Why Adebo, Akinyele civil service era was successful, by Olaopa

Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Prof. Tunji Olaopa, yesterday, offered insight into why the civil service era of great public administrators like the late Simeon Adebo and Theophilus Adeleke Akinyele was immensely successful.

Olaopa, who gave the insight during the fourth Theophilus & Elizabeth Akinyele Foundation Memorial symposium held in Ibadan, Oyo State, paid tribute to Akinyele, describing him as a statesman, mentor and icon.

He, however, commended the efforts to keep the memory of the Officer of the Order of Niger (OON) and the Bobajiro of Ibadanland, and that of his wife evergreen in the past four years.

Olaopa spoke on the topic “Reinventing Leadership and Ethics in Public Service in Nigeria from the Akinyele Era to Contemporary Institutional Reforms.”

According to him, the memorial events and other initiatives of the Theophilus and Elizabeth Akinyele Foundation “are the best gifts that anyone could give to a man who embodied the ideal of a public servant. A man who served his country and Ibadanland with unparalleled dedication and selflessness, thereby becoming the quintessence of the glorious era of the much-celebrated civil service that Nigeria will do well to continue to draw inspiration from and, as much as its practicable, reinvention.”

He said that Akinyele was an exemplar among the vanishing breed of old guards and ancestors that represent the very best that the civil service system in Africa has produced.

Olaopa said that Akinyele and others who made the civil service of their era great built on the values of public service left behind by the British colonialists.

His words: “The pioneer bureaucrats inherited the founding public service values and virtues which were significantly flavoured by the British Victorian ideals and moral codes that underlie the British administrative tradition, with its elitism and divisive class system.”

He noted that when “Max Weber formulated the framework of his bureaucratic managerial model of public administration, he had in mind a bureaucratic authority that is not only determined by its rules, systems and procedures in a legal-rational sense. He conceived it as a hierarchical organisation that is neutral, efficient, continuous, precise, strict, reliable and disciplined.

“He was also concerned that the public service should be conceived in terms of a vocation that is a calling. In other words, those coming into the service must see it as an honourable, spiritual and value-based institution. For Weber, therefore, being honourable is key to understanding the integrity of the public servant. An honourable public official sees to the execution of a policy to the best of his ability even if she disagrees with the policy choice. This is an honourable act because it demonstrates that the bureaucrat’s sense of duty and of service overrides his personal preferences.”

According to him, the public servant is also meant to pursue spirituality, which has to do with the search for meaning and significance through commitment, trust and dedicated loyalty to the tenets of professionalism.

Olaopa said that these key concepts of honour and spirituality made the public service system a value-based institution and custodian of democratic governance codes, stressing that the foundational philosophical principles were meant to mould the character and actions of anyone who aspires to be a public servant.