Chairman of Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof Tunji Olaopa, has explained why the government depends less on the outputs of local researchers, saying they do not contain deep and practical contents that solve specific problems of government.
  
The professor of public administration spoke yesterday, when the Director General of the Nigerian Institute for Social and Economic Research (NISER), Prof Antonia Simbine, paid him a courtesy visit in his office in Abuja.
  
To Olaopa, the interface between the policy space and research industry needs a “recalibration with a significant dose of strategic communication, which requires “a lot of research evangelists with the essential research elite and the public intellectuals and the press.”
  
He noted that NISER was deployed by policy experts to create seminal conversations to set the tone for development. He, however, lamented that he had  observed at a personal level and based  on his “experience of over three decades and the significant expertise built in the course of working on international development projects, and much later when he rose to senior positions in the civil service, that each time he led major development projects or policy design works that required deep analytics, most reliable allies were the foreign development agencies, who alone appreciate the range of expertise and knowledge that such efforts require and are ever willing to fund them.”
  
He said that until lately when some  foundations were rising to the challenge, “the unfortunate reality  in  the policy space  was that local capacities and institutional capabilities of our research institutions, think tanks, and experts have not been systematically built and harnessed, thereby  making our experts’ output to be gradually irrelevant and consigned to publication and for individual  promotion and professional development and not as input into the public policy making process.”
  
According to him, the research agenda of national research centres and local experts are generally dominated by themes of concern to external partners, who are the major funders of international research. 
  
“This has to do, on one hand, with what has been globally recognised as African contribution to global research and funding being abysmally infinitesimal and on the other hand, it has to do with the level of research relevance, with policy researchers complaining that their works are not being used by government. It also explains why the bulk of useful developmental statistics are funded by foreign development agencies. It is the reason that some scholars think that some African countries do not understand what development is all about.”

Earlier, Prof Simbine had explained that her visit was to congratulate Olaopa on his appointment as the chairman of FCSC and to express the readiness of NISER for collaboration with the commission in areas such as research and training.