By Tunji Olaopa

Without mincing words, and since independence in 1960, the consecutive governments that have been on the national saddle to transform the Nigerian state have been concerned with reforming the civil service. This came from the recognition that the bureaucracy is a key component of the governance apparatuses for national development and democratic governance.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it bears noting that the civil service is designated in its unfolding history as the hub of policymaking professionalism established and structured to backstop the government in terms of planning, designing, policy advisory, and the execution of policies, projects and programs. In this regard, it therefore serves ultimately as the institutional memory, record repository and structural hub for governance continuity and permanence.

In other words, the civil service is the expert administrative domain for policy intelligence and analysis, regulatory control, project management, national performance and change management; as well as action and policy-engaged research that are meant to activate a governance business model that—in partnership with other institutions and think tanks—can transform governance into a good experience for the citizens.

In Nigeria’s administrative history, the significance of the golden era of the civil service in the 1960s and the 1970s lies in how these core functions were positioned in the system to articulate an effective and efficient institution that was a formidable part of the nascent Nigerian state at the immediate post-independence period. And this is even all the more commendable as the civil service then was just still evolving in terms of organisational development that was heading towards institutionalisation. Quite unfortunately, one of the initial undoing of the service at independence was that its status, relative to other institutions, was somewhat over-rated and over-developed with considerable consequences for its continuing efficiency and functionality. For instance, the thought that the bureaucracy was sufficiently self-sufficient contributed in no small measures to its evident political neglect in terms of government’s commitment and investment in its institutional and professional development beyond wages and remuneration consideration until 1972—an investment that would have consolidated its maturation process.

Furthermore, the increasing success of the system in its early years and up to the mid-1970s generated a sort of structural deafness to institutional reform, especially those deriving from the managerial revolution that was then reshaping public administration and the public service profession. This constitutes, for instance, a key reason why the reform imports of the Udoji Commission report of 1974, as well as the Philips reform of 1988, that could have connected the civil service system with fundamental transformation of its operating systems were rejected. This rejection forced the service to miss out on a trajectory of evolution and growth that connects with the life-cycle of organisational development.

The series of reform agenda that consecutive Nigerian governments have put together have all been concerned with the damage control involved in putting the Nigerian civil service system back on track, and reconnected with its institutionalisation process. From the Udoji to the Ayida reform commissions, and from the National Strategy for Public Service Reform (NSPSR) to the Federal Civil Service Strategy and Implementation Plan (2021-2025), these reform agenda have all been designed with a grand vision of a comprehensive transformation of the administrative system. The critical issue, unfortunately, is that many of the reforms need a firm and fertile administrative ground that permit them to take root and flower so as to achieve what they have been intended to do. A comprehensive reform agenda needs to have the administrative reform basics already in place if it is to succeed. To overlook these fundamental administrative processes and practices that sustained traditional public administration praxis is, to quote Marie Curie the French physicist, to fall into a situation where “one never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.”

The starting point of any formidable reform therefore is to get the basics of administrative reform right. In my critical assessment over the many years I have been researching the system, what ails the civil service system in Nigeria can be summed into four cogent systemic issues: one, the quality of the civil service bureaucratic efficiency; two, the systemic hindrances to service delivery and the weak performance accountability framework; three, the inadequate level of professionalism of civil/public servants to backstop the current status of the system; and four, the lack of political will by the political elite to generate the requisite passion and invest resources, incentives, sacrifices and legacy commitment that keep institutional reform afloat and focused to its logical and administrative end.

Getting the basics right will involve two dimensions, negative and positive. The negative side has to do with confronting the fundamental cause of institutional decline and the terrible consequences on service delivery and hence democratic governance. The starting point for this is to confront, with required measure of political will, the bad politics that the Nigerian state and her political class play with public institutions involved in and with the dynamics of governance. In other words, public institutions like the civil service system are embedded within a political culture that allows the political class to take them as spaces for managing political patronage rather than as instruments for enabling service delivery to the citizens. These bad politics and bad administrative indices that have undermined the effectiveness and efficiency of the system include: (i) elite capture in the public service; (ii) passion without knowledge and conception-reality gaps including a lack of sufficient appreciation that public administration has a theoretical foundation; (iii) overreliance on imported models as part of international donors packages; (iv) weak action research culture that ought to serve as the template for interrogating and adapting received models for adaptation to fit local peculiarities; and many more.

On the positive side, getting the basics right is concerned with rethinking and recalibrating the fundamentals of doing government business. This will involve bringing about reform at the levels of processes, structures, ethics and efficiency. Indeed, a most fundamental aspect of this has to do with changing the orientation of the public servants through a robust competency-driven and people-centred re-professionalisation. The public servant is the emblem of what the public service system represents, especially to the citizens who are supposed to feel the reassuring impacts of the performances of the system. In other words, the importance of the public servant, and her perception by the citizens derives from the fact that she stands in-between the state and the people.

To therefore retrofit, reform and remodel the civil service system as a strategic partner to the government in the short, medium and long terms, we need to cast critical attention to preliminary but critical reform actions which must be adopted if they are not available yet in the reform agenda and their change management strategies and implementation plans. And if these elements are already adopted and embedded into ongoing reform agenda and measures, then they need to be deepened, consolidated and implemented with utmost urgency.

The starting point of this remodelling of reform effort is to give attention to the gatekeeping of the administrative system as a value-based institution that generates specific values and virtues which officers are required to learn as part of the entry-level gatekeeping assessment, induction and career management dynamics. This automatically dovetails into a (re)professionalisation of the core cadres through mechanisms that include posting, performance appraisal, consequence management, mentorship, training and reskilling to beef up the service institutional IQ. This also involves rethinking the pay and remuneration structure that goes a long way in restoring the government to its status as an employer of choice.

At the next level, gatekeeping the professionalism and vocational status of the system also requires, as an immediate corollary, the strengthening of the civil service internal control and democratic accountability mechanisms, and the streamlining of regulations and business procedures. These deepen the rigor that goes into monitoring public procurement and expenditure tracking, and the effectiveness of audit function and parliamentary oversight that support sound financial management. These mechanisms reinforce the open government and the emergence of other transparent processes including participatory budgeting, service charter, right to information (ROI), whistleblowing, etc. One of the further consequences of this reprofiling is optimising the public service to be able to take great advantage of the potentials of the public-private partnership infrastructure to boost service delivery to the citizens. This also feeds into the launch of a new productivity movement that implements a national waste reduction plan, and a new national assets and facility management strategy integrated into a national management culture.

The public service remodelling must also confront the “bureaucratic phenomenon”—the red tapes and rule-based conformism that support bureau-pathology—the structural inability of the system to become efficient and effective. This demands, as an imperative, a cultural adjustment, mental and ethical remodelling programs that target what it means to be a pubic servant who is public-spirited, spiritual, professional and ethically motivated. The ethical and professional deficit of the system is arrested by enforcing values through the establishment of specific institutional ethical boundaries—like the codes of conduct and codes of ethics—that much more rigorously enforce codes that regulate how public servants can administratively and democratically behave, as well as the limit of the ethical choices they can make.

In line with global best practices, the reform remodelling cannot take off as the motivation for efficiency and effectiveness if it fails to activate the transitioning of the public service from the traditional Weberian bureaucracy into a neo-Weberian new public service. But this must be done without dismantling the traditional legal protections and structural dynamics of the due process and embedded controls. This involves a significant reengineering of the standard operating system of the MDAs away from the rigid, rule-driven “I-am-directed” administrative system towards a more hybrid approach that integrates performance-based management and technology-enabled service delivery founded on measurable development outcomes and impacts. This neo-Weberian system prioritises citizens as customers and co-producers of pubic value, and optimises citizen-centric and user-friendly services; and therefore, require the review of administrative law to position the citizen as customer within a rights-based framework with enforceable claims against the state as a duty-bearer.

This transformation of the standard operating system will have a lot to do with the capacity of the public service to implement a technology-enabled governance digital transformation. This will, among other things, strengthen the system’s capacity for evidence-based or data-driven decision-making motivated by data analytics. It will not only establish digital public services that upgrade operational efficiency, but will also mean moving from rule compliance to tracking tangible outputs and outcomes while implementing clear key performance indicators to measure efficiency and impacts. Success will then start to be measured not just by budget performance as legally mandated,it will start to be evaluated against outputs, outcomes and impact metrics inviolably.

Tweaking the operating system enables it to achieve a structural redesign that institutionalise a decentralised authority framework that facilitates managerial discretion so that rigid vertical seniority-based hierarchies are replaced with a flatter structure. This flat structure devolves operational autonomy to frontline managers to be able to deploy resources as long as they meet negotiated performance targets, approved resource utilisation plans and service-level agreements. There will, at the back-end, be a total shift from incremental, historical and line-item expenditures, to funding tied to return on investment, accrual accounting, activity-based costing, performance budgeting and outcomes, with poorly performing activities and services receiving red alerts induced interventions, reallocation of resources, and operational audits.

The Nigerian civil service system can only carry the proof of its institutional reformation if it first bears the burden of getting the basics right. These constitutes the first dose of administrative antibiotics that precedes more comprehensive reform agenda.

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