After 27 years in the civil service, Dr Tunji Olaopa retired as the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Communication Technology. Leveraging on his rich experience and deep knowledge, he teamed with some others to establish the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy. In this interview, he talks about the rot in the public service system and suggests ways that corruption can be better tackled. Bisi Oladele was there.
You just retired as a Permanent Secretary. How would you describe the Nigerian civil service?
In fact, in the public service system and as a political scientist, one of the first things I noticed was that a lot of what we practise in government lack theoretical basis; they are more like commonsense. A whole lot of these were conceived properly in the First Republic because the colonial administrative system taught the first generation, brought them up in the knowledge of people; what the parameters are and what you can call the theoretical and value foundation for these institutions. But even the institutions have changed over time. What you have is that we still carry on, based largely on experience. And these are factors that are really constraining the effectiveness of some of these institutions. If you read some of the books that have influenced me mostly; that have deepened my thinking greatly, one of which was the book on Why Nations Fail. You will see that there have been so many theories on why Africa is not working. There has been the theory of geography because the weather is very friendly. The Africans are not innovative; you can sleep for a whole day, for the whole year if you are a son of a millionaire. But you can’t be a son of a millionaire in America and sleep like that. If winter comes and you don’t prepare for it, you may die. So, the society compels you to innovate because the environment could be very hostile. But we feel that Africa has a type of soil that even if you just wake up from your window and you throw anything to the soil, it will germinate whereas if you go to Israel and you don’t study the soil and re-cultivate it significantly with technology, you cannot bring out a single fruit. There is also the cultural theory by Max Weber that the West was largely influenced by the factor of Christianity. And it is a reflection of the theory about us, the cultural thing. We are so comfortable; we are a very consumptive people and all of that. So, there have been different theories but what an author said is that in spite of all, you cannot get development to happen if your institutions are not functioning. If your institutions have lost their focus and values, you can’t make things happen. For example, if the police cannot be made to work according to the ethics of policing, nothing meaningful can come from the force. It is only in Nigeria that somebody who has not been trained to be a police would go and be wearing uniform. There are values. There are strong issues that define institutions. Look at our institutions, the Legon University in Ghana is still like the University of Ibadan (UI) of the old. But what made our institutions to derail and become prodigal is because there was so much money. We had money because oil was the first to be discovered because it was defining global trend. All the multinationals came and quickly exploited it. But immediately the money was coming, we forgot gold and other mineral resources. Bitumen is more than oil but we forgot. And that is how it happens to spoilt children; all they think is what goes to their mouth. They don’t use their brain. So, what we want to do in the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy is to offer policy research and advise executives while at the same time creating sustained platforms for innovative problems solving in executive education.
What do we mean by these? We would not be doing the regular courses like courses in strategic planning, project management – is not our own focus. What we want to do is that we will be looking at critical challenges. Why can the Lagos/Ibadan express way not be constructed? That is talking about infrastructure finances because we are still thinking financing through the budget, because we are thinking of Public Private Partnership (PPP) in a contrite manner. We don’t understand it.
The second thing we want to do is that for every year, the conference will help us to shape the kind of issues that we are going to be concerned with in that year. So, we would have been able to assemble the core of experts. For example, maybe next year we are looking at human capital development. The whole issue will look at education, skills and all these artisan issues.
After looking at infrastructure, we will now look at education, health and human capital. You will see that these are big issues. We are looking at taxation and all others. The last thing I want to mention concerning what the school will be doing is to raise the bar of discourse towards advancing the Nigeria’s course.
Are you alone in this venture?
No, I am not. We have a very large house. First of all, our chairman is Prof. Akin Mabogunje. We have a couple of people who are like advisers such as Dr. Christopher Kolade, Chief Emeka Anyaoku and former president Olusegun Obasanjo. The reason was we shared our experience with them when we were setting it up and we did almost all you may call marketing research. So, in the process of interaction, they encouraged us. So, you discover that a lot of them feature in our programmes. They already have ýbackground knowledge of what is building up. Then, one of the other things we did is that we have within the scope leading political scientists like Professor Adigun Agbaje, who is one of those I regard as the real eggheads of political science.
Again, you must know that my background has been a policy and institutional work and I have done a global tour and I have built a whole legion of networks. So, what we want to do is that we retain a very large network. And also there are young researchers that we have identified in departments of Economics, Education, Archaeology. We have a list now of experts on our database that is running almost to 300. They are the people that will run the programme that we are starting. As we speak, the programme we are starting is about 250. We are starting a journal, something like a bulletin; I don’t want to call it magazine. We will start with quarterly. It will be like a must read for any policy maker and civil servants because it is going to be directed at educating them; making them know the current thinking that is defining government around the professional skills to run the government. We had a conversation with the Ministry of Science and Technology. In fact, they have asked us to come and help rethink the critical issues in their policies. We are building a whole range of expertise
The Institute (ISGPP), apparently from a theoretical level, is flamboyant. It is something one can look forward to and say that this is going to be a hub of institutional thinking for society but do you anticipate issues that can militate against this flourishing idea?
In fact, as we speak, the kind of programme we want to start after the conference are largely driven by a whole range of international institutions that want to do things in Nigeria. Some institutions you don’t know about who have interacted with us. There is one in Nairobi that specialises on governance research. They have a lot of funds. But you see the problem is that most of the equivalent institutions here cannot do their level of work that can pass their scrutiny. I saw it in governance. Most institutions in Nigeria are looking for quick money. They want to do populist things. For example, one of my philosophies is that we will not need to be going around to tell anybody. There are some programmes we will simply advertise and we have our business consulting people almost like the marketers who would go round to critical people that we think should benefit. But you see, it is not volume of patronage that will determine whether we are succeeding, it is the quality of the interaction and the target group that you are getting. People that are looking for solution when they see who can provide it, they will come, and the larger part of those people are the civil societies in the local government. For example, everybody talks about the local government not doing development but nobody has been able to throw it up as an issue of national debate. But by the time it becomes a core issue of research, we will publish it and it will raise the level of debate and level of advocacy that will be challenging. A lot of state governments don’t do good governance. Nobody is looking at it. I can tell you that, I know a lot of things that are happening there that if people know, they will protest. But we will not stand against government. What we would just do is that most of the people that are likely going to appreciate the thing we are doing will be included. Again, it is unfortunate but they are the ones that are looking for quality work. And that is why we are going to begin to create policy dialogue. A lot of these programmes don’t even require people participating to pay. We will just create platforms to popularize a whole range of thinking to educate. I discovered also that a lot of things are happening wrongly in government because people don’t know the proper thing to do. They just follow tradition like “the governor doesn’t allow commissioners to sign for money”. And these are the same governors that will be rated the best in Nigeria. And if you go to the states of these governors, their commissioners cannot even approve N5000. They are the only ones approving money. Some of them will concentrate the money in the hands of their wives. These are things that you can never hear about outside. So, what we want to do is to bring out salient structural and institutional constraining issues and raise it to the level of debate.
What we need in the country is more like a culture change; values reorientation. All these ‘no light, no water…’, if you go to find the root cause of the problem, it is the people. So, Nigeria is being undermined by culture but a lot of people don’t know. If people know the magnitude of corruption that is at the federal level, they will know ‘Dasukigate’ is a child’s play.
I am happy you mentioned corruption. Is this project going to develop any programme that can help government go beyond the level of just arresting and prosecuting…?
You see, my own conception of corruption is that all these arrests, for me, is a way of making yourself popular. It should be done but the question is: have you defined the goal? Corruption is a systemic issue arising from the weakness of institutions. For example, for 15 years a cabal was thriving on payroll pension silently. It never allowed computerization for almost two decades because they knew that some biometrics and introduction of technology to that industry will kill their shady business venture. And so they didn’t allow the right kind of people who are not compromised to be sent there. And they confused government. Former President Obasanjo got it right but can you imagine the kind of government we have had but they will be briefed by people who would divert their attention from the facts. So, for me, the starting point in fighting corruption is knowledge. And that is why we want to stand out. If we want to make money from this kind of school then we must be ready to simply help government. What most people in government want is who can help them to paint a good image. They don’t want somebody that will help them to interpret their reality for the public to appreciate. A lot of information and knowledge, if made available to the public, will begin to shape the way the people compromise themselves in the name of election. There is poverty but how many leaders have done sufficient scientific analysis of where we are, the steps we have to take before we can get out of poverty? All you tell people is ‘I’ll buy food for your children in school’. They will just pick an issue that doesn’t tie up. But when people know that you cannot eat an omelet without cracking egg, you can’t overcome corruption without first of all sitting down going through the pace and within a short time you do a turn around. So for me, the way to tackle corruption is while you are doing all these razzmatazz, you must be tackling the roots of corruption. You must begin to get institutions to work. You cannot be getting people to run institutions through lobbying and they would get there and face up to the core job. There are a few things around value and I think we are lucky with a government like Buhari’s because the luck we have is that one thing that has been missing in Nigeria’s dynamics was discipline. But you could also have discipline that will not translate to anything. In my book, I call it ration without knowledge.
Why have all the institutions not been able to find solutions to some of the problems you have highlighted in government because we have corporate personnel who go there for training?
It depends on why they are set up. The focus and methodology; I think the way ASCON and others are structured are achieving what they are set up to achieve: to provide continuous training for people in government. But the nature of the bureaucratic structure that it operates with, the quality of people in its faculty can hardly make it. You can only give what you have. The quality of the faculty you assemble which is a factor determines so many variables. If you go to Lagos Business School, the structure is created just like the Kennedy School: it is for you to have an expanded scope of income. Secondly, the environment is created for you to be very innovative, the courses are not structured. So, then you are also exposed to a lot of trainings. You find in most of our training institutions that some of our trainers have never gone to training themselves. They just come and say what is project management and they define it. Is that the way to go? So, it is a typical approach to learning and that is what you will find in university also. Why? Because of the flexibility; how much resources do you provide for them to do research? Do you even attract the kind of people that can do research in such institutions? So all you have are instructors who have first and second degrees and who have done it so well. When I used to talk to them in the training institutions, they will say but the civil service produced somebody like me. And I told them that I made efforts; it is not the system. Most of the knowledge that I have, most of the things I published, those in the civil service only read them to pass examinations because the system itself doesn’t directly have a need for it. So, I was developing myself to be on top of my game; the knowledge of my chosen area and I built up skills. But somehow, it comes out that through my advocacy the whole issue of reform was getting more serious. So we are raising the level of debate. Previously, routine officers that took reform. When they want to set committee to do reform, they bring retired people with mere reputation but without necessarily knowledge. For me, a lot of the institutions are serving what they are supposed to do but they don’t have the kind of flexibilities that would enable them to engage in some of the activities that can make them to be creative in a manner that we want to do here. For example, ASCON people cannot wake up tomorrow and say that there is an issue in government and they want to research it. Then, the first thing we will ask is how do you get the money? If you want to ýget money from somewhere, you have to go write a letter to the Permanent Secretary in charge of training who would now say why are you looking for money? Then they would say let us look at financial regulation; what does it say about how we can raise money? But even if we want to raise fund, there is protocol but the protocols are supposed to be directed at enabling you to solve problems. We won’t go for grants that we know will constrain us. And that is the difference between us.
