Introduction
The concept of the ‘devil’ in the title of this article is not a mistake. The devil has been blamed for a whole lot of sins in the human social dynamics. Apart from the purely theological understanding of the devil and his eternal attempt to make mankind fail, human beings have also found some other crimes for the devil. Thus, we talk of the ‘printer’s devil’ being mischievously responsible for all kinds of embarrassing typographical errors. Public administration also comes with its own special devil — and this devil works with what is called the execution trap. This refers to the lack of attention to the complex details involved in bringing a development agenda policies and programmes from their beautiful conception through an often thorny reality to completion, dutiful management and desired development outcomes or democratic dividends. Thus, the public service in Nigeria will constantly fail to make the move from reform to performance in the governance framework if the said implementation ‘devil’ is not thoroughly exorcised.

Two significances of the public service, especially in this period of change will lend credence to the need for administrative exorcism. One reason is that the public service is at the forefront of delivering the concrete socio-economic dividends of democracy to the people as the face of government in service delivery. Democracy and democratic governance therefore becomes meaningless if there is no effective and efficient civil service to translate government policies into infrastructural components the citizens can identify with. The second reason is more specific and immediate: Nigeria is in its season of change; and change is delivered from the danger of a mere sloganeering only if it translates into stable electricity, socio-economic empowerment, tangible employments, vigilant security, technological breakthroughs, reliable infrastructure, and so on. Democracy is therefore not an end in itself; its rightful end is good governance. And good governance is an impossibility if change does not happen, and quickly too, to the public service in Nigeria.

I therefore want to suggest that the change agenda of President Muhammadu Buhari, to all intents and purposes, be seen largely as a development agenda. And its proper locus of operation and execution is the Nigerian Civil Service. But here comes the paradox: the civil service is an agent of change that cannot function properly unless it is the first to undergo the painful but necessary administrative change and transformation that is required for a good governance dynamics to take off.
Diagnosing Policy and Reform Failures

‘Half the failures in life,’ according to Julius Hare, the British cleric, ‘arise from pulling in one’s horse as he is leaping.’ This is all so true because it takes a terrible decision to rein in a sturdy and enthusiastic horse that is rearing to leap beyond an obstacle. The dynamics of development in Nigeria can never be diagnosed as lacking in visions, ideas, strategies, or reform plans which for me constitute 15% of the challenge. Nigeria’s development predicament can be located squarely in the terrible mix of decisional/policy failure and execution trap which creates a huge deleterious gap between policy intentions and development outcomes and which constitute 85% of the challenge. In sum therefore, the challenge of PMB’s change agenda is wholly interpretable in development terms—it is the totality of the state capacity to carry policy and programmes from conception to implementation and sustainable management of the policy to deliver structurally transforming outcomes.

Development plans are often fast-tracked through a vigilant reform programmes, especially directed at the public service which constitutes the engine room of any governmental capacity to deliver development outcomes. Nigeria has been reforming since it became independent in 1960. Its administrative institutions, especially the Nigerian Civil Service, have been the focus of several determined reform effort to transform their service delivery capacity. Yet, the discrepancy between the many reforms and the little development outcomes has been so glaring in Nigeria’s fifty five years of independence. At best, all the reforms before 1974 and even after until 1999 have been implemented half-heartedly (largely a function of a mix of conception-reality gap and passion without knowledge – a lack of acknowledgement that public administration reform may not be rocket science but has a theoretical foundation) with the simple result that they were only able to move Nigeria hesitantly forward and upward in the development ladder. The metaphor of hesitancy was derived from the empirical study of the reform dynamics of 29 African states conducted by Prof. Adamolekun in 2005. It simply means that since independence, Nigeria has barely moved forward in development terms even though its administrative history is marked by rigorously conceived reform blueprints.

Nigeria has been variously tagged as either a fragile, failing or a failed state. In administrative terms, governance failure can be attributed to a combination of decisional, policy and administrative dynamics which manifest at four (4) levels: (i) failure to anticipate problem before it surfaced; (ii) failure to see problem for what it is when it surfaced; (iii) the tendency to ignore the problem even when properly perceived; and (iv) failure of attempts to resolve the problem. From this template of half-hearted devotion to policy and programmes execution and hesitant reform effort, it is a short step to the World Bank Review which paints a dismal statistical picture of development programmes implementation performance in Africa; namely: 29% of reforms ever got completed; 45% of on-going reform projects are rated unsatisfactory; and 6% of these reforms usually get cancelled. In summary, therefore, there is a decisional failure and execution trap in development management which create gaps between political intentions to ‘doing the right things’ and public service capability readiness ‘to doing it right’ which has historically constrained state capacity to carry policy from conception to implementation in manner that culminates in significant democratic dividends or development outcomes.
Reviewing Capacities: Between the State and the Public Service

Understanding why administrative reform has been either half-hearted or has outrightly failed in Nigeria requires paying adequate attention to two levels of analysis — the character of the state and its capacity to push change and transformation; and the capability readiness of the civil service to facilitate that governance change. These two levels of understanding governance reforms are crucial because the fate of the state and its public service are intertwined — they succeed or fail together. If this is so, then what should we know about the Nigerian state and its capacity to facilitate reform and governance?

The fundamental question here is: Is the Nigerian state and its many institutions developmental, enabling or failing? The extent to which a government is one rather than the other depends largely on the extent to which it has been able to gain and harness the loyal energies of the people. Norman Tebbit, the British politician, fundamentally remarked that ‘People are not willing to be governed by those who do not speak their language.’ And their language is that of good governance and democratic dividends. The citizens want to feel the positive effects of government’s policies on their lives, families, jobs and future prospects. Good policies are what legitimise the government in the eyes of its people.

The Nigerian state can therefore be interrogated on the basis of the four basic functions of any state: the security, policy making and management, service delivery, and regulatory functions. At the root of government performance rating, national development outcome and public perception resides the whole issue of how the state performs these four core functions. Since its independence in 1960, successive Nigerian governments have been struggling with achieving a stable legitimate profile which can facilitate harnessing the patriotic energies of the people and channelling them into developmental projects. Political legitimacy is strictly a function of a government’s governance profile. If good governance is wrapped in high-sounding macroeconomic terms that cannot be translated into specific indices that affect the dynamics of poverty and misery in the land, then government performance becomes a meaningless one in democratic context.

For example, Nigeria’s average GDP growth rate has been celebrated by the world economic institutions because it shows a steady increase from 5.1% in 2011 to 7.4% in 2013. Yet, it is not yet Uhuru because Nigerians do not have any concrete reasons to celebrate yet. Thus, the language of macroeconomic success has not been translated into the language of everyday development which Nigerians recognize. There are two indicators that distort Nigerians’ perception of the Nigerian state as a welfare, and hence a caring, state. The first is the increasing income differentials between the rich and the poor Nigerians. in a country (the proverbial conflict between the rich man and Lazarus) where the poorest 20% of Nigerians earn 4.4% while the richest 20% earn 54%, then there is bound to be a huge discrepancy between what government thinks it is doing and what the people thinks it is doing. The second indicator of what Nigerians consider as the constant insensitivity of the government derives from the growing level of unemployment that has worsened existential matters for most Nigerians especially the youths who constitute the bulk of the population.

The other side of the governance reform dynamics falls derives from understanding the capacity of the public service itself to translate government policies into concrete infrastructural and development outcomes through a sustained commitment to unravelling the complexity of reform execution. Unfortunately, one gross mistake often replicated by policy makers is the willingness to invest much energy and much more resources on articulating national visions, development plans and strategies but paying scant attention to the public service capacity readiness to implement the vision. In the final analysis, those visions invariably become hallucination and ultimately doomed before an implementation time table is even fashioned and rolled out. On the contrary, the capability readiness of the public service stands as the key between the success or the failure of any change agenda.

We have made the point earlier that the character of the state reflects positively or negatively on the capacity of its public service to efficiently or effectively perform its governance duties. In the case of the Nigerian public service, the character of the Nigerian state negatively affects the professionalism of the public service and its capacity to be exemplar of cherished values. Since the state is perceived as irresponsible and illegitimate in popular perception, then civil servants become inevitably political rather than professionally managerial. The ultimate implication of this is not only that the civil service capability readiness gets compromised, but also that development management and reforms keeps getting bogged down in multiple administrative dysfunctions and compromises. But beyond the lamentation of the loss of professionalism of the civil servants and the desecration of the time-honoured and noble ethos of the administrative vocation is the deep systemic issues that signal the critical reduction in the public service performance quotient. This performance predicament is indicated by such problems like (a) input-process oriented business model that is blind to outputs and outcomes; (b) skills and competency gaps; (c) lack of clarity on actions required to execute national plan; (d) poor alignment between national plans, sectoral activities and departmental/unit programmes; (e) misplaced policy priorities and resource allocation; (f) unclear accountabilities for execution; (g) inadequate performance monitoring, reporting and appraisal; (h) organizational silos and culture blocking of execution; and (i) undefined rewards and sanctions operated within a pay structure that is only capable of attracting 100 mediocre where 15 experts would do.

If this is the present institutional situation of the public service in Nigeria, nothing can be gained by further lamenting that systemic predicament. ‘The riddle does not exist,’ says Ludwig Wittgenstein, the German philosopher. ‘If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.’ This is the question: How can we begin to re-capacitate the public service as an efficient and performing institution which can effectively initiate the governance trajectory that leads from reform to performance?
Doing Things Right/Doing the Right Things: The New Professional Managers

For the public service to fulfill its mandate as the engine room of the Nigerian state and its development objectives, especially as enshrined in the Nigerian Constitution, it must satisfy the imperative of performance which requires that it must itself face a rigorous programme of reforms that will radically increase its performance quotient through a rejigging of its capability readiness profile. There is therefore a very simple administrative mechanism that could help us put the reform of the public service in perspective. It involves a sustained dynamics of re-engineering the public service management system into performance-oriented, technology-enabled and social compact or accountable business model. We cannot get change to happen when we are riding against the tide with the engine of a Beatle car when a Jet engine is required. This implies that there is a need to rethink the ways and manners in which government business is carried out if the public service is to become more strategic and less bureaucratic in service delivery.

The graphic manner in which to conceive the reform is to see it as an attempt to balance between ‘doing things right’ and ‘doing the right things.’ The most fundamental core of achieving such an administrative balance is the emergence of a critical mass of public manager that will handle and anchor the change momentum around the dynamics of what I have called the 3Ps—professionalism, performance and productivity. This intelligent but critical change team will be saddled, in the short-term, with the task of getting the basics of the MDAs’ management system right by defining their constraints and mobilizing the right kind of technical support to get the engine of government running while they are fixing the systemic problems. This would entail reform of on-going reforms since 2003 through their impact assessment to enable their deepening, redesign or outright cancellation. The change in the main would entail implementing a two-track imperative as the first order of business. The first will be to oversee the winding up of the old bureaucratic model that ensures that the public service is crippled by its own bureau-pathology that rewards trained incapacity rather than administrative diligence and creativity. This would also require that we rethink the intellectual base of skills and competencies for running the business of government, through a shift from a largely generalist to more specialized competency framework. The second complementary responsibility will involve setting up a new human resource architecture, built around the Senior Executive Service and a recalibrated career path that replaces the current Weberian hierarchical job-in-person cadres system that will give the public service a strategic corps of the highest policy intelligence possible to carry out its governance function.

The dynamics of recruitment into the new public service, for instance, will be strict and competitive but with the first option of entry given to serving career officers and professionals. These new professionals, whether already serving or entirely new, will be assessed based on their capacity to meet the three minimum requirements of working in the envisaged new public service in Nigeria. These administrative requirements are (i) public spiritedness—the virtue that comes from seeing the public service as a spiritual calling, a mandate to serve the public even to the detriment of one’s own gratification; (b) professionalism—the specific range of occupational code of ethics and conduct that regulates the activities of the professional civil servants; and (c) leadership—the core administrative element that requires that civil servants must be more than administrators or even managers in handling the dynamics of the Nigerian public service as well as the complexity of reforming it by being change agent committed to the agenda of instituting a new productivity paradigm in the economy.

Indeed, it is this leadership quality of a professional and public spirited public servant that can enable him/her to differentiate and ultimate reach an administrative balance between ‘doing things right’ and ‘doing the right things.’ On the one hand, doing things right will involve several administrative imperatives—commencing the implementation of the change agenda with a game plan; determining the pressure points in the governance space while identifying and assembling the strategic change team required; bonding the change team to become change champions through retreats and signing of social compact and performance agreements; conducting capability reviews of MDAs as hub of change implementation to articulate performance improvement plans and a public service reform programme hinged around a policy/performance/resources/capacity/process change framework. On the other hand, however, doing the right thing takes the urgency of administrative transformation a step deeper and further. It derives from an effective strategic planning that is circumscribed by the imperative of clarifying vision or the change programme, purpose and direction for the public service. In other words, it becomes critical for the administrative leadership to articulate a better business planning praxis synchronized to an implementable vision and driven by a dynamic strategy that incorporates needs assessment and stakeholder participation to strengthen the ownership of the reform. Doing the right thing ultimately involves fast-tracking the evolution of a performance management system that privileges the deployment of policy intelligence with professionally manned departments of planning, research and statistics as the policy hub armed with strategic/system thinking competence, problem-solving skills, contingency planning and future research capacity.
Conclusion

The change agenda of PMB does not require less than a full-scale assault aimed at jumpstarting the performance profile of the public service and its capacity to deliver goods and services to Nigerians. This can only be done through the determination to sustain the reform trajectory from conception to a successful implementation. Leadership counts in this herculean governance responsibility. And that, to me, is what change essentially requires—a leadership dynamics that combine resilience and doggedness in facilitating the foundation of good governance for Nigerians who have been yearning for far too long.

Dr. Olaopa is Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Communication Technology, presented this paper at the Nigeria Economic Summit in Abuja.
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