(Statement by Prof. Tunji Olaopa, Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission as Chairman of the 3rd Conference of the Nigerian Political Science Association (NPSA) South West, held at the Lead City University, Ibadan on Wednesday, 27 March, 2024)
One of the critical planks in my institutional reform philosophy hinges on the functional capacities of communities of service and practice to achieve an optimal oversight in stimulating the significance of national discourse for the health of democratic governance in Nigeria. Indeed, good governance and real development achievements is not just a function of leadership acumen and the forthrightness of government policies, it also requires the vigilance of an enlightened citizenry that is proactive in pushing the frontiers of democratic accountability. This dynamic is also shaped by the level, quality and relevance of scholarly contributions facilitated by communities of practice as the National Political Science Association (NPSA). And how far the NPSA will go in the analytical and discursive interrogation of development policies, governance and institutional reforms will in turn depend of how successfully it frames research questions to set agenda for researchers as well as the effectiveness of its strategic communication strategy as it ventilates research findings as scholarly inputs to national problem-solving and policy conversations.
Suffice it to say that the political and institutional reform design issues still awaiting technical resolution through research contributions of scholars are legion. Is it the whole issue of getting our federalism to be developmental through constitutional reengineering? Or the whole dynamic of making inter-governmental relations to be enabling for service delivery especially as touching the concurrent schedule of function? Or the role of the state in the maelstrom of ideological contestation in making better sense of our brand of liberal democracy and in enabling the private sector to be engine of growth for the national economy? Or better still, the challenge of getting Nigeria to optimise the full potentials of public private partnership (PPP) along its three-level maturity curve, and I can go on and on. The role of the political scientists is, in other word, cut out in spite of what many might regard as the anti-intellectualism in the policy space in Nigeria
In other words, communities of practice and service like NPSA constitute the gauge by which the functional health of institutions can be measured. Once these communities are comatose, then something fundamental is wrong and the consequences can be very dire, as we have seen with some of these communities in the Nigerian context. It is therefore a delight to see how NPSA has begun to reshape its internal institutional dynamics in response to its mandate as a gatekeeping mechanism for political science scholarship in Nigeria. And the theme of this annual conference is apt. This is indeed an appropriate time to not only interrogate the scorecard of Nigeria’s fourth republic but to also deepen the government’s objective of achieving optimal and efficient service delivery to Nigerians.
Nigeria has come a long way since the inauguration of the democratic experiment since 1999, and from the inaugural administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo to the current administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. We have seen so many evolutions and transformations of parties and the dynamics of party politics. We have also witnessed so many legislative transitions, governmental interventions and energetic institutional reforms. However, what could have made that scorecard really memorable for Nigerians is still missing. And this is the impact of the efficient service delivery mechanisms of successive administrations on the welfare and well-being of Nigerians. The pervasive perception of Nigerians, from way before the inauguration of the fourth republic, is that public institutions are not working for their betterment. And this perception is difficult to fault because it is backed by the experiential agonies of Nigerians as they encounter public infrastructures and their abysmal failures. Roads are not worth the amount spent on them. they begin to break up and become death traps just weeks after they are commissioned. Private schools have overtaken public ones in terms of reliability and quality services. Power supplies from national distribution companies are now mere backups to generators and solar inverters. Nigerian governments have so far failed in providing accessible public infrastructures that could demonstrate the responsiveness of the government to the yearnings of Nigerians for the dividends of democratic governance.
The governance template has been reduced to that of benchmarking failure in terms of government performance. Nigerians have been left with the task of comparing one bad government with another. This is because there has never been a period in Nigerian political development when Nigerians were given an undiluted experience of good governance. And institutional reforms that consecutive administrations have put in place have not been up to par because the leadership have not adequately been able to get a handle on the enigmatic devils in the details: the binding constraints to policy execution in the Nigerian public sector space that have constrained the translation of good intentions, good vision and masterplans to performance and inclusive development outcomes with evidences of dividends that conduce to life more abundant to the generality of Nigerians. And, as we are all aware, the leadership has not been able to put a hand on a general theory that can harness best practices, models and paradigms that will not always meet their Waterloo in Nigeria.
All over the world, good governance is defined around the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery made possible by a modernizing public service whose optimal function revolves around managerial innovation, technology savviness, and administrative flexibility. And the service delivery project in Nigeria, since 1999, has received lots of institutional transformation. The most prominent for me include the SERVICOM innovation we are all familiar with, the medium-term sector strategy and expenditure management frameworks, the Public Procurement Act, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the public private partnership (PPP) mechanism to leverage capacities and capabilities of private enterprises and industries as well as other sectors of the Nigerian economy to reinforce the delivery capability of the public service, the adoption of international chart of account and move towards performance budgeting, and many more.
However, in administrative terms, the fourth republic’s governance fortunate has been limited by the collective fixation on a public service operating system that is defined by the traditional “I-am-directed” Weberian bureaucratic model that is more defined by its regulatory control and capacity to manage the input-process side of policy, programme and project management rather than weighing in on the relationship between performance, outputs and outcomes, and service delivery. This operating system has facilitated the gradual shift of the Nigerian public service system into a chronic bureau-pathological state that has made the civil service, for instance, more interested in its own bureaucratic culture rather than its instrumental value for enhancing democratic governance in Nigeria. Transforming this operating system demands, as a matter of urgency, a managerial paradigm shift that will inject into the system frameworks of strategic planning, project management praxis underpinned by monitoring and evaluation system and performance management orientation.
Hitting on this crucial point of the problem with the public service system, for me, remains the most fundamental credit due to the Udoji Reform Commission of 1974. Nigeria missed that opportunity. And that singular misdirection has been compounded over the years by increasing bureaucratization that has led to incremental erosion of competency-based human resource practices and poor sensitivity to training investments, strategic coaching and deliberate mentoring approaches that transcend classroom-rooted reskilling. This systemic deficit is further aggravated by the bureaucratic closemindedness in relation to fresh ideas and insights, the unresolved pay and compensation structure, the adversarial industrial relations, etc. have compromised the organizational intelligence quotient (IQ) of MDAs. And to cap it all, managerial skills and talents are rushing off in drove either out of the country or to the private sectors because the government has lost its capacity to attract, recruit, incentivize and retain fresh and innovative blood. The result is that the MDAs largely depend on consultants, policy experts and subject specialists as well as technical supports extended by the donor community.
The reform shift required—the one that President Tinubu is gambling on for development and good governance—must be one that abjure the search for a once-size-fits-all and service-wide model emanating from a centralized governance of public resources and the management of the public service that hinders line managers’ creativity and productivity in getting the works in the MDAs done. On the contrary, the system must be retooled to become flatter, agile, streamlined and technology-enabled (FAST) in ways that achieve performance and productivity. It becomes FAST through citizens engagement, administrative efficiency effective decision-making processes and strategic intergovernmental and cross-sectoral collaboration. Three fundamental levels of reform inquiry point in this direction:
- How can the MDAs’ skills deficit be corrected through a mix of re-skilling, regulated injection of fresh new scarce skills, and some rightsizing if unavoidable?
- What contingent changes to we need to do to extant personnel policies, pay structure and recurrent cost ratios to get government to regain its status as employer of choice in the national economy?
- How would the civil service be at once sensitive and reliable ally in achieving the political objectives of government while being accountable to the public without its independence and professionalism being undermined?
First, we need to undertake a periodic MDAs’ capability review to achieve an internal institutional scan that establish their capability readiness to implement development agenda along such quadrants as quality of leadership, people management and incentive structure, bureaucratic efficiency of the internal processes and resource management, framework of stakeholders engagement, action research and analytics to activate monitoring, evaluation and change management systems. This will involve, for instance, a streamlined understanding of the relationship between the core and non-core functions of the MDAs, as well as exploration of alternative service delivery mechanisms. This also inevitably requires performance planning including revaluation of organizational vision and strategy, establishing the goals, objectives and measures at key institutional and at operational levels, and benchmarking of performance. Second, reprogramming the MDAs’ operating system for efficient performance and productivity will amount to a wasted effort if policy designs and programming in terms of development planning and other policy formulation processes are not creatively aligned with strategic implementation planning. Finally, there is the need for the installation of performance management metrics, like performance contracts and audit. This ensures that significant actors, from ministers to line managers, are held accountable to specific performance agenda. This is where the system’s technology-enabled savviness becomes critical. In other words, performance is also a function of the MDAs’ capacity not only to deploy the digital technologies, but to also become open and transparent.
This, in summary, is the crux of the task before the NPSA and other communities of practice that are forced by the fact of their charters to engage with the Nigerian state and her failures and possibilities.