By Tunji Olaopa

In an earlier reflection I titled “Deepening Policy Intelligence in Government: Politicians and Technocrats as Strategic Partners,” I argued that one solid means by which the policy function of government can be deepened and consolidated is through a structural and institutional framework that reinvent the town-and-gown partnership model that allows government to engage in strategic relationship with technocrats and the non-governmental base to spark policy intelligence to inform the efforts at development management, economic growth and democratic governance of the Nigerian state.

The strategic partnership will be benchmarked around global best and smart practices that have become definitive of high-performing economies around the world today. In the United States and the United Kingdom, I highlighted the relationship between the government and the Rand Corporation, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and so many others.

Such collaborative endeavours and partnerships are not usually formal and legally binding relationships. On the contrary, they are initiated informally or semi-informally as a symbiotic conduit or arrangements for high-level political and policy dialogues and discourses that enable the cross-fertilisation of ideas, research findings, outputs, technical expertise, paradigms and critical insights around best practices and governmental/organisational experiences on policy formation and implementation.

The partnerships, therefore, make possible policy intelligence, its development, management and evaluation, as well as constituting a staff revolving door for the exchange of manpower, ideas, innovation and practices. They position government officials, industrial experts, academics and technocrats as the significant players in the governance space for generating relevance and critical contributions that push the economy to its cutting edge of global competitiveness.

In this piece, I want to push the argument for this partnership even further with concrete national and global examples that should serve as the benchmark of experience and institutional frameworks for grounding the ongoing efforts at achieving policy intelligence for the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration.

Beyond the technocrats that are usually found in the corridors of government, the critical partnership framework informs a governance space that is enlarged toachieve a distributed leadership dynamic which facilitates the crucial and high-powered interaction and engagement between the government ad bureaucrats o the one hand, and on the others, nongovernmental and nonstate agents and agencies, captains of industries, industrial experts, civil society organisations, policy experts, subjects specialists, and more.

This is the administrative arrangement that catapulted post-Second World War Japan from a war-ravaged and devastated economy to a global economic power in a few years. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought Japan to its feet, the country braced for a post-war reconstruction that would have been daunting and unachievable for any other country. Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) was at the forefront of the policy move for economic and developmental transformation. How did Japan proceed? What steps led to the stature of Japan as a development powerhouse today? The first step initiated by the MITI was the establishment of a strategic ‘deliberation council” that was meant to be the springboard network and collaborative system for brainstorming around information sharing, policy consensus, policy intelligence and the co-creation of ideas paradigms, blueprints and frameworks that will throw up roadmaps to take Japan out of the war devastation.

This system enabled MITI to create and enable several councils made up of government, academia, industry, private policy specialists and experts. The primary essence of the councils was to serve as the official space for interrogating national and sectoral policies and initiatives, sharing critical information and knowledge, and building policy intelligence and consensus.

The end of the discourses and brainstorming was to transform policy initiatives and consensus into research and development (R&D) that leveraged government support and incentives for industries and the private sector to invest in high-risk development projects and programmes, which fed into the national development policy architecture. The methodology MITI initiated to ground this national development initiative was three-pronged.

Japan initiated a policy of trade expansion that was moderated by strict regulation that was close to economic protectionism and a key policy effort that stimulated private sector growth. With this arrangement, MITI initiated a non-socialist ideological framework that became a one-stop system for orienting policy intelligence and development insights. Unlike the centrally planned economies, MITI’s intervention was not meant to replace but support market mechanisms by gathering verified official data that is then deployed in ways that allow for deep industrial knowledge that Japanese firms could tap into for economic growth.

This arrangement makes the conversation between theoretical knowledge and practical policy processes possible in the articulation of policy design and change management that benefited key economic players, and made the MITI the site for a non-legal, informal and free policy and research data advisory for firms involved in the aspiration of Japan to become a globally competitive economy.

The above methodological framework that highlights Japan’s policy orientation was backstopped by thechange management dynamics that rested on two strategic plans to jumpstart a productivity revolutionthat would catapult Japan beyond its crippling state after the war. The first key underlying factor for the change management was the keiretsu principle or model. Before the war, Japan operated on the zaibatsu model, which was a family-oriented monopoly that grounded Japan’s industrialisation for centuries.

This was displaced by the keiretsu—the Japanese word for system or a group of enterprises—model that organises firms, enterprises and companies around a framework of interlocking shareholding relationships that enable the businesses to withstand market fluctuations. Within the MITI framework, the keiretsu model was transformed into a productivity principle that brought togetherJapan’s manufacturers, suppliers, bankers, industries and so on within a unique national frame of economic cooperation.

The MITI further iterated this keiretsu model to capacitate the Japanese productivity growth trajectory by eliciting the inflow of critical experts and specialists who could help Japan calibrate the nexus between economic growth, productivity, development and performance. Out of the significant trio of Joseph Duran, Edward Deming and Armand Feigenbaum, the contributions of Deming are instructive. Regarded as a key figure in the American quality movement, Edward Deming was a singular figure in shifting Japan’s focus away from low quality to a world-class manufacturing base. His argument is founded on the significance of quality, system and data-driven decision-making process. Data is very fundamental in reducing the incidence of variations in how systems work to achieve efficiency.

For him, therefore, it is the system design and function that are key to productivity and quality rather than workers’ performance. In a series of seminars delivered to the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE), between July and August 1950, Deming enunciated the management philosophybehind what he called the “Statistical Product Quality Administration”, which taught, among other insights, the need to build quality into a product rather than depending on quality inspection. This crucial quality management point is meant to lead to better designs for products that will, in turn, enhance product testing in the workplace and a competitive presence in the global market.

This quality management framework led to the second change management dynamic that Japan introduced after the war. Japan also ensured that enforcing workplace quality control, especially in the public service, would, in turn, ensure that the public service itself became capacity-ready to facilitate an efficient service delivery to the Japanese public. This is where the Deming management philosophy became very critical in transforming the workplace as the engine room for the productivity revolution that took Japan from a war wreck to a competitive economy.

The key insight in this historical example of the Japanese economic miracle is that any institutional reform must be wary of a pure technicist approach that makes the reform of the civil service a mere technical matter. On the contrary, the MITI project provided a framework where technical expertise, cultural change, attitudinal transformation and Japanese culture played a key role in shifting the Japanese manufacturing sector from a low-quality to a high-quality sector.

This is a worthy lesson for the ongoing efforts to generate policy intelligence through building up high-power policy-research partnerships that enable the Tinubu administration to efficiently elevate its policy function for the benefit of democratic governance. The partnership is meant to achieve the state’s aspiration for critical capacity building, evidence-based policy intelligence and the establishment of functional R&D that makes innovative technologies available to the public.

The collaborative partnershipis facilitated by personnel exchange and secondment that allows government officials, functionaries and bureaucrats to be seconded to universities and research institutes while academics are also placed within government sectors, agencies and departments. This twinning initiative facilitates knowledge transfer and a town-gown conversation that brings theories and practices into mutual engagements for governance improvement. Outside of this collaborative partnership through the twinning model, other partnership models are equally possible. One, the government itself could establish an in-house think tank that carries out internal brainstorming on crucial policy matters.

Olaopa is Chairman Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration.

Two, the government could outsource the brainstorming and policy intelligence function to an academic think tank that would then deliver high-quality and unbiased research-based policy evidence to the government. Third, there could also be a partnership hub that allows the government and academics alike to draw on policy evidence in an ongoing collaboration.

The Nigerian administrative history also delivers several critical examples that iterate these partnership models in critical ways. In the immediate post-independent period of the functioning of the regional civil service, Chief Simeon Adebo’s A-Club, which later transformed into the Regional Economic Planning Advisory Committee, was established as a brainstorming hub that drew the University of Ibadan into the policy intelligence function of the Western Region Government. There was also the Planning Office established during the Gowon administration and as a backstop for the super permanent secretaries to administratively think Nigeria through the civil war. Later came the Professor Ojetunji Aboyade-led Presidential Advisory Committee (PAC) during the IBB era, and the National Economic Intelligence Committee, led by Professor Sam Aluko, under the Abacha era. In recent times, the partnership between government and nonstate actors has been facilitated by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG).

The Nigerian government also benefits from the policy research and endeavours of the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), especially its annually themed Senior Executive Course (SEC) where the government is allowed to choose a critical theme that would be researched and presented to the government at the end of the course.

The implication for the Nigerian government is that the template for kickstarting a robust and efficient partnership for generating a formidable evidence-based policy intelligence that would orient the ongoing Renewed Hope Agenda of the administration is already available. NIPSS. For example, the preeminent think tank can be reformed to make it more efficient in facilitating policy research and partnerships with universities and other research institutes.

And the universities and research institutes could also be appropriated into intermediary hubs for generating research inputs into the policy process of the Nigerian state. To restate the truism: good democratic governance is a function of deeply researched and deepened policy intelligence that benefits from a robust policy-research partnership.