By Tunji Olaopa

It has now become a key analytical template that in diagnosing what ails the African state, we must talk about the state’s struggle with development that could energise democratic governance. The idea of democracy and good (democratic) governance is the most significant conceptual framework for understanding the contract that the citizens have with their governments to make their lives more meaningful and to be critically empowered for well-being.

And it has also become a diagnostic axiom that African development cannot even take off outside of the capability readiness of the public administration system and its civil services to carry the burden of good governance. And yet, since independence happened for many African states in the 1960s, there have been lots of concerted attempts at reforming the civil service to become optimally functional in carrying out developmental objectives. This has gone side by side with the larger aim of making the African state developmental.

One crucial dimension of transforming public administration and the public service since the 1970s has been the urgency of deepening the reform efforts with the need for performance management. In Nigeria for example, 1974 was a watershed in this regard with the submission of the Udoji Commission Report that essentially insisted that the Nigerian government must fast track its development aspirations through grounding the civil service in the imperatives of managerialism, especially the key idea of performance management.

However, and without demeaning the valiant efforts of many African governments so far, progress has not been sufficiently coherent and consistent to qualitatively change the profile of African countries as genuinely developmental.

This is why the recent concern of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UN-ECA) with performance contracting on the continent is a most timely and fundamental one. By facilitating a study of five African countries—Morocco, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and Namibia—and their performance contracting experiences, the UNECA has not only demonstrated a cogent understanding of one of the continent’s development malaises, it has also provided a most useful baseline with which to interrogate the significance of performance contract or performance agreementor performance bond, whatever it is called; as an important public sector reform instrument for strengthening managerial and democratic accountability; for improving institutional performance; and for ensuring that government policies translate into meaningful infrastructural development and service delivery outcomes for citizens.

The commissioned study, and its findings across the five countries regarding the varying level of implementation of performance contracting, helps us to make some level of deductions that enable useful diagnosis, prospecting and forecasting on the way forward for the civil service systems on the continent. This is especially significant as a learning curve for other African countries that are still hesitant or gyrating in their transition from the heavily bureau-pathological old Weberian public administration to the more efficient and results-based managerial tradition which performance contracting in theory enables.

When the managerial revolution in public administration commenced, the target of its radical reforms was the traditional Weberian public administration and the structure of the public service that was oriented on rules, hierarchies and inputs-motivated processes. The Weberian system is a slow-moving and slow-acting one that is characterised by an “I-am-directed” modality that ensures that public servants are more interested in filling up the work space and managing the political dimensions of career progression than in performance efficiency.

The Weberian administrative framework, without a seminal attempt to deconstruct its value foundation, became a bureaucratic paradigm that engendered a bureaucratic political imperative that has contributed to the trajectory of underdevelopment of African countries. The bureaucratic culture acquired by the public service eventually became counterproductive to the task of facilitating national development and good governance for African states.

The New Public Management (NPM) framework intervenes at the point of the performance inefficiencies of the Weberian bureaucratic model to facilitate a rehabilitation of its service delivery modalities. And it does this by assessing the performance profile in the public sector through the prism of private sector achievements in delivering public goods. The NPM principles were therefore meant to modernise the traditional bureaucracy by making it more professional, efficient, and citizen-centered.

In other words, the principles of managerialism essentially emphasise the application of business-oriented management techniques, with the aim of achieving particular results that can be measured by pushing the public service to adopt and adapt quasi-market structures and principles to achieve market-driven efficiency.

The idea of performance contracting therefore becomes a very fundamental reform imperative that is located at the very core of managerialism because it serves as the primary mechanism deployed by governments for shifting public administration from a focus on rigid processes to a focus on measurable results.

And so, given that performance management has made its way into the global best practices for rethinking the efficiency of the public service system, it becomes a reform imperative—as the UN-ECA study highlights—that must be figured into the overall search for performance efficiency and productivity of the civil service. This implies that many African states immediately picked up on performance contracting as a key part of their reform programs for the civil service systems.

However, despite the many reform efforts and concessions to the need for performance management system, there are subsisting and deepening limiting factors that keep reoccurring as a result of the Weberian bureau-pathology of the system. These include limited managerial autonomy, weak monitoring and evaluation systems, archaic internal managerial control and accountability mechanisms, a culture of planning without facts or unreliable data and statistics, fragmented intra- and inter-departmental responsibilities and coordination, to name just a few.

All these institutional and structural challenges speak to the worries of Allen Schick, the professor of political science, in a 1998 paper which warns about the ensuing temptation that developing countries had to adopt the NPM reforms and achievements of New Zealand.

For him, New Zealand was able to surge forward with the NPM because of the pre-existing and deeply rooted Weberian baseline of financial integrity, rule of law, professional meritocracy, and a strong public service ethos which many African states lack. It seems to me that the UN-ECA study of five African countries bears out the warning that developing nations should not blindly emulate the operationalisation of the NPM innovation and reform frameworks, especially with regard to performance contracting.

Institutionalising performance contracting therefore faces many challenges that must be resolved to facilitate a seamless integration into the systems. First is the need to get the basics right in terms of reforms. For example, once a public manager signs a performance bond, what flexibility or managerial discretion does she have to reset the department or agencies through the leverage that control over the management of resources and such decentralised powers enables in order to drive performance? This is a key query given the central NPM principle of decentralised authority which “let managers manage resources” principle implies in order for managers to be held accountable for the contract they signed.This will involve the urgent need to introduce performance-based budgeting, concretising agencies autonomy with revenue retention, including waiver for funds virement flexibility, etc.

Second, if attention is not given to the backend of the Weberian model to rejig its rules-based, compliance-rooted, seniority, hierarchical and centralised processes, it becomes very difficult to enforce performance contracts and activate rewards and sanctions that compel poorly performing administrators and managers to resign. This in itself creates many problems, like what turnover rate of staff loss will mean for the government that has lost its status as an employer of choice especially in terms of pay and compensation package and motivation, or how performance contracting would be factored into the context of the highly adversarial industrial relations dynamics that seek to protect workers against establishment policies?

Three other hurdles that undermine the institutionalisation of performance contracting are apposite.

There is the ‘gaming phenomenon” which speaks to the practice of MDAs selecting easily achievable low-hanging targets, simply as administrative roadshow. Unfortunately, however the positive gains, as what works, are hardly scaled-up nor mainstreamed to alter systems and processes that drive core service delivery operations.

There is also the pervasive data manipulation tendency where MDAs sometimes prioritise the need to “make the numbers look good” over fixing underlying operation failures which is often the trickier and more challenging responsibility. And lastly, the frameworks for the enforcement of penalties to deal with failures to meet contract targets is usually weak and, where it is strong, usually politicised. This trust deficit invariably makes managers to treat performance contracting as a bureaucratic compliance routine, rather than a living reform dynamic.

Within the structural parameters of the MDAs themselves, there is the need to not underestimate the process of disaggregating large and monolithic departments and agencies into autonomous and specialised agencies.

If not properly managed, the bottleneck that will be created will turn out to be messy especially in terms of role redefinition required to separate policy-making functions (usually retained in central departments) from policy implementation functions (decentralised to autonomous agencies).

This is compounded by other issues associated with the dynamics of transferring operational, financial, and personnel decision-making powers to agencies and the nitty gritty of activating contingent legal instruments.

How do we move forward beyond these challenges of institutionalising performance contracting as a critical reform imperative for African civil service systems? The starting point must be the realisation that performance contracting is not a standalone administrative dynamic but rather operates within a larger performance management-rooted governance and institutional reform program. One implication of this is that it cannot be considered to be a mere add-on to the overall reform process. It cannot, in other words, be treated administratively as a part of a mere annual compliance exercise. Neither can its success be judged as a result of the number of contracts signed or targets reported as achieved.

Locating it within the context of performance management system implies connecting it with national priorities, institutional objectives, resource allocation, managerial responsibility, measurable outcomes, and citizen experience.

One of the central cores of performance contracting as a reform imperative is to make performance citizen-centered. This demands that its elements must transcend the usual and formal bureaucratic managerial processes and opaque targets to encompass more concrete institutional understanding of public value that are delivered to the citizens as a measurable dimension of democratic governance. Thus, performance contracts cannot be a compliance-driven “check-the-box” assessment. On the contrary, it must be treated as a framework for continuous learning, incremental improvement rather than rigid punitive measures. Its institutionalisation must therefore be strengthened with clear legal instruments that will undermine its politicisation as well as foreclosing the chances of its hasty dismantling by change-averse protectors of the status quo. It is when performance contracting is supported by required measures of political commitment, institutional capacity, reliable data, operational flexibility and continuous dialogue that it becomesa powerful instrument for the overall performance effectiveness of the government and its public service.

And all this brings us back to the yeoman effort of UN-ECA. What the UN-ECA has done is to put its finger on a critical defining pressure point that is potentially a game changer if it can be turned into a movement. To do this requires that the institution has to do more than the pilot study. Thus, and in collaboration with its networks of development partners, UN-ECA needs to conduct a baseline study to profile African countries based on agreed standard and basic elements of success which will help each country to locate itself in a spectrum of performance from low to high. Two, it needs to hold a few more high-level workshops to build enlarged mass of champions across Africa. In this regard, it might be helpful if UN-ECA can latch on to earlier work done by the Conference of African Ministers of Public/Civil Service (CAMPS) that led to the development of a management guide for performance management system in Africa through the African Union Commission (AUC). Lastly, it will be useful to designate a few centres of excellence for capacity building and training for public managers and policy makers across Africa.

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Prof. Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission. He delivered this paper at the United Nations Commission for Africa (UN-ECA) High-Level Workshop on ‘Enhancing Public Accountability and Service delivery through Performance Contracts in Africa’ held in Gaborone, Botswana, recently.