One critical question that I had contended with for sometime as a public service institutional reformer is, why it has been so very difficult to institute performance-oriented values and systems (PMS) to alter the inherited ‘I am directed’ public administration tradition in the civil service in Nigeria.
Indeed, implementation of PMS has been largely rhetorical, entailing moving in circles since the Jerome Udoji Public Service Reform Commission reforms’ first attempt in 1974. Why is this so? One, civil servants generally take on their job as career, largely because of job security. They therefore would generally resist any reform that threatens their jobs, even if such reforms are in the public interest. This attitude translates, for all practical purpose, into a general dislike for change and an unreflective defense of the status quo
Two, civil servants are accustomed to a tradition of ‘wait for your turn’ to gain seniority within hierarchical structures, and therefore value the respect and authority that their positions carry jealously. This orientation contrasts with performance management’s need to reward individual initiatives, creativity, authority of knowledge, and proven expertise, while rewarding officers based on evidence of performance, usually measured as outputs, outcomes and impact within results-based management frameworks.
Three, in any governance context and administrative environment where entitlement mentality prevails, where cultural practices of patronage and nepotism that would usually override merit on the altar of ethnic, religious and sectional parochialisms prevail.
One where personal connections and loyalty influence appointments with brazen disregard for merit as is common in our clime, it is usually difficult to achieve the flexibility that enables the fairness and objectivity required for a performance-based system to function effectively.
Let us now proceed to put this set of theoretical statements in context, to explain how the failure to institute performance-based systems in the Nigeria’s public administration system over the years has, in part, been responsible for Nigeria’s arrested development.
Let me start with an axiom that has guided my reform optimism about the Nigerian state and the unfinished business of institutional reform. That axiom is that there is definitely no shortage of development visions, blueprints, development ideas and paradigms, well-intended policies and programs, or even expert or professional advisory support.
As a public service institutional reformer and policy implementation researcher, I recognise all these as the very first step in the trajectory of getting reform done. Thus, while consecutive Nigerian governments could be said to have a surfeit of the visions and ideas that ground institutional reforms with varying levels of impacts, the momentum that translate these visions, ideas and paradigms into efficient institution and transformative development progress has been missing.
Unfortunately, the institutional and developmental impacts have been less than salutary because of the lack of the political will that backstops the success of any reform effort. This is the second level of the reform business that unlocks the possibility of success. We can all agree, without prejudice, that many Nigerian governments have played bad politics with development programs. By this I mean that Nigeria’s political orientation, from independence till date, has made it extremely difficult to achieve the right composition of elite nationalism that triggers national development. First, there is the problem of policy short-circuiting due to administrative discontinues—each government always desires to reinvent the political and administrative wheels rather than building on the foundations the previous administrations have laid.
Most fundamental is the lack of any genuine ideological bases for political parties that connect to an overarching philosophical construct for rethinking national integration and national development. Since 1999, when Nigeria’s resumed her democratic experiment, politicking has been more about trivial issues of religion and ethnicity than that of issue-based discourse on taking Nigeria seriously.
In institutional reform terms, therefore, we have been witnessing political administrations who have been entrapped in the conception-reality gap in the sense that they have demonstrated some real passion for institutional reforms, given the availability of outstanding ideas, insights and blueprints.
However, the passion lacked deep knowledge that could have enabled the governments to intimately and critically interrogate the binding constraints that limit and undermine institutional reforms in the public sector change space as well as the institutional architecture that the space represents. This failure makes it very impossible for these governments to recognise the devils in the details of development policy execution.
This conception-reality gap is further complicated by the ready default of prebendal culture of primitive accumulation that color elite nationalism. This makes it difficult for any successive administration in Nigeria to take a gamble on development by initiating development bargains around which the Nigerian Project could have taken off efficiently and with the right dose of political will to raise the possibility of success.
From an institutional reform perspective, many of Nigeria’s past governments have moved from electoral victory to administrative performance to unlock the dividends of democratic governance without a thorough knowledge of the binding constraints that requires dismantling within the governance, administrative and institutional dynamics of the Nigerian state and its public service.
Thus, every effort to ignite structural and developmental transformation has remained futile. From the technical angle of policy and development management, therefore, Nigeria has been benchmarking failures through change management initiatives that have been marred by several limitations:poor policy and programme design; poor resource allocation; unstable macroeconomic climate not matched with required policy intelligence and analytics; lack of disciplined and performance managed development policy and programme execution; policy and programme discontinuity; low public service organisational intelligent quotient (IQ) and sub-optimal institutional capability readiness; and the wide-ranging sociological and cultural issues generally summed up as the Nigerian Factor.
However, when the Tinubu administration was inaugurated, His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu wisely opted for performance management as the best means by which to manage the Renewed Hope Agenda. And to achieve this, the president compelled key policy players to sign a performance bond. The administration further appointed Hadiza Bala-Usman to oversee the structural nodal point for implementing and tracking the trajectory of institutional performance.
Whatever the process is called—performance bond, agreement or contract—it signals a political willingness on the part of government to achieve a measure of performance and productivity through a judicious attempt to get the best out of the people, infrastructure, financial and material resources deployed by the MDAs.
This will be achieved through a systematic set of actions that link the Renewed Hope Agenda’s policy goals and national development objectives with the performance and productivity expectations from the MDAs in terms of sector strategies, performance budgeting, improvement plans, targets, data, workplans, key performance indicators, training and capacity development, etc.
And to achieve the utmost productivity, corrective measures in terms of rewards and sanctions are equally put in place when performance improves or falls short.
Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration, Abuja.
