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  • Public service in Nigeria and the big questions of public administration

    Public service in Nigeria and the big questions of public administration

    • By Tunji Olaopa

    One of the founding theses of public administration reform philosophy is that the dysfunction and reconstruction of the administrative system must be figured out both in theory and in practice, and public administration had therefore historically functioned within frameworks of communities of practice and service and their knowledge networks. And that, among other things, implies that theory and practice must first be seen as being two sides of the same coin rather than two mutually exclusive frameworks. When I made the decision so early in my public service career to study the theoretical foundations of the Nigerian public service system, it dawned on me that dissecting the dysfunctional dynamics of the public service system provokes theoretical insights by which to engage with these same dysfunctions. However, the gross anti-intellectualism of the policy space in Nigeria contributes to one of the fundamental deficiencies in the institutional framework of the public service in Nigeria: a mix of conception-reality and passion without knowledge gaps that manifest in terms of a mismatch between theoretical and reform paradigms on the one hand, and local conditions, circumstances and realities on the other. Indeed, administrative reforms are conceived and implemented to a significant extent with scant recognition that public administration has a theoretical foundation that is way distinct from the theoretical assumptions of the core management science.

    We therefore arrive at a most significant reason why the public service system has been struggling to constitute the institutional mechanism to backstop democratic governance and its dividends for Nigerians. If we take it as axiomatic that the bureaucracy is a necessary complement to democracy, then it implies that the public service must be in topnotch shape—in terms of human resource management, performance accountability and productivity metrics—to be able to deliver on the imperatives of good governance. The public service system in Nigeria has however been struggling with the necessity for institutional reform that will transform it into a worldclass mechanism that could serve the need of a developmental state and its democratic requirements.

    Ultimately, the fate of the public service and its optimal functionality—its capacity readiness to service democratic governance anywhere—lies firmly in the type of theoretical questions we ask in terms of what should drive the practice of public administration. The big questions are fundamental questions that articulate the relationship between theory and practice, and provide the directions that enable theorists and practitioners to make sense of any endeavor. The big questions that public administration is confronted with help to shape how it grounds its frameworks, dynamics and paradigms, especially when applied to the working of the state and the imperatives of governance.

    Three initial big questions have been offered that are meant to ground public management. One: how can public managers break away from non-innovative fixation with excess of procedural rules which prevent pubic agencies from achieving measurable result and outcome? In other words, how might we ignite the shift from current input-process fixation to an output-outcome-impact-results-based management framework? Two: how can public managers motivate their workforce to achieve more in performance terms? Three: how can public managers measure these achievements?

    These how-questions underscore the capacity of the public manager and her capacity to facilitate the capacity readiness of the public bureaucracy. This approach, especially in public administration, focuses on the public managers and their objective of capacitating the public agencies as an organization with its own unique character. However, as the objection goes, such an approach is limited in its failure to connect the functionality of the public bureaucracy or agency to the institutional demands of a democratic government. Public administration in a democracy is a whole ballgame all by itself. Once we see the intimate connection between public administration and a democracy, then we immediately see how there is a need for new set of big and fundamental questions that will adequately guide public administration practice within a democratic context.

    Seven of such questions have been provided in the literature. “(1) What are the instruments of collective action that remain responsible both to democratically elected officials and to core societal values? (2) What are the roles of nongovernmental forms of collective action in society, and how can desired roles be protected and nurtured? (3) What are the appropriate tradeoffs between governmental structures based on function (which commonly eases organizational tasks) and geography (which eases citizenship, political leadership, and societal learning)? (4) How shall tensions between national and local political arenas be resolved? (5) What decisions shall be “isolated” from the normal processes of politics so that some other rationale can be applied? (6) What balance shall be struck among neutral competence, representativeness, and leadership? (7) How can processes of societal learning be improved, including knowledge of choices available, of consequences of alternatives, and of how to achieve desired goals, most importantly, the nurturing and development of a democratic polity?” 

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    Unfortunately, it is not just sufficient to align public administration and public management to the imperatives of democratic government, as these seven questions by John Kirlin of the University of South California has attempted to do. A further criterion is missing. And this, because the experience of public administration and democracy differs from context to context. The contextual criterion ensures that the fundamental big questions we need to ask will be those that will take seriously the peculiarities and uniqueness of the context within which public administration will be expected to interact and backstop democratic governance. This is even more so in the Nigerian context where public administration and democratic government must factor postcolonial circumstances into the type of fundamental questions they are meant to engage with.

    The Nigerian state, since its post-independence trajectory, has generated its own unique experience of public administration. This can be framed in terms of the myriad attempts at achieving institutional reform of the public service system inherited from the British colonialists. The commencement of the democratic experiment in 1999 puts a new spin on the urgency of bending public administration to the demands of democratic governance that will transform the quality of life of millions of Nigerians who have been promised the dividends of democracy. How then can we articulate the fundamental questions that should guide our understanding of the relationship between public administration and democratic governance in Nigeria? What are the critical issues that the government, its bureaucracy and public administration theorists ought to make the core of their reflective endeavor? 

    In what follows, I frame seven of such big questions in line with my many years of theoretically and practically engaging with the perils and promises of the public service as a mechanism for democratic fulfilment in Nigeria.

    One: How can public managers break away from non-innovative fixation with excess of procedural rules and regulations that prevent public agencies from producing results and outcomes that translate to better life to the people in a democracy? This question speaks to the centrality of the “I-am-directed” Weberian tradition and the centrality of the input and process-oriented business model that undermine the output-oriented model which demands performance, efficiency, productivity. 

    Two: ⁠How can the public service resolve the seemingly jinxed pay and remuneration policy problem which has prevented the public service from achieving an excellent talent management regime that enables attraction and retention of talented professionals and some of the scarce skills the service requires to perform at optimal levels? This is a question that stems from government’s loss of status as the employer of choice which in turn has eroded civil service’s prestige as a brand, as well as the inability of the public bureaucracy to attract and retain the brightest and the best while managing adversarial industrial relation that undergirds employer-employee contractual obligations.  

    Three; ⁠How can public managers measure the achievements of their agencies in a way that is game-changing for performance of government and the productivity of the national economy? The success of democratic governance in Nigeria is aligned to the urgent need for a shift in the productivity paradigm that ensures that the public service system becomes motivated by a performance management that increases the productivity profile of the Nigerian state. 

    Four: ⁠How can the nature and role of the state be sustainably redefined and how to leverage same to organize and utilize government resources to better achieve the collective good? The nature and the role of the state keeps changing in relation to its governance responsibility. And this demands that the success of public administration is seen in terms of the state’s relationship to other non-state and nongovernmental actors that are stakeholders in the governance space.

    Five: ⁠How can the public service regain public trust and foster social equity within framework of stewardship relationship with the people in a democracy? This question addresses the modalities by which the public service system function as a democratic institution that is transparent, accountable and open to the citizens as the most significant component of a democratic government.

    Six; How should NGOs be empowered so they can play more positive role in society and in getting public policy to achieve the common good, and how can their desired roles be better protected? NGOs, as a nonstate actor, opens up the governance space (hitherto dominated by government and its agencies), and serve as the critical mediator between the government and the citizens.

    Seven: ⁠How can the public service strike a balance between the values of being neutral and non-partisan as basis for strengthening professional ethics and the public servants’ capacity to speak truth to power? The founding dichotomy in public administration—the politics/administration distinction—insists that the politician and the administration must operate on different level of the policy divide. However, this dichotomy must be balanced with the capacity of the public servant to confront and engage with policy somersaults that fails the test of policy intelligence and action research.

    These big questions constitute core issues which the public administration profession in Nigeria must foreground as the central reflective points for rethinking the functionality of the public service in Nigeria’s quest for democratic distinction on the continent. 

    • Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission & Professor of Public Administration, Abuja
  • Writing public service into the Nigerian consciousness

    Writing public service into the Nigerian consciousness

    In this piece, I want to specifically pose the question of how literature and literary writing can serve the purpose of representing the significance of the public service to the Nigerian public. Narrating the nature, significance and dynamics of the public service, admittedly, is the sphere of the social sciences—especially of political science and public administration. But then, why can literature not come to the aid of the political scientists cum administrative scholar-practitioner in documenting the ups and downs of the public service and its role in enabling good governance?

    Literary writings narrate humanity. the human experiences and endeavors in ways that reveal horizons and frontiers of possibilities while also laying bare the depth and dynamics of the familiar. The literary eye sees beyond the normal and transcends the ordinary. All literature reveals their time and context; and this is why literature is a dangerous endeavor: it poses narrative questions that do not reveal easy answers. And yet these questions enable us, if we keep unraveling them long enough, to find a way out of our mental cocoons, according to Elif Shafak, the Turkish novelist. We can all easily agree with C. S. Lewis therefore: “Literature adds to reality; it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”

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    Is the writer then a revolutionary? From Chinua Achebe to Naguib Mahfouz, Wole Soyinka to Mariama Ba, from Niyi Osundare to Abdulrazak Gurnah, from Ngugi wa Thiong’o to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and from Nadine Gordimer to Odia Ofeimun, we have writers who have championed a rebellious forthrightness in narrating the conditions for the existence of their postcolonial existence and future. We have writers who enable us to see our ordinary experiences and to transcend them. Let us take Odia Ofeimun’s The Poet Lied (1980) as a starting example. That poetry collection signals Ofeimun’s sensibility as a poet who has a deep understanding of the sociopolitical and economic anguish Nigerians have been going through for much of Nigeria’s sixty-five years of existence. As a poet, according to him, “I cannot blind myself/To putrefying carcass in the market place.” In the poet titled “A Foot Note,” Ofeimun laments:

    In our model democracy

    The magic promises of yesterday

    Lie cold like mounds of dead cattle

    Along caravans that lead nowhere…

    More specifically, in “A Civil Servant,” Odia Ofeimun highlights a critical dimension of any civil and democratic government in terms of the machinery that makes any government function efficiently. This is in terms of policy formulation and service delivery of the dividends of democracy to the citizens.

    A dull day:

    you sit on the dung-heap

    of boredom, a lizard

    basking in the cold sunshine

    of banal precedents.

    Your lymphatic smile

    is decorated with the painless anguish

    of pedestrian hours

    An idle star

    streaks across your sky

    This dull day

    you bear the unproductive patience

    of a dismantled industrial spider

    you cannot say, for certain, what you want.

    This poem represents not only a scathing critique of the neglect of the civil service by any Nigerian government, a neglect that makes the civil servant “sit on the dung-heap of boredom” like a lizard basking in a “cold sunshine.” It is also a poem that hits very hard and poetically at what I have called the bureau-pathology of the Nigerian public service, and its capacity for blind conformance at the expense of productive efficiency. A civil servant, Ofeimun aptly remarks, bears the “unproductive patience” of a “dismantled industrial spider”!

    In Niyi Osundare’s “My Lord, Tell Me Where to Keep Your Bribe,” written in 2016 at the height of the corruption scandals that traumatized the sensibility of Nigerians, and especially the undermining of the professional integrity of the Nigerian judiciary. Imagine a servant bowing constantly in fake submissiveness, and asking, “My Lord, where should I keep this bribe?” merely asking that question, with the two contraries of “Lord” and “bribe”, already implies a deep and bruising moral judgement. When we conjoin that with the suggestions of the various hiding places, then we see that the judge being addressed has already, in the space of that monologue, been stripped of all honour. In “No Hiding Place for Politicians,” Osundare was at his poetic height in railing against corruption, embezzlement, clientelism and the betrayal of democratic trust. Take just these lines:

    When the man of power

    Tells you his tale

    Ask him to wait till

    You bring a sieve

    ****

    Whoever believes what the politician says

    His ear is blocked by the carcass of truth

    A politician tells you to wait

    And you heed his words…

    Your sole will tell you

    The biting pains of folly

    These few lines already project not only the politician’s alienation from truth, but also the futility of listening to any form of “politicspeak” by which politicians have deceived Nigerians from independence to date. The “biting pain of folly” is what has indeed attended the constant optimism which has characterized Nigerians’ trust in the politicians who come, make noise, get our votes and then turn to stab us all in the back. But then, it behooves the poet, and the writers that a nation has produced, to bring the citizens to awareness. This is exactly what Barbara Kingsolver had in mind when she said, “What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.”

    Wale Okediran, who celebrates his entry into the septuagenarian circle this year, provides a larger and more experiential context for examining the mindset of an average Nigerian public servant. In his Tenants of the House (2010), Wale Okediran fictionalized his short-lived experience as a member of the Nigerian House of Representative. That was an experience, we can say, that was stranger than fiction. We get to read the fictional account of what we all know has been going on—the greedy consumption of Nigeria’s commonwealth by a few who translated democratic stewardship into a license to steal and loot. What makes Odia Ofeimun’s and Wale Okediran’s literary accounts so graphic and significant is that both have traversed the public service space in Nigeria for a while. They were not just fictionalizing hearsays and the fecundity of their imagination. Any Nigeria, from what we daily encounter about the shenanigans of the political class, can fictionalize their misdeeds. But when one had walked the corridors of power and perceived the dark odor of political corruption, the literary imagination becomes even more effective than it could have been when fashioned on the imagination alone.

    Nigerian literature serves as the handmaiden of social scientific and humanistic inquiry into the state of the Nigerian sociopolitical affairs. As a social commentary, it provides a complementary analysis of where the rain began to beat us as a nation, to quote Chinua Achebe. Indeed, the Nigerian literary space itself suffers significantly from Nigeria’s bureaucratic pathology and policy inchoateness.

    We all know the cost implication of getting published by a traditional publishing firm today. Many of Nigeria’s literary figures, from Chimamanda Adichie to Nnedi Okoroafor, get published elsewhere. This provides an occasion, therefore, to memorialize the great and persevering efforts of the Association of Nigerian Writers (ANA) for keeping the Nigerian literary spirit alive, and for serving as the breeding ground for literary effervescence.

    Nigeria is a literary space; the precarity and suffering instigated by misgovernance and the policy somersault of consecutive administrations in Nigeria provide the occasion for rebellion of the literary imagination. In fact, I am very glad to call on the literary figures in Nigeria as collaborators in the institutional reform of the Nigeria state and its public service machinery. I have often written that institutional and governance reformer is a lonely figure even in social scientific analysis. For more than twenty years, I have been raising the alarm about the debilitating state of the public service in Nigeria, and how institutional reform, as well as the political will of any government, can reverse the rot and restore the machinery of government to an efficient state.

    However, these critiques and analyses cannot compare with the fictional narration of Nigeria’s democratic struggles, the greed of its political class and the suffering of Nigerians. Chris Abani’s Graceland (2004) tells the story of Elvis Oke and his struggle to overcome the poverty, violence and corruption of ghetto life in Lagos. Wole Soyinka’s Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth (2021) consummates his damning and devastating literary chronicling of the political corruption that has perpetuated a season of anomie in Nigeria since independence. And there are more: Chika Unigwe, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Helon Habila, Chinua Achebe, Unoma Azuah, and many others. When even an average Nigerian encounters these writers and their fictional narration of the inefficiency of the Nigerian government and the suffering it engenders, the novels and short stories mirror their experiences. There is no Nigerian lady who will not empathize with Sisi, Efe, Ama and Joyce, the three ladies –in Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street (2011)—who left Nigeria to become sex workers in Belgium in order to make a good life for themselves.

    Literary activism is the response of Nigerian literature to institutional reform that demands that the administrative dynamics must be responsive to the yearning and aspirations of Nigerians. Literary activism encounters the Nigerian public service as the seat of misery and of transformation. Most Nigerians encounter the Nigerian state from the deficiencies of infrastructural debilitation—bad roads and highway networks, inefficient healthcare facilities, inadequate education sector, etc. Literature engages politics from the perspectives of literary visions of possibilities. We can tell the stories of the civil servant who refuses bribes; the Oga who stands up to the powers that be for the sake of efficiency; the public servant who champions transparency even at the cost of losing her legislative slot; a group of civil servants who presents alternative policy implementation blueprints, and many other possible stories of administrative events that can inspire.

    Here, ANA has a lot to still do in terms of its commitment to literary activism as a mode of speaking truth to power. I think that the genre of the administrative literary genre should be added to existing genres. Rather than the appearance of the public service as a monolithic endeavor in the literary imagination, ANA can encourage Nigerians to harness their experiences of the multifaceted dynamics of the Nigerian public service system to articulate poems, novels and short stories that speak specifically to civil servants, procedures, departments, and systemic experiences and narratives. I will be glad to see special calls for literary editions around the public service and its dynamics. Such special literary editions can elevate the consciousness of Nigerians on what it means to reflect imaginatively on the present and future of the public service in relation to human flourishing in Nigeria.

    For the Russian poet, Boris Pasternak, “Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.” We owe it to the institutional reformers and literary activists to transform the banality of human suffering in Nigeria to the refreshing discovery of the extraordinary power of social change.

    Let me end with a tribute to Dr Wale Okediran at 70. Dr. Okediran has come a long way and has blazed many trails so consistently that at a beautiful age of seventy, he has achieved a sublime legacy that embodies existential fulfilment.

    Dr Okediran is in my estimation Nigeria’s answer to C. P. Snow’s two-culture thesis. According to that thesis, there is a significant and unbridgeable divide between the humanities and the natural sciences in ways that ensure seeming lack of communication between the two. The literary intellectuals and the natural scientists pride themselves on their inability to understand each other, and this, Snow argues, leads to an inhibited intellectual progress. In Wale Okediran, we have a fluid and exemplary personification that firmly undermine that thesis. Dr Okediran fluidly incorporates the love for science and the humanities. He is the very embodiment of the renaissance man—the multi-talented man imbued with a secular sensibility that draws on the human condition to articulate an Afropolitan sensibility of humaneness, compassion, strength, open-mindedness, passion and empathy.

    It was almost inevitable that Dr Okediran’s love for medicine and literature would be deployed in the service of the humanity in Nigeria and on the continent. Medicine is not just physiological and psychological, at least not in Africa. Medicine ministers to the brutalized bodies of Africans. As a medical doctor therefore, Dr Okediran has the unenviable space to confront the many psychotic manifestations of governance failure in Nigeria. His literary interests and skills provide the opportunity to tell the postcolonial Nigerian stories as he encountered them over the course of his own personal existential and professional trajectories. And this explain Dr Okediran’s path into politics; what better way to effect significant changes than being in the corridor of power?

    One could only wonder how long a man of such literary sensibility would last within the murky space of Nigerian politics. Fortunately, public service is not restricted to being a member of the House of Representatives. Dr Okediran’s public service space encompasses the local, the national and the regional—from the National Old Student Association of Olivet Baptist High School to the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA). Dr Wale Okediran’s literary sensibility enables him to build a community of service. The Ebedi International Writers Residency at Iseyin is unique defining sense a built metaphor for Okediran’s enlarged sensibility that draws in people and create possibilities.

    (Being Statement delivered at the Association of Nigerian Authors – ANA – Abuja Chapter 70th Birthday Event/Celebration of Dr. Wale Okediran and a Reading/Writers Dialogue held at the Mamman Vatsa Village, Abuja, on the 19th of April, 2025)

  • Trends shaping public service future, its reforms and discourse

    Trends shaping public service future, its reforms and discourse

    • By Tunji Olaopa

    This piece is one of the technical notes that I used in some seminal conversations before now, one of many others that I consider should be shared, in spite of its seminal tone, for the benefit of public managers¬-learners who are spread all over the nooks and crannies of Nigeria and beyond, and for public education, In penning this contribution, I am interested in a sort of agenda setting that has the capacity to generate discourse around public cum civil service institutional reformulation and its framework of relevance especially in a postcolonial context like Nigeria. All across the world, public administration serves the purpose of outlining and concretizing the administrative agenda that allows the state intervene positively in the lives of the citizenry. This therefore places a huge responsibility on the public service—and the public administration scholarship and communities of service and practice—to get up to speed in outlining a pathway that will transform the professional endeavor into a sturdy representative of state activities and responsibilities to the people. Like every other endeavor, public administration must necessarily respond to the multiplicity of events, circumstances and occurrences that have come to define the world in the twenty-first century. 

    Public administration has come a long way since its first documented formation, with the rudimentary but fundamental beginning in the ancient pharaonic Egypt through to the high political intrigues and engineering feats of the Roman society to the exigencies of the industrial revolution of the nineteen century. In the twenty-first century, and all across the world, public administration is even more challenged by current circumstances shaping not only national administrative imagination but also international and global relations. In the first place, public administration is today immersed in what has been called a VUCA environment. This implies that public administration and its processes, procedures and institutional operations must be factored into an environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. The VUCA world implies the myriad degrees of shocks, threats, cynicism, turbulence and challenges that governments all across the world must have to respond to in order to design and formulate policies that will resonate with the yearnings of an increasingly politically sophisticated citizenry. The VUCA environment is aggravated by what has come to be called a polycrisis, a fundamentally complex situation as a result of many crises, conflicts and complex issues reinforcing and complicating one another in sequences that aggravate any existing circumstances that humans and states find themselves. In such a situation of a polycrisis, the overall consequences and impacts of the complex crisis is greater than the sum of all the variables making it up. For example, poverty in the world today is now a function of climate change, economic recession, natural disasters, bad governance and political instability. 

    Within a VUCA environment, policies and their trajectories and dynamics cannot be considered as simplistic and linear endeavors. This is compounded by the fact that the status and role of the public manager, as the administrative and policy craftsman, has kept changing: (a) the ‘I am directed’ rule-oriented bureaucrat (public manager 1.0), (b) business-oriented and performance-focused manager (2.0), and (c) networking and relations-focused collaborator (3.0). This transition reflects the transformation of thinking about public administration and the public service from Max Weber to Woodrow Wilson and from the new public management (NPM) to the idea of new governance. The VUCA environment within which the twenty-first century public manager is expected to effectively and efficiently function is further complicated when it is considered from the perspectives of a postcolonial context like Nigeria. Africa is often considered as the most difficult administrative context in the world. And that is essentially because the organic maturation of public administration had been disrupted not only by colonial rule but also postcolonial consequences of a logic of extraction. This therefore implies that public administration and the public manager in Africa must not only anticipate and preempt current and recurrent challenges that ails governance on the continent, but must also be conversant with emerging trends and paradigms shifts that are determining the trajectory and possible directions that public administration is taking in the evolving fourth revolution and knowledge society mediated by digital and destructive technologies, from the blockchain and robotics to enterprise resource planning and big data.

    Trend analysis therefore becomes a necessary and inevitable tool for prospecting for patterns, scenarios and variances in order to determine future prospects and achieve strategic decision-making. Trend analysis rely essentially on empirical and historical data and evidences to determine, monitor and forecast short- or long-term institutional changes that could constitute downtrends or uptrends for any particular endeavor. In public administration, it involves gathering historical and current data on emerging trends that could get the public managers to make decisive and evidence-based strategic decisions that would get the public service to perform more effectively and efficiently for better service delivery. This serves the purpose of empowering the public managers and public administration scholars and experts to gather valuable insights on how far public administration practices have come, the emerging developments that are shaping the practices, and the future prospects in the profession. It also enables public managers to generate crucial understanding of performance metrics that could keep pushing the boundaries of the operational functionality of the public service for optimal performance and productivity.

    The most recent source of polycrisis all over the world was the COVID-19 pandemic that decimated millions of lives across the globe and facilitated in its wake what is now called the “new normal” in terms of human social relations, societal dynamics and structural cum institutional realignments. Humans have been forced to reassess normal patterns of doing things at some professional levels. We now work from home, adapted to a blended educational schedule, attend conferences and symposia virtually, and so on. In economic, social, political and even spiritual terms, there are now dramatic transformations that were instigated by the precarious developments of the COVID-19 pandemic. The new normal is enabled by digital and other new technologies and the new information dispensation to disrupt the usual dynamics of social, cultural and professional lives. The pandemic triggered a deluge of challenging situations for public administration and the public service to deal with. This can be likened in a sense to the administrative challenges that the Nigerian Civil War posed to Nigeria’s public service and those we now call the “super permanent secretaries.”

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    The COVID-19 pandemic struck most governments and their public administration dynamics at this critical service delivery point. And the tragedy of the pandemic is that it caught the entire world at varying administrative stages and phases of the normal. This is even worse for the third world countries, and Africa especially. Before the COVID-19 lockdown, the Nigerian public service system had been afflicted by a bureau-pathological protocol defined by a collusion between what we all know as the “Nigerian factor” and some damaging systemic debilities. The tragedy of the pandemic and of Nigeria’s unpreparedness for it has presented the public service system with a unique opportunity to reflect on and rethink its governance and administrative policies. And so, with the sudden transformation of the way we look at work and the workplace dynamics, the public service had to forcefully embrace what used to be the staple of administrative conferences and forecasting.

    The transformation of the workplace, as part of the key reform for preparing public administration to manage the fourth industrial revolution especially in Africa, demands the deployment of human resource management to achieve performance and productivity. The transformation of the workplace and work ethics gives the public service the capacity to recruit a global workforce and create incentives that increase employee loyalty and commitment, and collaborations that generate productivity. This gives room for the achievement of a better work-life balance deriving from freer time and flexibility to work. It also crucially facilitates the acquisition of “twenty-first century literacies”: (a) interpersonal skills: facilitation, empathy, political skills; (b) synthesising skills: sorting evidence, analysis, making judgements, offering critique and being creative; (c) organising skills: group work, collaboration and peer review; and (d) communication skills: better use of new media and multi-media resources. The smart public manager must also factor into the mix the unique cultural and sociological demands that the emergence of the Gen Z, Gen Alpha and Gen Beta are bringing or will bring into the constitution of the workplace as a technology-enables space with its own peculiar generational dynamics. No conscious public manager will ignore the demands of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in making the workplace more broad-based and strategic.  

    Apart from the immediate need for flexible and remote work protocols that transformed the workplace and its dynamics, the imperative of open government suddenly got a new lease on life. Since the emergence of the new public management and the managerial revolution that drove it, the objective has been to achieve a government that is FAST—flatter, agile, streamlined and technology-enabled. And one way to do this is not only to install a performance management system, but to also facilitate an open government framework that allows for the co-creation of values through citizen engagement. For instance, a flat government demands that the distance between government and the citizens be decreased through the deployment of digital technologies and the social media and mobile technologies that increase the participation of citizens in administrative and decision-making processes. Open government therefore increase transparency and accountability in government decision making, remove red tape and hierarchies, and enable cross-sectoral collaborations.

    The open government initiative also makes possible an open data platform that governments across the world are deploying to further facilitate citizens engagement and interactions with the policies of government. Through emerging communication and information technologies, governments make available data and information that the citizens can use. Tracking and mapping systems also help the citizens to interrogate government’s expenditures and decision dynamics. Open government and the open data initiatives are made possible by the right to information legislation that makes it imperative for the government, through its MDAs, to share critical information about its processes and procedures with its citizens. the open government partnership plays a crucial role in grounding the significance of the public-private partnership. This is achieved through a networked dynamic that open government and its deployment of communication and digital technologies make possible. The government can now draw the private sector into a governance space for tackling challenging administrative and governance issues that the government or the private sector could never tackle on its own.

    The idea of open government and its potentials for making public administration more effective inevitably raises the specter of cybersecurity with regard to the value of big data, data sovereignty and how this could be compromised.

    For example, data sovereignty gives a government the control over sensitive information and data that its public administrative institutions and processes require to function effectively. It also prevents these data and information from unauthorized access or information mining and misuse that could compromise the significance and values of these data and information. Hence, governments need to manage the circumferences of its data sovereignty by monitoring and anticipating data breach and vulnerability. Public managers will therefore be tasked with the imperative of thinking more strategically about the critical relationship between open government, open access to big data, administrative efficiency and the threat of data breach through cyber-attacks. This inevitably demands the significant role of cybersecurity professionals who can anticipate and deal with cyber-threats as they emerge.

    The reforms that will shape public administration of the future will be determined significantly by the capacity of public services across the world to leverage digital, communication and information technologies to both create strategies and be strategic. Creating a strategy, on the one hand, is a process of translating a plan into a set of results. On the other hand, however, being strategic is a competence that involves critical thinking. The two point at the urgent need for the public service to generate strategic thinking required for the change management that will move the institution forward into more optimal functionality and productivity. Both must be channeled institutionally to the most central process of strategic decision making. Creating strategies and being strategic in administrative decision-making demands the deployment of new thinking and developments in decision science.

    Decision science has become a critical field that has integrated cognate developments from artificial intelligence, organisational psychology, systems thinking, machine learning, probabilistic modeling, scenario analysis, big data analytics, and many more to become a key area that the public service must buy into to push forward its policy intelligence that strengthen decision-making. Modern policy making that has taken cognizance of decision science will most likely possess nine fundamental features: (i) forward-looking; (ii) outward-looking; (iii) innovative, flexible and creative; (iv) evidence-based; (v) evaluation; (vi) review; (vii) joined-up; (viii) inclusive; and (ix) learned lessons.

    Artificial intelligence plays a critical role in decision science and strategic decision-making for the public administration of the future. AI possesses a huge significance for the objective of making the public service an efficient institution for democratic service delivery that optimize democratic governance. AI not only makes possible the digitization of crucial data and information, it simplifies routine and tedious tasks, and fast tracks data analysis. It is also inevitable in facilitating the open government and open data aspiration that transform public administration. However, in deploying AI in public administration, the public manager must factor the multiple ethical and legal concerns, especially in terms of human rights issues that links AI to labour issues and industrial relations.

    The last fundamental trend that public administration must factor into its reform is the emergence of a flexible, updated and up-to-date curriculum that benefits from the contemporary discourses on public administration, current administrative practices, and also feeds administrative education and training. The curriculum will feature syllabi on artificial intelligence and its critical significance, the role of new technologies in public service efficiency, human resource management and the new workplace, the imperatives of open government, etc. The curriculum, for example will explore the relationship between the public service and commercial/market tools, analysis, techniques and models for gathering commercial data that will enhance the effectiveness of the public service in terms of project management, asset and facility management, outsourcing, contract awards, and so on.      

  • Professional or licence certification not compulsory for entry into civil, public service — HoS

    Professional or licence certification not compulsory for entry into civil, public service — HoS

    The Federal government has announced that professional or license certifications are no longer compulsory for entry into the civil and public service.

    The circular dated April 12, 2021 was written after a meeting of the National Council on Establishment in Lagos. 

    The circular personally  by Yemi-Esan during her leadership, reads in part:  “The National Council on Establishment (NCE) at its 42nd meeting held from 30th November – 4th December 2020 in Ikeja, Lagos state resolved that professional certificates shall no longer serve as entry qualifications into any cadre in the Civil/Public Service. Consequently, only academic qualifications such as Junior and Senior Secondary School Certificates (WASC/SSCE), NECO, GCE, ND, NCE, HND, University degrees and postgraduate degrees shall apply”. 

    This is in response to insistence by professional bodies that certification is compulsory for entry into civil/public service. 

    Last month, the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) warned professional bodies to operate within existing memorandum of understanding signed with the Board, saying that overstepping their bounds will attract severe consequences.

    Read Also: Gbenga Omotoso: Another year of excellence in public service, dedication and compassion, by Adeniyi Olutimehin

    “I must emphasise that some professional bodies are overstepping their bounds. 

    “Some even go to NYSC to stop the mobilization of graduates. This has now been resolved and NYSC has stopped aiding this illegality,” the Executive Secretary of NBTE said in a memo dated September 11, 2024.

  • Public Service marks ‘Ideas Day’

    Public Service marks ‘Ideas Day’

    Lagos State has celebrated 2023 Public Service Ideas Day, a platform through which ideas proposed by civil servants are presented and the top three selected for implementation. The theme was ‘Building a Future-Ready Public Service’.

    Three ideas were selected. Ministry of Physical Planning and Urban Development won with its idea on paying compensation to families to be displaced for Fourth Mainland Bridge.

     Maternal and Child Centre of Amuwo Odofin General Hospital came second for proposing Apnea Machine to address infant death in sleep.

    Read Also: Changing ‘public’ in public services and implications for reforms in Nigeria

     Ministry of Basic Education came third with its proposed compulsory hearing, sight and speech defect checks for primary school pupils for early intervention.

    Head of Service, Bode Agoro, representing Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, described innovation in the public sector as technological advancements and about finding creative solutions to complex problems.

    Director-General in the Office of Transformation, Creativity and Innovation, Mrs. Toyin Anjous-Ademuyiwa, said the Ideas Day was a way to bring out public servants with great ideas, and embrace the ideas.

    “We have public servants with great ideas and we should start embracing then before looking elsewhere’’.

  • ’10 attitudes for successful public service career’

    Mr Sam Chinda, out-going Enugu State Comptroller of Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), has identified 10 positive working attitudes and ethics for a successful public service career.

    Chinda, who is exiting the service after attaining mandatory 60 years retirement age, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday that a public servant must develop passion for his job in order to excel.

    “Having or developing passion for the job entails putting in your best as well as being focused on the job as required to effectively complete your daily tasks.

    “The passion is also necessary as you are not only working to be paid salary but rendering a service for the betterment of the society and country at large,’’ he said.

    The NIS boss said that the second point was learning the job very well and paying attention to details of carrying out the job by superiors and trainers.

    “Thirdly, do not place money and gratification first, so that it does not becloud your sense of duty and judgment.

    “Fourthly, develop and sustain good relationship with colleagues no matter your perceived or natural differences with them.

    “Fifthly, you must plan your life from day one you entered to service the public.

    “The planning covers both present, futuristic as well as retirement plans; since you will never be in service forever,’’ he advised.

    Chinda advised public and civil servants to be prudent and manage their monthly salaries very well; while cultivating the habit of saving monthly, no matter how little.

    “Yes, the seventh, is do not compare yourself or your achievements or possessions with another colleague of yours in the same office or work environment.

    Read Also: Lagos lawmaker decries state of Badagry road

    “This is very important for young people in service since you do not know and they might not honestly tell you how they came about the achievements or personal possessions.

    “Eight, maintain a good name in all your dealings; while maintaining the `right track and philosophy’ over life generally.

    “Do not ever pull people down; but lend a helping hand to pull people up in any way you can in life, especially among your colleagues,’’ he said.

    According to him, the last, which is voluntary but helpful, is engaging in farming where possible since the civil/public service rule permits that.

    “Take a practical lesson on any aspect of agriculture from a successful farmer in the field,’’ said Chinda, who bowed out of NIS Enugu State Command after several years of impactful service to the nation.

  • AIG chiefs speak on economy, public service

    The Africa Initiative for Governance (AIG) has reiterated the need for the judicially to contribute to economic growth and better life for all across the globe.

    The AIG Visiting Fellow of Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, Mrs. Georgina Wood, who delivered a public lecture titled Rule of Law, the Promotion of Sustainable Development and Ghana’s Experience: A View From the Bench at the school, said: “One key lesson I have learnt is that the imperatives of promoting a rule of law based governance system, anchored on a free, fair and impartial administration of justice cannot be overemphasised”, said Justice Wood, whois immediate past Chief Justice of Ghana.

    “The moderating influence of the Judiciary on the more political branches is the basis of constitutional stability and balance, providing the needed conducive environment for sound economic growth and a better life for all.”

    Also speaking, Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government, Ngaire Woods, said:”We are honoured to host Justice Wood at the Blavatnik School”, said Professor.  “We are grateful to her for sharing her outstanding experience of the Justice System in Ghana with our students and faculty.”

    AIG Founder and Chairman, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede said: “We are pleased to have Justice Mrs. Wood as the AIG Fellow for 2017/2018 and are honoured that we are able to support outstanding senior public service practitioners from West Africa in enriching their understanding of policy, and in sharing their wealth of knowledge to aspiring young people and with the world”.

  • Public service and imperatives of strategic planning

    An anonymous author once affirmed that: “In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.” Similarly, Albert Einstein once said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” And, of course, according to popular wisdom, only the unwise embarks on a journey without a map.

    The importance and indispensability of strategic planning in management has been proved and validated over the years. Surprisingly, however, organisations are not always readily open to embracing a culture of strategic management. Ironically, every well meaning organization strives to be the best in their sphere of influence. For the public service especially, the sure way to be the best lies in embracing a culture of strategic management. Strategic management model remains, perhaps, the best ever and definite way to ensure an efficient and productive public service that would impact greatly on good governance and quality service delivery.

    In an article titled: ‘Introduction to Strategic Management,’ Ryszard Barnat listed the benefits of strategic management for organisation to include provision of a way to anticipate future problems and opportunities, providing personnel with clear objectives and directions for the future of the organisation, more effective and better performance compared to non-strategic management organisations,   increased personnel’s satisfaction and motivation, faster and better decision making and cost savings.

    In addition to the above, Ryszard Barnat equally stresses that strategic management allows for identification, prioritization, and exploitation of opportunities, provides an objective view of management problems, represents a framework for improved coordination and control of activities, minimizes the effects of adverse conditions and changes, allows major decisions to better support established objectives, allows more effective allocation of time and resources to identified opportunities, allows fewer resources and less time to be devoted to correcting erroneous or ad hoc decisions, creates a framework for internal communication among personnel, helps to integrate the behaviour of individuals into a total effort, provides a basis for the clarification of individual responsibilities, gives encouragement to forward thinking, provides a cooperative, integrated, and enthusiastic approach to tackling problems and opportunities, encourages a favourable attitude towards change and gives a degree of discipline and formality to the management of an organisation.

    At this point, it is important to draw attention to five essential attributes of strategic management, according to the thoughts of a leading management consultant, Mr. Mark Rhodes. First, an effective strategy should be deeply understood and shared by the organization. Rhodes argued that the ancient Mongols defeated far larger Armies because they were able to make adjustments on the battlefield despite ancient systems of communication that limited the way orders could be delivered to warriors already in action.  He then stated that the secret was instilling battle strategy in the hearts and minds of all soldiers so that they could make correct tactical decisions without direct supervision or intervention.

    Like the mission statement published in the annual reports or guiding principles framed in the lobbies of organisations, a strategic plan itself accomplishes nothing.  What matters is whether personnel in the organization understand and internalize the strategic direction that have been well articulated and can make tactical choices on their own.  Strategic plans must be articulated in a manner such that operational and tactical decision-making can follow suit.

    Furthermore, the leading strategist must count on the employees or members of the organization to make sound tactical and operational decisions that are aligned with the desired strategic direction.  To ensure that these decisions are well made, the articulated strategic direction and strategic plans must be applicable and clearly related to the issues that people face.

    It is always helpful to remember that an effective strategy provides a picture of the desired long-term future.  In order to make sound day-to-day decisions, all members of the organization must be able to begin with the end in mind.  All steps must ultimately keep the organisation on course toward the long-term objective.

    In the second place, an effective strategy allows flexibility so that the direction of the organization can be adapted to changing circumstances. Rhodes explained that rigid strategic direction seldom turns out to have been the best course of action.  To assure that your organisation is nimble and able to react to changes, it is essential that your strategy is flexible and adaptable.  As a strategist, you will count on timely and accurate information about prevailing relevant conditions.  It is essential to build and employ effective mechanisms for observing and listening to what is going on in the environment.  Real-time information, in turn, must feed on-going strategic and operational shifts and deployments.

    Thirdly, effective strategy results from the varied input of a diverse group of thinkers and participants in strategic decision-making must be unafraid to state contrary opinions.  Managers of human resources must look carefully in the mirror in order to ensure that their strategic team is ready to make effective decisions.  They must encourage debate, even argument among their strategic team about key decisions. Encouraging blind alignment with the organization’s positions can be counterproductive. Personnel must be allowed to feel free to air contrary views about organizational goals.

    Fourth place, an effective strategy follows a thorough and deep analysis of both the external environment and the internal capabilities of the organization. This is the essence of the famous SWOT model (an evaluation of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).  The strategist must understand the effects and dynamics of external entities such as competitors, suppliers, regulators and strategic partners.  A sound assessment of these external factors leads to a rich understanding of threats to ward off and opportunities to pursue.  The strategist must also understand the internal capabilities of his or her organization.  A realistic self assessment enables the organization to leverage the strengths of the organization and to shore up areas of weakness.

    Finally, an effective strategy is one that identifies areas of Competitive Advantage.

    Many aspects of the organisation must be held at parity across a wide swipe of the competitive landscape. In business, this is called the “business essential” elements of organizational design.  You do not need to be world class at mundane business practices that are not your distinctive competence, but you must maintain standards of work equal to that of your competitors.  That is, the organization must maintain parity with competitors in the ordinary and mundane matters.

    Moreover, all members of the organization must keep the uniqueness of their company in the forefront, always keeping competitive advantages unharnessed in order to compete in a vigorous manner.  In short, every strategic plan must educate the full organizational team how it must use carefully identified competitive advantages in order to compete and win.

    In the absence of a well defined strategic management plan, personnel merely become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia. This is why the Lagos State Public Service is radically tilting towards strategic planning and the results have been  amazing.

    • Oke, is Lagos State Commissioner for Establishments, Training and Pensions, Lagos State

  • Rebuilding public service in the wings of a productivity movement

    At a recently organized Prof. Pat Utomi’s Centre for Values in Leadership (CVL) annual seminar and international symposium on “Leadership and Performance in Africa’s Economic Competitiveness,” held on the 6th of February in Lagos, I had the great fortune not only of being one of the participants that sat under the distinguished keynotes of Dr Kandeh Yumkella, a presidential candidate in Sierra Leone and a former UN Undersecretary general, and the newly minted Dr Olusegun Obasanjo. But I got the most distinct honor of being selected as one of the panelists to interrogate Yumkella’s and Obasanjo’s keynote addresses. The consensus the discourse threw up was that Nigeria has arrived at its lowest level of national performance imaginable. Prof. Utomi then put me in the spotlight by asking for my expert opinion on what could be done to salvage the public service which requires urgent institutional rejigging in order for it to overcome the policy execution trap which has contributed immensely to the undermining Nigeria’s capacity to harness her economic growth possibilities and developmental potentials. I offer this piece as a complement to the brief expert ideas on the issue which time did not permit me to fully outline at the CVL event.

    It will be a serious technicist illusion for anyone to think that the policy implementation crisis can only be tackled with a reformed public service alone. This technicist assumption reduces the execution of reform to the mere issues of tactics and operational strategies that fail essentially to take into consideration the dynamic nature and trajectory of reform management. While all civil service reforms are essentially technicist or instrumentalist in the sense that they require addressing several and severe technical administrative issues and problems, reform success goes beyond merely ensuring an aggregation of technical details and dynamics. There is also a fundamental necessity to situate the reform of the civil service within the space of other complementary reform projects.

    Reform, within the contemporary resurgence of democratic politics and the growing expectations of the citizens, has become more complicated and comprehensive beyond the purview of public service reform. Governance reform, all across the globe, now represents a broader understanding of reform that brings the government into a collaborative partnership with a broad coalition of non-state actors, especially the private sectors and civil society organizations which are stakeholders in the good governance dynamics that is meant to bring the dividends of democracy closer to the citizens. The fundamental end of the governance reform is to achieve a more efficient and effective democratic service delivery that will empower the people and make their lives more meaningful. Such a reform framework not only initiates some fundamental transformation of the three functions of government (namely, policy management, regulation and service delivery), it essentially also demands some immediate strategic responsibility.

    Thus, if the Nigerian government must achieve a sustainable national transformation that caters for democratic governance, then the government has the most immediate responsibility to commit totally to the reform project in the same measure that it commits to visioning and development planning. This observation derives from the crucial fact that the success of any reform project depends on the political buy-in and commitment of the political leadership. Once this is achieved, the success of the reform is almost assured. At the seminar, I cited the example of the UK 1980 reform project under PM Margaret Thatcher and her successor, John Major. Indeed, Nigeria is at that stage that UK was with her civil service (in terms of its policy architecture, not functionality) in the shape that it was migrated to us and, in significant terms, in the shape Nigeria’s public service still is: described officially in the UK as “… inefficient, badly managed and unresponsive” in one breath. And on the other, lacking innovation, too large to be efficient with too many jobs duplication and many MDAs overlapping what others is doing. Besides, given the way the Nigerian civil service is currently wired (heavily bureaucratic and undiluted with the technocratic cum entrepreneurial managerial culture that define 21st century public administration praxis), it is incapable of providing quality service both in the advice it gives and in the service it renders to the public. It was this same reality that caused the UK, in the 1980s, to commence the process which first saw the introduction of the Efficiency Unit (and later Delivery Unit), first under the Chairman/CEO of Marks & Spenser, Lord Derek Rayner (supported by the leading public administration experts), to provide leadership to a dynamic that turned out to be an institutional reengineering of the entire public sector and a paradigm shift. There are now dozens of change management models as seminal as the UK’s, if not more, to pick ideas from. But the point to make with this reference is one of how critical political commitment and leadership sophistication is to institution rebuilding and transformation.

    And this political commitment requires that the Nigerian federal government set up a presidential reform commission that will be charged with the oversight function of the public sector overall institution rebuilding and trajectory from design to implementation for at least five years. This reform commission must necessarily be headed by a public sector management specialist with a 21st century core management credentials as the executive chairman. The Commission, which will draw technical support from consortium of firms and with a strengthened Bureau of Public Service Reform (BPSR) as its secretariat, should be saddled with a very clear mandate to articulate, based on multitudes of readily available national strategies, study reports, well-intentioned reform initiatives that are being badly managed, etc. from which it will not only design but oversee the implementation of a comprehensive institutional reform and changes at two levels.

    The first aspect of the reform program the management experts in the reform commission must confront is Nigeria’s productivity profile and its very low scorecards as a transformation point for governance performance in Nigeria. Development is a function of an optimal productivity framework. In fact, productivity is intricately attached to good governance. This is because if governance has to do with the capacity of the government to make good policy decisions, then such decisions affect the productivity level of the state, which in turn facilitates infrastructural development and eventually empowers service delivery to the citizens. Since the management experts understand this intrinsic relationship between productivity, development and good governance, the challenge remains going beyond rhetoric to substantive institutional reform of the productivity framework of the Nigerian state. One good way to proceed is through historical insight into how other high-performing nations have dealt with their productivity challenge. And the best example for me remains post-World War II Japan.

    Japan pulled off an economic miracle in a period of one decade after it was pummeled to the ground by the American bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Any other state faced with this kind of national challenge would have buckled under. Add the fact that Japan is a conglomeration of islands without any substantive mineral resources that could translate into comparative economic advantage. Yet, from a vanquished state, Japan rose to become the second largest capitalist economy in the world. Japan’s economic recovery process had external and internal factors. The external factor had to do with the intervention of the United States in the economic equation. However, the most outstanding influence is the capacity and the resilience of the Japanese government to envision what is needed and then to put a unique and bold strategy of capacitation in place. The strategy is to first understand that the government by itself cannot facilitate economic recovery.

    Japan’s strategy was three-pronged: strict regulation bordering on protectionism, trade expansion and the stimulation of private sector growth. Two further internal strategic dynamics are cogent to understanding the productivity revolution of post-war Japan. First, the Japanese government deployed a Keiretsu principle that unites the country’s manufacturers, suppliers, bankers, industries and so on to form a unique dynamic of economic cooperation.

     

     

  • Case for customer-centred public service

    In the public service where the customer is the citizen, it has also been noted that government departments and public service organizations have clearly defined missions to provide a service to their constituents. Poor experience leads to complaints that in turn, ultimately affect votes for public officials if service is consistently bad. Public service organizations that do not understand their customers’ changing needs, or worse, don’t care about their customers, will receive complaints that require additional resources to solve. This creates stress for both employees and customers and takes resources away from their core roles. The momentum and complexity of global change are challenging all organizations, including government agencies, to move faster, work smarter, use their resources more effectively and think further ahead.

    In a recent publication, PwC, United States, asked and answered a germane question as follows: “What does a customer-centred organization look like? It’s an organization that considers the customer in everything it does, from procurement to deployment to the entire customer experience. It also speaks to its customers in their own language and makes it easy for them to align their goals with the mission at hand.”

    In making a case for a customer-centred public service, such as the Lagos State Public Service, Christopher Brown noted that, countless studies have documented the link between organizational culture and organizational performance. Specifically, many studies show that a customer-centric culture drives superior service and value for customers resulting in an experience that creates customer satisfaction and advocacy. This in turn drives exceptional organizational performance in terms of productivity, new product and service success, innovation and financial performance.

    Championed by Governor Akinwunmi Ambode and anchored by the Ministry of Establishments, Training and Pensions, the administration has engaged all departments and units of the public service in trainings and workshops designed to improve productivity, deepen knowledge, expand horizon, and re-evaluate and sharpen vision and focus.

    These efforts were made in pursuance of the promise and undertaking made by the governor on May 29, 2015 when, in his inaugural speech, he said to the people of Lagos State and the whole world: “As we all know, the best practices of yesterday may not be good enough for the products of today. In this sense, we shall embark on continuous reforms in the public service. I am determined to demonstrate that the government belongs to the citizens. You have put us here as servants to serve you and not you serving us. Today we are committed to that creed.

    “Moving forward, the Civil Service will be strengthened and made to respond to the needs of all citizens in the same manner quality services are rendered in the private sector. My administration is prepared to take the decisions needed to promote merit and professionalism. To restructure where required, eliminate poor human resource practices and accelerate the pace of reforms in the spirit of good governance.”

    Now, all stakeholders are beginning to notice and appreciate the investments made to build and deepen capacity in the Lagos State Public Service. From citizens to donor agencies, and from civil societies to the media, objective evaluations testify to a Lagos State Public Service that is better motivated, better focused, and better equipped to confront the challenges of modern governance and administration in an emerging, dynamic and rapidly-growing global and smart city.

    While we delight in this achievement, we are mindful that our work is not done. We appreciate that there is a place called ‘better.’ We are conscious that the task of fully realizing the vision set out by the governor as highlighted above is only best described as ‘work-in-progress.’ To this end, the Lagos State Executive Council has carried out a detailed evaluation of the public service in light of the investments and progress so far made with a view to determining the next critical step in the effort to ensure that the public service performs at its optimal level and delivers exponential value to the citizens of Lagos State.

    That evaluation has identified that, aside from skills-capable development, it is imperative to embark on an extensive, rigorous, sustained, and public service-wide advocacy that addresses what social scientists have identified as the most cognate component of organisational development: that is, the changing and substitution of a fixed mind-set to, and with, a growth mind-set. Thus, the next critical area of focus for those charged with the development of capacity in the public service is not infrastructure or knowledge deepening. These have received, and continue to receive, substantial and adequate investments and attention from this administration. Rather, the next critical area of focus for those charged with the development of capacity in the public service is the renewal and transformation of the mind-set of our public officers.

    We are convinced that, by having individual officers of the state public service inculcate the growth mind-set, we can attain a truly effective, productive, and transformational public service that will surpass the expectations of all stakeholders. In practical terms, our advocacy will be to challenge and encourage all the officers to embrace a growth mind-set such that the state’s objectives can be realised.

    First, every officer with a ‘growth mind-set’ will become interested in understanding and adopting the vision of the public service as a whole and will be empowered to set a clear vision regarding his or her duties and effectively communicate it to colleagues, providing them with a clear understanding of the desired direction from time to time. As has been severally noted, a crafted vision by itself accomplishes nothing.  What matters is whether the officers of the Lagos State Public Service understand and internalize the vision that has been articulated and can, on the basis of that, make aligned procedural choices on their own.  The task of the leadership of the public service is to ensure that the unit, departmental, and organisational vision is clearly articulated and communicated. An inculcated and nourished growth mind-set will thereafter ensure that the officers are committed to making sound tactical and operational decisions that are aligned with the articulated vision.

    Second, every officer with a growth mind-set will be personally invested in the resolve and effort to cut through red-tapism in all facets of the public-facing segments of the public service.

    In the light of the above therefore, the advocacy of the mind-set will include emphasis on the priority and importance of a customer-centred approach to the discharge of services.  Also, every officer with a growth mind-set will be ready and equipped to assume leadership of assigned tasks, including the ability and readiness to take initiatives and decisions that align with communicated objectives. The strategy of growth mind-set which we have adopted is in line with the motto of the state: Centre of Excellence.

    This means that every civil servant will strive towards excellent delivery of service to the public. When we adopt excellence as our world view, it will shape our attitudes, behaviour, habits and ultimately have the desired impact on the behaviour of Lagos State Public Service as an organisation. The public has become sophisticated and highly informed, they are aware of global standards of service delivery; they demand to be treated courteously and served excellently because their taxes provide the wealth that government spends.

     

    • Dr. Akintola is Commissioner, Lagos State Ministry of Establishments, Training and Pensions.