, Gray Longe, Shehu Musa, to name just a few. All these worked tirelessly to reproduce a functional and ethically responsible civil service in post-independence Nigeria. Chief Simeon Adebo’s service credential is all the more incredible because he had no special original calling into administration; he was a graduate of English! Yet, he came to a deep understanding of his vocation as more than just an employment. Adebo would definitely understand Abraham Maslow’s contention that ‘Duty cannot be contrasted with pleasure, nor work with play when duty is pleasure, when work is play, and the person doing his duty and being virtuous is simultaneously seeking his pleasure and being happy.’

    Unfortunately, these same professional civil servants who laid the foundation of what we now regard as the golden era of public service in Nigeria watched perplexed as the civil service they had built was overwhelmed by incipient bureaucratic pathology. Before their very eyes, their civil service was demoted from being one of the celebrated civil services in the Commonwealth to become an extremely degenerate structure that could no longer transform policies into infrastructural frameworks. It was this civil service that I made the decision to join in the late 80s, and that decision transformed my entire personal and professional lives.

     

     

  • Reforming the Nigerian Civil Service: My struggles, my pain, my triumphs (V)

    The first brutal fact I confronted when I joined the civil service was its complex operational frameworks, and unfortunately its pathology. I came in when the Nigerian civil service had already imbibed, to the fullest possible extent, the disenabling bureaucratic culture. The complex operational dynamics of every civil service system all over the world had begun to overwhelm our own system, and like we said in the last part, the system itself was not prepared for the challenge of change. The rule of the officials had commenced, and to borrow the title of Michel Crozier’s book, the Nigerian Civil Service became a ‘bureaucratic phenomenon.’ As it became immediately obvious to me, as the bureaucratic complacency became entrenched, and the official procedures became multiplied, the citizens became more excluded from democratic transaction, and became more disenchanted.

    From the mid-70s, the Nigerian Civil Service had already got a bad name.

    We all have experienced the red tape at one time or the other-the clerk painting her fingers while people wait impatiently on the long queue; the official who complicates a simple matter of getting a license because he wants a bribe; moving from one office to the other trying to track a file; the annoying list is endless. Peter Enahoro, the veteran journalist, considers the civil servants as trapped within their own institution: ‘Civil servants are also a compromise between incivility and servitude. They are inherently uncivil and economically servile. The civil servant is underpaid, which makes his service equivalent to servitude. On the other hand, the civil servant takes a razor-sharp tongue to work with him and will snap like the jaws of a crocodile at the least provocation. Thus, while he is not civil, he is a servant. It is a rare compromise.’

    It took me a while before I would begin to understand that the public service has a deeper professional pedigree than what we today see all around us at federal and state secretariats all over the country. By the time I had embarked on the doctoral programme, it dawned on me that the public service is actually a vocation, a deep spiritual calling that requires a deep service to the public. Of course, this is difficult to accept within the contextual bastardisation which Enahoro referred to as ‘uncivil servitude.’ But the simple question that would bring enlightenment is: where did we derive the concept of ‘public service’ from? And why ‘public or civil service’?

    The civil service, which predates the idea of modern government, derives essentially from a vision of ensuring social order from an administrative coordination of human affairs. Since its beginning in the ancient Egyptian society, the public service has been perennially faced with the urgent need of confronting the complex task of managing public affairs through the ingenuity and creative acumen of a manager who understands the dynamics of management and how it can be directed in a manner that impacts positively on the citizens of a state. Those that were chosen to serve the pharaoh, a demi-god in ancient Egypt, were required to go through a special scribal education that was partly a lesson in administrative responsibility, partly an induction into patriotic enthusiasm, and partly a cultural enlightenment.

    I had to understand Plato and Weber to come to a full realization of what service as spirituality means. The first time I read Plato’s Republic, as a young secondary school boy, it struck me as a fundamental political manifesto. It was a philosophical reflection on how to tame political disorder in a state. But Plato had a higher intention if his Republic would be better than Athens. Plato was convinced that if a state must work to deliver the goods to its citizenry and maintain harmony, it must also be strongly fortified by a cadre of managers and experts who know what they are doing. Plato definitely had more intellectual resources and political complexity than the pharaohs. And, still smarting from the judicial murder of Socrates in the hands of public servants, Plato knew that the depth of philosophical diligence must be reached if the Republic must have a public service that is true to the most fundamental principles of the state. And he deployed educational, psychological, metaphysical and epistemological resources to ensure that.

    But it is to Max Weber that I must give the intellectual credit for the groundwork that reveals the public service as a vocation. With his theory of the modern bureaucracy, Weber outlined the specific relationship that ought to exist between the public servants and the government. His sociological legacy consists in giving us the template for what he called the ‘ideal-type’ bureaucracy which can serve as the rational basis by which ‘actual type’ bureaucracies, public or private, can be assessed for the rational attainment of the goals of the organisation.The idea of bureaucracy, for Weber, is based on the notion of legal-rational authority; an authority which employees recognise as legitimate. The framework of the legal-rational authority privileges written rules and procedures. Each position in the bureaucracy has its duties and rights, which are clearly defined; rules and procedures are laid down to determine how the given authority is to be exercised. Bureaucracy therefore promises a stable organisation, despite the fact that its incumbents come and go. Weber’s ideal-type bureaucracy emerged as neutral, hierarchically organised, precise, continuous, disciplined, strict, efficient, reliable and ultimately inevitable in contemporary society. The bureaucracy was to become technically the most efficient form of organisation. And in Weber’s sociological, Plato’s philosophical and the pharaoh’s cultural vision, the public service was to become a vocation.

    And the first condition for such a vocation is that the public servant must be apolitical in a manner that shields him or her from political patronage that could colour his or her administrative judgment. This is what Joseph Schumpeter meant when he remarked that ‘bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.’ As history has shown, it is a very short step from administrative service to administrative dominance by officials. As vocation, the public service was to be a spiritual calling, a profession that would consume the affections of those committed to it. A profession becomes a calling or a vocation when it becomes integrated within an ethical framework and is therefore attached to larger vision and purpose beyond itself. It is in this sense that a bureaucrat is ‘called’ to serve the state and a purpose beyond him/herself.

    Beyond the rigid intellectual framework of my doctoral dissertation, I did not need to look to pharaonic Egypt, ancient Rome or 18th century Prussia to encounter those who are public servants par excellence-Nigeria had its own golden era of public service professionalism whose foundation was laid by die-hard public servants: Simeon Adebo, Jerome Udoji, Sule Katagum, S. O. Wey, Ali Akilu, Allison Ayida, Phillip Asiodu,  Ahmed Joda, Ime Ebong, Yetunde Ighodalo, Francesca Emanuel, Tejumade Alakija, Gray Longe, Shehu Musa, to name just a few. All these worked tirelessly to reproduce a functional and ethically responsible civil service in post-independence Nigeria. Chief Simeon Adebo’s service credential is all the more incredible because he had no special original calling into administration; he was a graduate of English! Yet, he came to a deep understanding of his vocation as more than just an employment. Adebo would definitely understand Abraham Maslow’s contention that ‘Duty cannot be contrasted with pleasure, nor work with play when duty is pleasure, when work is play, and the person doing his duty and being virtuous is simultaneously seeking his pleasure and being happy.’

    Unfortunately, these same professional civil servants who laid the foundation of what we now regard as the golden era of public service in Nigeria watched perplexed as the civil service they had built was overwhelmed by incipient bureaucratic pathology. Before their very eyes, their civil service was demoted from being one of the celebrated civil services in the Commonwealth to become an extremely degenerate structure that could no longer transform policies into infrastructural frameworks. It was this civil service that I made the decision to join in the late 80s, and that decision transformed my entire personal and professional lives.

  • Reforming the Nigerian Civil Service: My struggles, my pain, my triumphs (III)

    Confucius, the ancient Chinese philosopher, once gave a remarkable admonishment: ‘Study the past if you would define the future.’ And for Edmund Burke, once we take historical knowledge for granted, then we are doomed to repeat those terrible mistakes of the past. There is no better preface on the significance of historical insights into Nigeria’s administrative trajectory. History, any history for that matter, is not a list of boring stories of what had gone by. On the contrary, history is a rich tapestry of human actions and inaction, and the multiplicity of consequences that flows from them. Nigeria’s administrative history stems from the moment the Nigerian state came into its amalgamated existence in 1914.

    The history of Nigeria’s reform experiment becomes important once we see it as the ongoing attempt, in administrative terms, to come to term with the possibility of redeeming Nigeria from its postcolonial deficits. Amalgamation was motivated by colonial arithmetic; hence, it lacked any national consideration of progress. The need for administrative reform is therefore premised on the urgent necessity of transforming the civil service into an effective institution that would foreground the nation’s search for an infrastructural revolution that would alleviate the years of denigration Nigerians have suffered under colonial rule.

    Within the context of my doctoral investigation of the evolution of administrative reforms, the idea of a trajectory therefore becomes very critical. A trajectory, in this administrative context, becomes an intentional search for an omega-point that is represented by series of successful reform efforts, beginning from an alpha-point. While all the pre- and post-1954 reforms are significant in their own regard, especially in the calibration of what came to be known as the Nigerian Civil Service, the real nation-defining reform issues actually commenced in 1971 with the Adebo Commission. Like most of the others, the Adebo Commission was established to deal with some of the intended and unintended consequences of the Nigerianisation Policy, especially the wage issue.

    But the Adebo Commission soon became caught up in two bigger issues, internal and external. While still investigating its terms of reference, the first military coup had happened, and the decline of the civil service structure and organisation had commenced. The military government set in motion several critical factors that instigated the gradual evolution of a structural pattern that consistently whittled down the capacities the civil service has to promote good governance. Externally, the managerial revolution had already commenced, and the British Civil Service was already the focus of its demands through the Fulton Commission of 1968. Thus it was that the Adebo Commission began with a brief to investigate the wage and recruitment issues of the new civil service, but ended up with a more significant managerial challenge bordering on organisation and structure. The Adebo Commission recommended that another public service review commission; the Udoji Commission came into existence.

    The Udoji Commission, if I am asked, remains the singular most significant reform commission in Nigeria’s administrative history. It is the watershed of what could have gone right but went wrong with the civil service system in Nigeria. The significance of the Udoji Commission is simple but profound: it is the commission that had to mediate between the new managerialism that was defining the civil service system and the old Weberian tradition on which the Nigerian Civil Service was founded. In its Main Report, the Commission diagnosed the central problem of the Nigerian Civil Service as that of its inability to respond to serious change. When the Commission was in place, the NCS was already too bureaucratic to achieve the postcolonial objective of national development and democratic service delivery to Nigerians. Thus, fully inspired by the UK Fulton Report, the Udoji Commission went on to recommend, on the one hand, a new style public service infused with “new blood” working under a result-oriented management system operated by professionals and specialists in particular fields. And, on the one hand, it recommended standardization of conditions of service, increase in public sector wages, a unified and integrated administrative structure, the elimination of waste, and the removal of inefficient departments.

    Andrew Grove got it right: ‘When you’re caught in the turbulence of a strategic inflection point, the sad fact is that instinct and judgment are all you’ve got to guide you through.’ The Gowon administration missed the significance of the ‘strategic inflection point’ that the Udoji Report represented. Rather than Udoji becoming a template for the rejuvenation of the civil service system in Nigeria, it became a slogan for abundant wage. This was because the Federal Government decided to implement the wage component of the Udoji Report rather than the structural components. The turning point was therefore lost in the euphoria of wage increment. It seems to me that since Udoji, the civil service system in Nigeria has been attempting to reverse the mistake of 1975. Udoji casts a long shadow over the stagnation of the civil service.

    For instance, it is interesting to understand the dynamics of the next two significant reform attempts in Nigeria-the 1988 Civil Service Reform and the 1995 Ayida Public Service Review Panel. The Philips Commission Report, which generated the 1988 reform recommendation, was forced by inevitable global trajectory to revisit the managerial revolution in administration through its attempt to lay the foundation of a professionalised civil service. Professionalization was thus tied to specialization. Unfortunately, rather than professionalising, the reform entrenched a politicisation of the workforce, especially the status of the permanent secretary which became a political appointment. The conception of professionalism was also curious because it was taken as a function of the location and time span of an officer in a particular ministry. The Ayida Panel was supposed to act in a review capacity to interrogate the recommendations of the Philips commission as a means by which the system can be reinvented. But it took the logic of reinvention the wrong way-it reinvented the pre-1988 civil service system and its managerial deficit! The simple but sad implication of this is that the Ayida Panel did not have a concrete agenda of reinvention; so it recommended a regression back to the status quo ante.

    ‘Challenging the status quo,’ according to Gary Hamel,’has to be the starting point for anything that goes under the label of strategy.’ While the Ayida Panel failed at doing this, it becomes the administrative standard by which to assess the remaining four reform strategies that define the democratic dispensation in Nigeria-the Obasanjo Renewal Programme, the Yar’Adua Civil Service Reform Programme,the Transformation Agenda of the Jonathan administration, and President Muhammadu Buhari’s ongoing Change Agenda. The four reform agenda are founded on the fundamental principle that no transformation of the Nigerian state would be possible without a capable, efficient and corruption-free public service. The Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan administrations therefore accepted the reform blueprint contained in the National Strategy for Public Service Reform (NSPSR) which projected the vision of a world class public service that is professionalised enough to deliver government policies and programmes.

    Much as these reform agenda are beautiful programmes of renewal and revitalization that has the benefits of administrative hindsight, visions are often undermined by reality. And the present reality is that the civil service system in Nigeria, in spite of the multitude of beautiful reform visions and strategies, is still struggling to deliver democratic dividends to millions of Nigerians who are sighing under the terrible burden of poverty. The Nigerian Civil Service is still far from being a world class public service.

    If, as Norman Cousins insists, ‘history is a vast early warning system,’ have we learnt any good and practical lessons from 1971? From the historical nuggets of reform trajectory that we have outlined here, what are the fundamental administrative lessons to be learnt? What are the defining issues in civil service renewal effort? That will be the subject of the fourth part.

  • Is the Nigerian Civil Service irreformable?

    generated by the reform efforts so far, the NCS is definitely reformable.  Laozi, the Chinese philosopher, said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a step. In the Nigerian civil service, several reform steps have been taken. What is left is for us to know whether the direction the reforms are taking is exactly where we want to go.

    The question of whether or not the Nigerian civil service is reformable, we have so far argued, should not be taken as a rhetorical or provocative question. Rather, it is one which is entirely diagnostic in the same manner in which philosophers’ treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness. We made the point that since reform is so critical to the idea of democratic governance which is constantly evolving to capture the needs and aspirations of the citizens, the question of reform is not one that can be settled once and for all. Rather, the real issue is that of constantly reflecting on how to reform right and in a manner that a system will not continue revisiting the same reform issue for ages.

    If we grant the fact that past reforms till date have generated crucial insights and strategies that suffice to say the NCS is reformable, then we should be concerned with whether those insights are sufficient to take us to our objectives. In this regard, we should urgently ask the next question: Has the Nigerian civil service been reforming since 1974? Of course, a sub-question would immediately be: Why is 1974 significant in Nigeria’s administrative reform history? The irreformability of the civil service system, in this context, will therefore be the function of those insights which have been generated but which we have consistently neglected for several reasons. As such, Nigeria is still far from the objective of a world class public service institution that will drive the business of government and provide efficient and effective service delivery for Nigerians. The worry therefore is: For how long can we keep on reforming without arriving at the objective? Will the transformation of the civil service system happen soon? Or, is the system essentially irreformable?

    The quality of reforms that have been initiated (especially with evidences of successful efforts of some agencies and state civil services) so far invalidates the presumption that reform is impossible in the NCS. Yet, that does not allay the pervasive fear that if we fail to undermine the execution trap we outlined in the first part, reforming the NCS may become so protracted that we can as well conclude that the system is irreformable. And this brings us back to the question of 1974. It is significant because it was the year that Nigerian civil servants suddenly came into enormous wealth as a result of the stupendous wage award associated with the Udoji reform implementation. That Commission therefore became a negative administrative watershed in terms of what could have happened to the NCS.

    The Udoji Commission was preceded by the Adebo Commission of 1971. This commission was set up to investigate the stubborn issue of remuneration that first surfaced in the attempt to pay the expatriates and Nigerians in the civil service. However, the commission’s terms of reference was overtaken by the encroaching and far deeper challenge of managerialism that was fast becoming the revolution in administrative practice. The commission recommended that unless the far weightier issue of organisation and structure were first settled, that of wage and compensation would become essentially trivial and unenlightening. It therefore recommended the establishment of a different commission with expanded terms of reference. The Udoji Commission was the result.

    When the commission began sitting, its job was already cut out for it by the Fulton Report of 1968. That commission in Britain had a very similar responsibility: it was set up at a time when the British civil service was already too bureaucratic to make any success of its many reform efforts. Fulton therefore became the framework for giving birth to the managerial culture in public administration. The Udoji Commission dug deep into the intent of the Fulton Report to advocate the need for a total reassessment of the Nigerian Civil Service and its capacity to internalise global changes. It not only recommended the institution of a performance management framework backstopped with project management praxis, but it also advocated the enlistment of new professionals that would be compatible with the new global knowledge dynamics that is defining global best practices.

    Unfortunately, like the Fulton Report itself, the Udoji Report was disarticulated. Its implementation was a disjointed one that selectively executed the compensation package while neglecting the real substance of the recommendations. The Udoji reform is just one in line of other relevant reform programmes-Phillips reform of 1988 and the Ayida Review Panel of 1995-that were either not properly implemented or implemented in an unreflective manner. All these reform reports contain deep administrative blueprints for a continuous reappraisal of the NCS. While they are not perfect reports, their recommendations could have been genuinely modified and intelligently refined to purge them of the conception-reality gaps that could have hindered their implementation.

    Thus, while we can talk of some ‘pockets of reform effectiveness’ in the reform of the NCS since 2003, the significant points are that (a) we ought to have gone beyond this juncture a long time ago given the dedication and visionary analysis that went into our reform efforts since 1971; and (b) it is still not too late to put in place a serious and collective framework for deepening and consolidating the insights derived from them through a rigorous impact assessment rooted in a critical reappraisal of the MDAs. This approach essentially confronts the idea of reform as a systemic one that transfer our focus to the MDAs as the locus of government business. This immediately implies that what is being reformed-what all the reform assessments from 1974 has been demanding-is an urgent change in the MDAs’ business model which ought to have been transformed through active debureaucratisation.

    ‘The aim of leadership,’ according to Edward Deming, ‘should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people.’ Reforming the MDAs is confronting them at the level of performance and critically injecting the insights of past reforms to re-engineer their service delivery capacity. This requires not only boldness on the part of the reformers, but also careful sensitivity as to what lessons to learn and unlearn from the diagnosis and recommendations of past reforms. My study of the history of reform commissions and recommendations outlines several issues which are crucial for the task of recalibrating the business model of the MDAs.

    First, there is the recurrent issue of competitive remuneration. Unfortunately, this issue has been part of our reform experience without any significant way forward. Without a competitive pay system, the idea of performance cannot even be confronted. The same applies to the second issue of the current workforce composition and size characterised by redundancy, administrative in-breeding, skills and competency deficit as well as a very low organisational IQ. This implies that when the NCS attracts people, we necessarily do not attract the right kind of talents. Working for government now in Nigeria is the passport to all manners of laxity and indifference. It is even worse because we have an uncharacteristic large number of people doing practically nothing where we could have an ingenious HR framework that employs the best and remunerate them accordingly based on performance.

    The third critical issue concerns a subsisting adversarial framework of industrial relations which seems antithetical to the objective of a fast, smart, intelligent and lean public service that can deliver service on the go. A viable and developmental industrial relations framework therefore becomes critical because of its direct connection with an urgent national productivity paradigm that could drive the public service performance dynamics. All these would also be coupled with a deep budget reform of macro-aggregate public financing to free recurrent budget essentially for development purposes.

  • Is the Nigerian Civil Service irreformable?

    I have been asked to choose a topic for reflection as my 55th birthday gift to the enlarging constituency of reform of the public sector.  The tone of the title I have chosen would appear rhetorical and even somewhat provocative especially given the evidence of the short, medium and long-term reform interventions that have littered, especially, the evolutionary path of the Nigerian Civil Service (NCS) since 1954. To ask whether the NCS is irreformable could therefore be seen, and rightly so, as casting some form of doubt on Nigeria’s past reform efforts. If we take the question to be rhetorical however, then the question requires no answer since the evidence of reform in the NCS trajectory speaks for itself. If we take it as provocative, we achieve the same result. Indeed, if the reform of the NCS has been going on for all these years, why would anyone, especially someone who really is in a position to know, still ask if the service is irreformable?

    This rhetorical question was not freshly minted, it was the unique angle of a seminar task that I was recently saddled with at a continental professional seminar platform of the African Ministers of Public/Civil Services in Marrakesh where I was put in a difficult position (as a civil servant) of assuaging the frustration of policy makers (largely politicians) and experts in public administration on why, inspite of spirited effort of the political leadership as to why except in Botswana, Mauritius, South Africa and Namibia – those that Prof. Adamolekun in his 2005 research report categorised as ‘advanced reformers’, civil service reform, as distinct from its public service reform success stories like pension, tax, customs, procurement reforms etc., seems to be recording insignificant impact.   Disembodied of technicalities, I share a few of my thought at the seminar through this medium, in continuation of our public education series.

    The two ways of interpreting the question that this contribution interrogates are in a sense wrongheaded. There is therefore a third approach to the intent of the question. In other words, to ask whether or not the NCS is irreformable is to cast attention on some of those protracted administrative issues and circumstances that have ensured that we continue reforming the institutional frameworks of the civil service system without essentially achieving our central objective. What then does this question suggest? Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, gives us a clue: ‘The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.’ To ask if the NCS is irreformable is therefore to ask for a diagnostic assessment of past reform efforts vis-a-vis our current reform activities. But beyond the historical excursus, it is to highlight some of the tangible reform landmines and insights that could expedite the transition of the civil service system in Nigeria into the future envisioned for it.

    The question of the reform of the civil service system, anywhere in the world, is not ever settled, another way of saying that the road to perfection is always under construction. This is simply the case with the public service as its reform is intimately tied to governance which in itself is an unceasing and constantly evolving process of determining how to make life better for the citizens; a domain that is also undergoing deep seated reforms. The important issue therefore is not to think of settling the question of reform but to constantly reflect on how to reform right and in a manner that ensures that a system will not continue revisiting the same reform issue for as long as change, regarded as a constant, is imperative. In reform, the real issue is not often doing things right, but doing the right thing to get effective and efficient outcomes.

    “‘Experts,” says Tom Peters,’are those who don’t need to bother with elementary questions anymore-thus, they fail to “bother” with the true sources of bottlenecks, buried deep in the habitual routines of the firm, labelled “we’ve always done it that way”.’ The first lesson in reform is thus that of how not to make it a tradition; that is, reformers cannot afford to reform for reform sake. Reformers cannot afford to make themselves ‘experts’ in reform matters. Indeed, the issue raised by Tom Peters is peculiar to the civil service because it is a system that is constantly under the threat of becoming bureaucratic. This implies that such a system becomes too overwhelmed by the immensity of its routine work that it domesticates genuine reforms to some trivial administrative changes that leave the real problems-the true sources of bottlenecks-deeply buried behind the thick files. In this context, reformers pay lip service to the necessity of reform while discreetly working to preserve the administrative status quo.

    Without the burden of a complicated historical analysis of the trajectory of reform in Nigeria, suffice is to say that the Nigerian civil service, since its inauguration in 1954, has been undergoing series of reforms (this, for me, isn’t the same as saying we are reforming). Beginning with the several reform commissions in the pre-and post-1954 period and up till the evolution of the democratic dispensation, the NCS has been subjected to approximately twenty one reforms efforts. Each of these reforms was targeted at specific issues within the evolving civil service system. For instance, the pre-1954 reforms were essentially concerned with the thorny issue of giving birth to the nascent civil service system while facilitating the smooth exit of the expatriates. On the other hand, the post-1954 reforms had to settle the issues of the critical absence of an indigenous middle executive cadre in the two-tiered civil service system that had most Nigerians in the junior cadre and the issue of remuneration.

    By the time the democratic wave was rolling across Africa in the 90s, it has become an established administrative fact that much of what we expected from the reforms have not been achieved. The evolving democratic dispensation revealed a very serious dilemma: How we hope to democratise without an adequate and functional civil service institution already working in tandem with global best practices? In other words, the civil service is still terribly embroiled in severe institutional gaps-process, policy, capacity, performance and resources-that tell us that we have actually made tremendous effort at turning the civil service system around, but we still have a long way to go in terms of making that system a world class institution delivering quality service to Nigerians.

    The extent of the reformability of the civil service system, especially in its Nigerian context, has to do essentially with the capacity the system has to overcome the execution trap in the development pathway. It has been noted with a special reference to Africa that only 29% of reforms ever got completed; 45% of on-going reform projects are rated unsatisfactory; and 26% of these reforms usually get cancelled. The reform execution trap therefore speaks to the unfortunate fact of excessively conceiving reform ideas without translating those ideas into demonstrable outcomes that we call qualitative and efficient service delivery.

    In Nigeria, the implementation trap is acutely demonstrated by two critical institutional deficiencies. The first concerns our inability to connect the intention of reform with the environment within which that reform intent would be implemented. More often than not, an unfriendly environment will always undermine a good reform. One immediate way to read this deficiency is to see it as a kind of disconnect in designs between governance, policy and administrative operations. The second institutional deficiency manifests as the passion for reform without the knowledge of what it takes to successfully manage a reform process. The third relates to the scope and contents of reform that are sufficient to create desirable multiplier effect and systemic impact. The three examples if correlated will demonstrate this deficiency-the failure to recognise that public administration systems have theoretical underpinnings and the inability to derive reform solutions from action research.

    These systemic deficiencies are so formidable that we are driven, once again, to re-examine our initial question: In the light of these historical outlines, is the Nigerian civil service irreformable? The answer to these questions is double-edged. A positive answer will derive from the qualitative levels of reform that has been generated by the democratic framework since 1990. We can identify the SERVICOM as veritable concept still requiring oxygen to come alive; IPPIS, GFMIS and the NHIS reforms as valiant attempts to remould our institutional platforms for the ongoing challenge of democratic governance in Nigeria. Indeed, every Head of Service at the Federal level has made spirited attempt to add value with the framework set between 2003 – 2009, while a significant, albeit incomplete, move towards performance orientation has been made with the Tenure Policy in 2009.  Subsequent move to deepen the institutionalization of the performance-oriented business model still remains largely aspirational.

    With the benefit of hindsight, therefore, we can look through the perspective of history at the trajectory of continuously improving reform insights and strategies that had been put in place. The critical point here is that without the framework of successive reforms from pre-independence till date, our present reflections on administrative reforms in a democratic context would have become stunted.

    The Nigerian civil service has really come a long way since its inauguration in 1954. Thus, in terms of the consistency and critical insights

    To return to our original question: Is the Nigerian civil service irreformable? With the benefit of analysis, we can return a resounding ‘No’. The caution, however, is that the question may return to haunt us if we fail to learn from the critical insight generated by past reform efforts. Horace, the Roman poet, counsels: ‘To have begun is half the job: be bold and be sensible.’ That is solid advice from the ancient!

  • Imperative of professionalising Nigerian Civil Service (2)

    To be or not to be? That is the essential question that the Nigerian Civil Service (NCS) must necessarily answer if it must indeed earn the epithet of a functional democratic state that is committed to an efficient and effective service delivery to its citizens. In the first part, we saw how that since its inauguration, the evolution of the NCS constitutes the sum total of outstanding starts; evolving, immature and weak structures; ambivalent decisions; bold steps; compromised reforms and fortuitous breakthroughs. This evolution simply implies that the organisational growth of the NCS has failed to reach a point of maturity from which it could commence a reformulation of its original objectives. Thus, most of the reform efforts since its inauguration have been mere attempts at damage control. Hence, when Prof. Adamolekun categorised Nigeria as a hesitant reformer, it is not difficult to see the analogy with Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

    It is often said that when a person or an institution is through changing, then it is through. It doesn’t really appear that the NCS is through changing despite its compromised institutional growth trajectory. When the wave of democratisation began in the early 90s, Nigeria had to decide whether it still wanted to be a hesitant reformer or make the urgent push for advancement in reform management. From 1985 to date, we have had five specific reform attempts aimed at refurbishing the professional status of the Nigerian civil servant-the 1985/1988 Phillips Commission, the Ayida Reform of 1995, the Obasanjo Renewal Programme, Yar’Adua Civil Service Reform Programme and the present Jonathan Transformation Agenda. Put together, all these reforms had a very simple objective: Reconstructing the persona of the Nigerian civil servant through professionalising the NCS and its HRM architecture. Some of the essential steps taken in this direction include: (a) To re-professionalise as a means of creating a new generation of officers and technocrats with sufficient skills, knowledge and motivation for institutional innovation; (b) the conduct of vigorous and systematic evaluation and reporting of professional performance to make policy-makers accountable for resources used and for results; (c) modernising core operations and systems of the NCS using ICT; (d) creation of a number of more specialised cadres; (e) putting in place a system of capacity utilisation wherein core skills are better matched with jobs; (f) injection of high skills and competencies available in other sectors of the economy into the public service, using a range of incentives; and (g) strengthening policy and research synergies through enhanced collaborative projects, including public-private partnerships.

    Yet, reconstructing the modus operandi of the NCS requires more than just token attention to the imperative of reform. It requires, essentially, a paradigm shift. The simple reason is that we can never hope to continue at this hesitant rate and hope to achieve a world class status with the same indecisive level of administrative functionality. Transforming into a ‘new public service’ involves answering two simple but basic questions: How do we want to be seen as an administrative institution? What must we do to achieve this new perception? The National Strategy for Public Service Reform (NSPSR) provides a straightforward answer to the first question: The Nigerian Civil Service ought to be perceived and to function as ‘A world-class public service delivering government policies and programmes with professionalism, excellence and passion.’ And its mission statement is also simple: To efficiently and effectively implement the policies and programmes of government, operating collaboratively and transparently with other stakeholders to ensure quality delivery of public services.

    The answer to the second question follows automatically: To achieve this large vision of a world class and democratic public service, we need to urgently get the basics of reform execution and management right. Getting the basics right implies the need to build the fundamental strengths of our public service institution before deploying best practices to ignite the changes we desire. Consequently, reform must create the government context for agency-level systemic changes to take root. In a 2008 essay titled ‘The Public Service of 2025,’ Jocelyne Bourgon outlines five fundamental trends around which the vision of the NSPSR can coalesce if its mission statement is to become a reality for Nigerians. These paradigmatic trends include: Trend One-Hybridisation of Public Human Resource Models. This would involve a civil service system exploring the possibility of a mixed regime that combined the career-based and position-based models of recruitment into the civil service. Trend Two-A Reduction of Protection, Immunity and Privilege. In this regard, there has been a serious encroachment on the traditional permanent tenure of the civil servants in favour of flexible and fixed-term contract appointments. Trend Three-Emphasis on Individual Performance. Such a future civil service would also be concerned with how its HRM framework can been capacitated enough with pay, compensation and incentives to build individual and unit performance that would result in organisational progress. Trend Four-Decentralisation of HRM Policies. This involves achieving flexibility and freedom in HRM policy implementation through devolving powers to implement to MDAs. Such a decentralisation would be done within several frameworks that could have no central agency, a single agency or multiple agencies facilitating the implementation. Trend Five-Cultivation of a Senior Civil Servant System. This would be an attempt to separate a top echelon of intelligent and competent administrative officers that would focus the leadership of the civil service and direct its policy formulation and implementation capacity.

    If the NSPSR provides the vision and the mission statement, and Bourgon gives us a framework within which the vision and mission can be calibrated into a dynamic future-defining new public service anchored on a functional HRM architecture, then McGregor identifies a further underlining component that motivates the paradigm shift. This involves challenging existing bureaucratic behaviour. Since we are basically concerned with the persona of the Nigerian civil servant, it becomes inevitable that we transit from an administrative behavioural framework that Douglas McGregor calls Theory X to another he calls Theory Y. Theory X, for McGregor, derives from a very strict administrative regimen and gloomy picture of human nature at three levels: first, management involves the deployment of people, material and money as means towards the achievement of particular economic objectives; second, that organisational objectives require the control and motivation of people; and, third, that without a strict organisational regimen, humans are usually unproductive and resistant to organisational needs. On the other hand, Theory Y has at its base a picture of a transformational leadership and a philosophical insight which insists that that humans are motivated by the need to satisfy the higher-order needs like social relationship, the search for esteem and dignity as well as the need to exercise their creative genius especially with regards to organisational performance. The responsibility of a Theory Y leader is therefore to provide the atmosphere that unleashes these potentials of his already motivated employees.

    The paradigm shift in HRM framework therefore demands an ingenious mix of components of Theory X and Theory Y to achieve a dynamic framework for creating a new generation of neo-Weberian professionals sufficiently capacitated and incentivised to function differently and outside of all existing bureaucratic pathologies afflicting the Nigerian civil service. These new professionals will be dedicated to the demands of a new productivity paradigm undergirding the performance-oriented dynamics of the NCS. And they will be backstopped by the evolution of management competencies, values and ethics necessary for the successful management of the reform processes in the public services. This takes issue with the HRM policy and framework of the NCS.

    A dynamics HR framework isn’t just personnel management or even HRM. It involves

     

  • The Nigerian Civil Service: A Reformer’s Manifesto (2)

    One of the strongest points of Dr Tunji Olaopa’s new book, ‘The Nigerian Civil Service of the Future: A Prospective Analysis’ is its detailed account of the evolution of the Nigerian public service as well as a rigorous analysis of the process, triumphs, travails and failures of public sector institutional reforms from the colonial era through the various phases of the country’s post-independence period. We are thus enabled to trace the systematic and incremental deterioration of the civil service from the efficiency and qualitative policy conceptualisation and implementation that was the colonial legacy, through the golden age of the immediate post-independence era and the consequent downward plunge in the orientation, values and efficacy of the civil service. We can thus see the correlation between the degeneration of the civil service and the disorientation and mal-development of the Nigerian polity and society. Dr Olaopa conceptualises civil service reforms in Nigeria from two perspectives: first, achieving a set of future goals and second, retrieving lost positive and valuable attributes of the past. Utilising divergent experiences of civil service leadership titans of the first republic such as Chief Simon Adebo in the Western region and Chief Jerome Udoji in the Eastern region, Dr Olaopa shows the critical linkage between a functional civil service and ‘good development performance’.

    It is thus his contention that to help the country achieve development objectives of the future, the Nigerian civil service must re-discover its lost attributes of incorruptibility, discipline, loyalty and competence that aided the political leadership of the first republic to achieve the still unprecedented socio-economic strides of the period. He points out that under Chief Adebo’s leadership, for instance, some of the qualities of the Western region civil service included emphasis on service and mutually respectful relationships among seniors, colleagues and subordinates as human beings; the establishment of qualitative institutions/mechanisms to reproduce qualitative leadership through continuous training and effective succession plans; collaboration between academics and administrators in policy conceptualisation and generation of ideas as well as boosting confidence between staff and management through vibrant industrial relations practice.

    Adopting a near evangelical, proselytising stance in his fervent advocacy for the emergence of a ‘new public service’ predicated on the retrieval of lost values, Dr Olaopa contends that the civil service is not just an employment but a spiritual endeavour which emphasises leadership as integrity in service. In this regard he laments that “In the Federal Civil Service, there are too many people doing nothing, too many doing too little and too few people doing too much”. This is what he describes as the phenomenon of ‘bureaucratic pathology’. He attributes the institutional decay in the public service to various developments in the evolution of the service including the post-independence Nigerianisation policy that devalued competence and professionalism in the service; the decimating purge of the 1970s; the culture of impunity and ‘with immediate effect’ attendant on military rule; the administrative incoherence engendered by the debilitating organisational politics between generalists and professionals; negative implication for quality of ceaseless creation of states as well as the value erosion associated with the oil boom.

    According to Dr Olaopa, the crisis of state, society and economy that practically paralysed the African economies in the mid-eighties took a heavy toll on a civil service that had been considerably weakened by post-colonial contradictions. In the wake of the ensuing neo-liberal reforms to address this crisis, the civil service along with other public sector actors, was perceived as lacking the capacity of steering the society on the path of economic efficiency and good governance predicated on transparent and sustainable democracy. The imperative of public service reforms, Dr Olaopa continues, deepened with the increasing democratic pressures on the state. Ironically, the intensely partisan environment attendant on democratisation intensified the problems of corruption, nepotism as well as clientalist and primordial considerations that further incapacitated the public service from fulfilling its potential to assist government in delivering qualitative and efficient social services to the people.

    The author is definitely in a vantage position, as we noted in the first part of this review, to discuss in an informed manner why public sector reforms have failed for the most part of post-independence Nigeria. This he does exhaustively in his magnum opus. Much more important than the content of various reforms – decentralisation, New Public Administration, capacity building etc – he argues are the strategies and tactics to actualize the objectives of reforms. It is thus at the stage of implementation, that otherwise sound reform programmes have failed dismally. He looks at every aspect of the conceptualisation, implementation, management, monitoring and strengthening of the reform process in Nigeria. The sense one gets from the book is that reforms; a continual process of self-examination and unending institutional improvement never reaches a terminal point.

    From this perspective, it follows that the only basis of sustained development and progress in an ever increasingly competitive world is for a society never to be satisfied with its level of socio-economic, political, cultural and moral attainment. Just as with liberty, eternal vigilance to protect and continuously enhance reforms is the price for the avoidance of institutional stagnation and decay. Thus,Olaopa in various chapters expertly examines different aspects of the reform process – strengthening the capacity of government to deliver on key functions of policy implementation, service delivery and security; the dynamics of pay and compensation in the public service; managing public sector industrial relations; rethinking personnel management and performance and ultimately advocates the institutionalisation of reforms through the establishment of a Bureau of Public Service Reforms as a lead reform agency in Nigeria.

    In one of the most important chapters in the book, Dr Olaopa brings a practitioner’s perspective to bear on the phenomenon of ‘Bureaucratic Corruption and the Public Service’. Quoting Edward Griffin, he affirms that “To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism”. He examines in detail various manifestations of bureaucratic corruption including bribery, embezzlement, fraud, extortion, abuse of power, conflict of interest, Insider trading/abuse of privileged information, favouritism and nepotism. After a clinical and thorough diagnosis of the contagion, Olaopa proposes various preventive and curative strategies to tame one of the most sinister monsters that has impeded the reform process in Nigeria and turned the country into what Professor EghosaOsaghie calls a ‘crippled giant’. Of course, Dr Olaopa admits that central to any meaningful anti-corruption initiative must be “the availability of the political and bureaucratic will from the leadership to alleviate corruption in all its manifestations”. Is this not a tall dream in a political economy in which vicious and unstructured competition for state power – elective and appointive – for the purpose of primitive capital accumulation is the driving force of politics? That is the million dollar question.

  • Nigerian civil service at threshold of the future [1]

    Nigeria, undoubtedly, is in the threshold of history. There are commendable development strides in the governance space which, if deepened and accelerated, will soon redefine Nigeria’s global reckoning. But the key words are ‘deepening and acceleration’ which entail balancing ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘doing it right’. Deepening means doing things differently, doing some magic of a sort and here disciplined execution is key. My concern in this attempt to extend discourse on political leadership into the realm of institutional reengineering is resolving the whole issue of ‘execution trap’ through getting the government implementation machinery, the civil service, capability ready in the assumption that sufficient transformational leadership commitment and passion drives the development process.

    The global world today only recognises those states which are distinguished by their economic competitiveness as well as their democratic governance profile. This explains the many global instruments that track economic growth and development worldwide. For instance, the Global Competitiveness Report, published by the World Economic Forum, assesses the competitive strength of over 150 states, spanning the MINT and the BRICS, the Arab world, Latin America and the Caribbean, the European Union, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The objective of the Report is to benchmark those factors that hinder or aid national economic competitiveness. Competitiveness is defined as ‘the set of institutions, policies and factors that determine the level of productivity of a country.’ And so, in mapping competitiveness, the Report outlines twelve pillars that are crucial for any state which wants to achieve sustainable growth: institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, health and primary education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labour market efficiency, financial market development, technological readiness, market size, business sophistication and innovation from technological and non-technological knowledge.

    In the ranking for 2013-2014, Nigeria is ranked 120 out of 148 on the Index, with a score of 3.57 out of 7. The 120 ranking is a drop from 117 in the 2012-2013 ranking. South Africa is the first African country that made a strong appearance at number 53 with a score of 4.37. In terms of the strength of institutions, Nigeria is ranked a dismal 129 out of 148. The emphasis of the World Economic Forum on institutions as a critical component of the basic requirements for growth and development brings home cogently the nexus between leadership effectiveness and the crisis of institutions in Nigeria. In those series, we submitted that it is the strength of the institutions that determine the quality of leadership, and leadership itself sets the template for the evolution of such strong institutions in the first place. It is therefore the synergy between the strong leader and the strong institutions that guarantees competitiveness and growth.

    A nation’s productivity profile becomes the first point at which the development process begins to hurt a state’s governance template. However, increasing the productivity level involves rethinking a country’s institutional capacity to address multifarious issues arising from internal and external dynamics. Institutional capacity speaks to the urgent need for a capable developmental state that would serve as the focal framework for enacting and implementing good governance policies. States that overcome their developmental problems are usually developmental states. And developmental state automatically also assumes the existence of a leadership arrowhead that gives direction to a common national agenda and processes.

    However, no state can ever hope to become developmental except it can rely on an efficient and effective civil service system that would facilitate the smooth transformation of government policies into a fast and democratic service delivery that will impact positively on the lives of the citizens. Thus, a developmental state is itself made capable by a development oriented civil service that channels inputs into deliverable outputs. The last centenary of the evolution of the Nigerian civil service demonstrates that this institution requires a huge dose of rejuvenation that would not only redeem it from its amalgamated logic, but, much more significant, would also strengthen it as the solid institutional link between the past and the future. When the Nigerian civil service began its evolutionary journey in 1954, it came into a host of problems which are the consequences of attempting to adapt a foreign structure on local realities. The evolving institution therefore had to undergo series of reform, mediated by several commissions and committees, to panel-beat the civil service system into shape for the task of post-independence reconstruction in Nigeria.

    In our recent series on the centenary of the Nigerian civil service, we highlighted the most significant of these reforms. We outline the fact that the civil service was given birth to with the tentative hope that it would, through the many reforms, acquire the capacities and competences needed to drive the engine of socio-economic growth in postcolonial Nigeria. However, we eventually came to the conclusion that in spite of the valiant, century-long efforts made on behalf of the civil service system, the institution is still some steps away from delivering capacities, competences and public goods; it is still struggling to attain the status of a world class institution. The reason, essentially, is that within a century, we missed two transformatory moments which the historical dynamics of our evolvement compelled us to confront and utilise.

    The first is the historic lesson, within the context of the development of the regional civil services, which points at the benefits of a synergy between the political and the administrative leadership as the foundation of a thriving civil service. The successes of the Awolowo-Adebo model of administration, however, have not been translated into the core of our reform efforts. The second transformation moment that was lost was the failure by the military leadership to heed the warning of the Udoji Commission Report on the need for a managerial transformation of the civil service system. If that warning had been heeded, the Nigerian civil service would have successfully installed a performance management system that would bring the institution to a delivery mode required to transform policies to demonstrable developmental outcomes.

    The Nigerian civil service is now confronted with the prospect of another century, and therefore the urgent need to rethink its historical dynamics, institutional readiness and transformatory potentials. I have attempted to do all these within the context of a forthcoming book titled: The Nigerian Civil Service of the Future. This eighteen-chapter book is an intellectual effort to retrieve the two transformatory moments within the historical dynamics of the evolution of the Nigerian civil service. The book projects an optimistic and demonstrable theoretical and practical trajectory of how the past of this institution can become a foothold of strength from which to launch the achievements of the next centenary. The Nigerian Civil Service of the Future is meant to serve as a reform blueprint for jumpstarting the debate about institutional renewal and democratic consolidation of the civil service.

    More than ever before, the Nigerian civil service must prepare for its own future. And that future, according to Walter Mosley, is what we make of it. It would consist of the optimism with which we prepare, the alacrity with which we redouble our efforts, the foresight we bring into our prognosis, the determination with which we rethink our administrative and historical dynamics, and the boldness of our decisions. The forthcoming book roadmaps several issues, landmines and detours, stretching from the past in 1954 to the present—represented by the reform efforts from 1999 to the present Transformation Agenda of the current administration. These issues, landmines and detours constitute the core of the administrative arsenal by which we can take informed steps and decisions into a future already mapped by the lessons of where the rain began to beat us.

    In the next part of this series, we will make effort to highlight and outline the structure and basic arguments and practical guides which form the basis of the forthcoming book. Suffice to say, in conclusion, that the future of the Nigerian civil service is not a joking matter; the political and the administrative leadership cannot therefore be caught taking it lightly. Our next centenary depends on it.

    Dr. Olaopa is

    Permanent Secretary

    Federal Ministry of Communication Technology

    Abuja

    tolaopa2003@gmail.com