The recently concluded maiden annual distinguished public lecture of the Association of Retired Heads of Service and Permanent Secretaries of Oyo and Osun State (ARHESPSOOS) held at the International Conference Centre, University of Ibadan, provided another opportunity to brainstorm on the present challenges and future possibilities of the civil service system in Nigeria.
The occasion is a significant one for the fundamental reason that it pools the administrative experiences of retired heads of service and permanent secretaries who in their own rights constitute a legitimate institutional memory that ought to be harness in all the conversations that reflect on and rethink the capability of the civil service in Nigeria.
For those familiar with my public commentaries on the civil service and its institutional reform, my preferred methodological approach is to deploy a mix of historical and analytical methodology to outline a trajectory of administrative development, philosophies, and management design thinking to interrogate the current state of the civil service in Nigeria, as basis for our reflection on the future of public administration in Nigeria. This method not only allows us to make critical deductions from the narrative about administrative history and praxis in Nigeria and how they have influenced and affected the series of reform strategies and programmes that have been put in place to redirect the civil service system.
Further than this, these deductions allow us to explore extrapolations and scenarios for future reform possibilities, with the objective of excavating a number of recommendations that could possibly feed into the policy intelligence of the political and administrative leadership in Nigeria in their spirited efforts to transform the institutional capability requirements of the civil service necessary for achieving democratic service delivery, infrastructural development and ultimately, national socio-economic transformation.
Public administration has come a long way in historical reckoning. From the ancient pharaonic society to the height of Roman sociopolitical requirement, public administration was a phenomenon whose necessity has increased in complexity today. The ancient Pharaohs needed to dam the River Nile and build the mathematically complex pyramids.
The ancient Romans needed to efficiently win many complex wars and ingeniously build many engineering feats. From the scribal authority of the ancient pharaohs to the tenured and salaried profession that public administration demanded in the Roman Empire, public administration eventually evolved into a noble vocation that mirrored the Levitical spiritual order of the Hebrews. With Max Weber, the bureaucracy was modelled into a legal-rational command-and-control structure that reflects the Prussian military governance system.
This is the origin of the “I-am-directed” Weberian administrative tradition that Nigeria, as well as most countries of the world, inherited. This tradition conceives of the bureaucracy as a neutral, hierarchically organised, efficient organisation, which demands precision, continuity, discipline, strictness and reliability. The framework of the legal-rational authority privileges written rules and procedures.
Each position in the bureaucracy has its duties and rights, which are clearly defined; rules and procedures are laid down to determine how the given authority is to be exercised. Bureaucracy therefore promises a stable organisation, despite the fact that its incumbents come and go. How did the bureaucracy then earn its bad reputation? A better question is: What is it about the bureaucratic system that makes it so powerful as to threaten its very own essence as well as the service it is supposed to carry out on behalf of government? The short answer is that as the locus of governmental power, the bureaucracy is saddled with the coordination of complex administrative that raises the possibility that street-level and front-line bureaucrats follow rules for their own sake.
This is the origin of the bureau-pathologies of the civil service system, a pathological predicament that is aggravated in a postcolonial context like Nigeria. Douglas McGregor characterised that tradition as Theory X, a transactional model that conceive of the administrator as a thermostat regulating an organisation founded on a bleak picture of employees. Theory X is undergirded by the perception of human nature as indolent, lacking motivation, naturally egoistic and resistant to change. This is why it became necessary to impose a legal-rational framework. The General Order (GO) represents the codified operating standard for this administrative model.
By 1968, the Fulton Report had already been submitted as Britain’s concession to the new managerial revolution of that time, and the urgency of reforming the British civil service that had become a great rock in the tideline. By 1974, the Udoji Commission Report had taken the challenge of reorienting Nigeria’s civil service system away from the Weberian tradition towards managerialism.
The Report’s assessment of the system is its administrative inflexibility which makes it difficult to anticipate and respond to governance and administrative challenges and positive institutional transformation. This particularly concerned, for example, the generalist-professionals rivalry, and the need to inject the system with new blood working within a result-oriented performance management model.
Since this Report, and the failure to ground its fundamental recommendation that would have strategically transformed the civil service system, Nigeria has been swinging between moving away from the Weberian tradition (as in the Dotun Phillip Report of 1984 that would have managerialism as the foundation of the civil service) and the Allison Ayida administrative revisionism that reconstituted the system along the Weberian order based on the conception-reality gap it detected in the Philip Report.
And yet, since the 1999 commencement of Nigeria’s democratic experiment, the civil service system has witnessed a series of institutional reforms that keep pushing the system towards the goal of being a world class institution. These reforms include the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), SERVICOM, pension and pay reforms, the professionalisation of the FOS/NBS, FIRS/NEITI, the price intelligence and procurement reform, fiscal responsibility plus MTSS/MTEF, to name just a few.
But these achievements are too small and far in-between to short-circuit the already distorted trajectory of organisational development through the five-stage life-cycle: birth-adolescence-maturity-institutionalisation-reformulation. We have majorly the military intervention in Nigeria’s political development to ‘thank’ for this.
An engineering metaphor helps make the point of reform very clearly: Whereas the Nigerian state urgently needs an administrative backend that is efficiently propelled by a jet engine, what the many years of administrative hiccups, institutional disruptions, reform misconceptions and fortuitous breakthroughs have equipped the bureaucracy with is the capacity inherent in the engine of a Beatle car. Essentially, the service workforce structure can be characterised by a situation where there are ‘too many doing nothing, too many doing too little, and too few people doing too much.’
It is not surprising therefore that a key part of diagnosis of the system’s dysfunction is the execution trap derivable from the system’s inability to achieve capability readiness for democratic service delivery. And so, in a 2005 study, a World Bank review reported the finding that: 29 per cent of development programmes ever got completed, 45 per cent of on-going projects are rated satisfactory, and 26 per cent of such projects usually get cancelled.
How then can we move from institutional debilitation to bureaucratic reform? Institutional reforms underscore the possibility of creatively evolving a developmental democratic state in Nigeria. Such a state, in global discourse, is backstopped by a functional, effective, efficient and optimal civil service system.
To be continued tomorrow.
Tunji Olaopa, Professor of Public Administration and Chairman Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja delivered this lecture at the Maiden Annual Association of Retired Heads of Service and Permanent Secretaries of Oyo and Osun State – ARHESPSOOS – held at the International Conference Centre, University of Ibadan, recently.
