Reengineering bureaucracy as engine room of government – Part 2

And so, the reform of the public service is the first condition towards such objective. This means that the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs)—the engine rooms of the public service system and therefore of governance—must be adequately capacitated to become effective and efficient as the formidable institutional framework that would be ready at all times to meet the challenge of nation building, good governance and national development.

This requires a change management framework that is anchored around three critical frameworks of significantly reprofiling: the quality of bureaucratic efficiency; the quality of service delivery and performance accountability within a democracy; and the professionalism of the public servants.

These critical frameworks focus the objective of institutional reform: the public bureaucracies must be transformed to become: Fast moving, intelligent, professional, information-rich, flexible, adaptable and entrepreneurial; less employee-focused and rule-driven, deliver quality service; performance-focused, accountable and productive—defined by objectives and measurable results, outputs and outcomes; capable of creating the policy climate that will unlock the energy of the private sector and other sectors and to install a new productivity paradigm in the national economy; operated by multidisciplinary team of new generation public managers and project teams signed on to performance agreements or contracts within carefully crafted ministerial scorecards to which everyone is held accountable and bound within a framework of social compact stewardship that sees citizens as clients deserving of effective and efficient services

To achieve such a new public service demands several systemic and structural imperatives in change management that go straight to the heart of the old Weberian administrative tradition, and its business model and procedures. The first is that a developmental state demands neo-Weberian administrative framework. The idea of the neo-Weberian is useful for two reasons. One, the managerial revolution in most Western countries was not an attempt to entirely jettison the Weberian model.

Rather, the reform efforts were an incremental attempt to recalibrate its efficiency and effectiveness. Two, the Weberian bureaucratic framework has not outlived its utility, especially when considering the African context. The implication of this is that the new public management has to be brought into conversation with the Weberian tradition to be able to achieve the effectiveness and efficiency of the new public service envisioned in Nigeria.

The second imperative is the urgency of rethinking the intellectual foundations of public administration as the vehicle for the administrative reconstruction of the Nigerian state and the quest for good governance. This will involve several developments. There is first the need to reflect on a non-adversarial and cooperative relationship between politicians and administrators.

Secondly, the system demands a firm and meritocratic gatekeeping measure that is founded on the principles of public-spiritedness and professionalism. And thirdly, the necessity of keying into global and regional best practices in terms of competency and human resource framework for doing government business and articulating efficiency in the workplace.

The next imperative is correlative. The new foundation on which the public service must be based needs a new generation and cohort of public managers who are capacitated with the requisite values and competences to manage the demands of the new public service that the developmental state in Nigeria needs to make an appearance in the fourth industrial revolution.

This will necessarily serve as the first condition for the possibility of instituting a new performance management system and HRM framework that could transform the workplace efficiency and productivity, especially in the face of the new normal that COVID-19 has imposed on the world, and the flexibility demanded by the Gen Z.

This is the move that transforms the service IQ in the form of a strategic leadership intelligence through the creation of a multidisciplinary talents-reinforced senior executive service (SES) guided by a new ethical professionalism.

Next, the new public service must deal with the demand of facilitating public-private partnership dynamics, and moving them to a higher level that allows good corporate governance principles to drive the frameworks for democratic governance. This enables, as part of the HR function transformation, the possibility of incorporating commercial skills as part of the HRM capacitation of the public managers.

Lastly, none of these reform imperatives would make any sense if the public service does not facilitate a paradigmatic shift away from an adversarial to developmental industrial relations that makes it possible for the workplace to generate the level of performance and productivity commensurate with the reform inputs.

Transforming the civil service system is not an issue to be politicised. And the simple but fundamental reason is that it is the fulcrum for achieving sustainable development that constitutes the most significant objective of the developmental state. That, in overall analysis, is where the Nigerian state should be headed.

Concluded.
Olaopa, Professor of Public Administration & 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.