By opting for the performance management system, the Tinubu administration has keyed into a global best practice. From Florence Nightingale’s effort, in 1861, to instigate the publication of medical statistics in London hospitals and the impact of this on the British civil service, to F.W. Taylor’s scientific management method that facilitated process improvements on factory floors, performance management has come a long way.
By the time colonial rule was over and Nigeria had keyed into the inherited administrative traditions of the British civil service system, Nigeria had adopted the formal personality-based assessment models, the most popular of which is the annual performance evaluation report (APER) form. Unfortunately, this template would soon degenerate into oblivion because of its flaws bordering on its subjective limitations.
And high-performing civil service systems across the world would later revise and supplement it by other rating instruments and scales, including psychometrics, 360-degree peer review feedback, Management by Objectives (MBO), critical incident techniques, behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS), assessment centers, project-based appraisals, self-assessments, competency-based reviews, narrative appraisals, and many more.
For the Nigerian civil service system, the Udoji Commission report recommended and introduced the planning, programming, budgeting system (PPBS), that ensured that MDAs and their performances were framed in terms of programmesand strategies rather than line items. The Commission also introduced the management by objectives (MBO), and later the zero-based budgeting.
At the global level, and under the prodding of the new public management, performance management planning and implementation would soon be enriched and upgraded at many critical and technical points to demonstrate the complexity of measuring performance in an increasingly complex administrative world. The Kaplan and Norton Balanced Scorecard (BSC) became significant in the public sector because of its revolutionary shifting of performance scorecard away from the traditional focus on the very narrow financial considerations to a broader and more comprehensive assessment founded on four variables—financial, customer, innovation/growth, and internal processes. This has been followed by other performance management features, from value for money audit and service delivery units to performance-based pay and sanction and citizens charter.
Despite the perspicacity of the Tinubu administration in opting for the implementation of performance management system, there is still a fundamental question an institutional reformer is forced to ask. Are the MDAs’ structural, procedural and institutional dynamics capability ready for the performance-oriented change process? Are they prepared to shoulder the burden of performance management? Why, despite our best reform efforts, has it appeared as if the civil service system is just gyrating on an axis without any appreciable progress? The performance management dynamic of the civil service system in Nigeria has been dominated by the fixation with the APER template and some underlying assumptions. These have to be deconstructed to even begin to reinvent the performance management system that will anchor the Renewed Hope Agenda.
First, therefore, we need to make it very clear that staff performance evaluation that the APER takes care of, is not the same thing as performance management. The annual performance appraisal is merely a one-off evaluation criterion which barely add any value to a staff’s promotion score. It is therefore just a key but not too significant component of performance management.
On the contrary, performance transcends staff appraisal. It involves a continuous cycle of monitoring and reporting of performance against certain set targets, goals, and objectives. To foreground performance as the basis for evaluating the MDAs, the Renewed Hope Agenda has to concretize a performance system that instigate performance monitoring, evaluation and reporting based on (a) whether or not the MDA is doing what it is supposed to do in terms of outputs, impacts and outcomes; (b) articulate gap identification in the MDAs that enables them not only to evaluate and learn but also to improve their performance; and (c) institute a reward and sanction system as a basis for rewarding high performance, and sanctioning low performance.
As a paradigmatic shift away from the traditional Weberian and “I-am-directed” bureaucratic system, performance management transcends technical and technocratic design, roll-out and training, and speaks rather to the necessity of transforming work and workplace culture, behavior and attitude in ways that emphasize outputs through the baselining of quality information and data system with the capacity to produce high-quality data in timely manner. This then enables the MDAs to develop strategic plans, like the medium-term sector strategy (MTSS) which stipulate quantitatively measurable goals, objectives, performance indicators and how they are to me achieved.
To therefore concretize the firm resolve of the Tinubu administration to frog leap the civil service system into an efficient mode through the adoption of the performance management system, more is required. The performance system must first be squared with the existing dynamics of technology, capacity, governance and technology. It is not just sufficient to introduce the system in a discrete manner that fails to cohere with the existing overall civil service limitations and possibilities in terms of structures and institutions.
Here, the Offices of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (OHCSF) and States Heads of Service will need to play a crucial role as nodal points in coordinating the strengthening of the monitoring and compliance dimensions of the performance management system in the central personnel agencies. This will facilitate not only the institutionalisation of performance as an accountability tool, but also the necessity of unifying its dynamics and procedures across the MDAs.
The second most significant step in the institutionalising of the performance management system is the need to integrate it with the existing and reformed component of the human resource management. This will be two-sided. On the one hand, it will involve the HR processes of recruitment, promotion, training and deployment that articulate the significance of leadership pipelining and talent management for the civil service. On the other hand, there is also the imperative of a consequence management system that regulates performances and challenges through, for instance, a performance bonus or the establishment of a challenge fund that motivates performance.
This must also be coupled with a service-wide capacity building workshop and training program, especially supervisors, to determine a schedule for periodic impact assessment. The Federal and States Ministries of Budget and Planning, OSGF/OSSGs, Bureau of Statistics, Civil Service Commissions, government training institutions, and, of course, the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on Policy and Coordination, etc. have pivotal roles in PMS implementation.
Their roles are multi-layered and integral, making PMS inter-ministerial partnership as one irreducible critical success factor in its implementation to explore in great details. Exploration of the dimensions to the latter, is beyond my mission in this contribution, as it is far more nuanced and technical.
The Renewed Hope Agenda has taken off to a good start. It is a declared intention to shun bad politics in the articulation of a governance framework that is founded on solid institutional reform blueprint that will deliver the stated goals of the Tinubu administration. What I have done in this piece is to outline the structural and institutional components of the performance management system that will backstop the success of the Agenda. It is the last mile towards good governance.
Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration, Abuja.
