At independence, Nigeria, in the midst of the euphoria amongst Nigerians and the huge expectations locally and internationally, was confronted with series of possibilities and challenges that made the prospect of political independence a daunting one. On the one hand, Nigeria had just gained the independence she requires to start taking charge of her own political affairs.

On the other hand, the new nation must put all her resources together to be able to articulate an ideology of nation-building that will make the nation responsible for her citizens. One of the most immediate challenge Nigeria faced was determining the direction of the Nigerianisation Policy, especially in terms of placing Nigerians into the civil and public services. Since Nigeria emerged out of the colonial amalgamation policy, it became extremely important that employment into government business must be done with care.

The dilemma that faced the nationalists was to decide between meritocracy and representativeness. Should civil servants be recruited based on merits, strictosensu, or based on their ethno-religious affiliation, in equal measure?

Understandably, the pendulum of the policy decision swung towards representativeness. This was partly because of the fact that Nigeria had already become a deeply divided nation fragmented along multiethnic paths.

And partly because of the urgency of constituting a civil service that would be saddled with the task of overseeing the implementation of development policies. One significant consequence of the adoption of the principle of representativeness as the yardstick for recruitment into the administrative cadre of the civil service was the bit of unguarded multiplication and redundancies that came with it, one which assaulted the size, growth and trajectory of the evolving administrative system.

Many of the regional leaders therefore saw civil and public servants as the representatives of regional rather than national interests. There was thus created within the system a clash of interests: civil servants often faced the pressure to be loyal to their ethnic, regional and even personal interests which they are expected to use public resources to serve. And furthermore, this divided interest led increasingly to a measure of de-professionalisation as the civil service became inevitably somewhat bloated by reason of the balancing art embedded in the principle of representativeness.

What the foregoing suggests is that the civil service, even in its glorious days of the 1960s, had its high and low points. Modeled after Whitehall, the British civil service, it was nonetheless celebrated at the time for its effectiveness and efficiency in maintaining law and order; in delivering high professional service; and in generating revenue for the colonial authority.

Indeed, despite the challenges of transitioning from colonial rule to independence; the challenge of filling in for the capacity gaps created by the exit of colonial expatriates and the heated polity; the service maintained stability and continuity, ensuring that the government machinery functioned effectively. As per the low point, the heated political climate that eventually culminated in military incursion into governance was not the most enabling, but it did not distract the service.

As the implementation of the Nigerianisation policy was still ongoing, the service indeed had shortages of skilled professionals and senior level graduate specialised personnel in many cadres, thus limited in its overall capability readiness in a very significant sense. According to M. O. Onajide (1979:31), “there has been little and inconsistent training resulting in glorified amateurism” at this period in time.

Nonetheless, the service earned for itself a reputation within the Commonwealth of Nations for being a beacon of integrity in a significant sense, and for serving as a model for effectiveness and a testament to a well-functioning public service during crucial periods of national emergences and development.

Lars Kolind(2006) in his book The Second Cycle: Winning the War Against Bureaucracy identifies three factors that inject a downward spiral and gradual decay in the lifecycle of an organisation before such an organisation achieves maturity and commences the process of reformulating its original vision.

These factors are size, age and success. These factors turn a life cycle into a death cycle for any organisation in spite of whatever success the organisation has made. The second factor and the age factor. As the service grows older, it develops traditions, for example, the tradition for dealing with ideas.

Decay sets in if age gives tradition preference over innovation. And the older the service gets, the deep rooted the preference for tradition becomes. The most dangerous factor however is success, because it inevitably leads to self-satisfaction and an unreflective defence of the status quo even where the once successful system is not necessarily as successful any more. In other words, it could happen that long after the unique selling point and strength of an organisation has been lost, it continues to live in the illusion that it possesses the secret key to success.

Public administration systems behave similarly. Administrative leadership think they know what the problem is and simply stop listening and do more of the things they know best. The resulting organisation’s deafness lead to a tendency to react slowly to both weaknesses and opportunities response by doing more of the same rather than doing something different from that which perpetuates the status quo.

This was how I interpreted one of the elements of the symptoms of the decay that set into the civil service in Nigeria in my 2018 inaugural lecture at Ibadan. By 1971, the Chief Simeon Adebo Second and Final Commission on Wages and Remuneration concluded its work by calling for a more fundamental review of the organisation, structure and operations of the public service in view of expanding role of the state and the need to manage the effect of a devastating civil war. It argued that wages and salary issues that it was called to address were just symptoms of a deeper systemic challenge that Nigeria needed to address. It therefore recommended the setting up of another commission which came to be known as the Public Service Review Commission, led by Chief Jerome Udoji. The Udoji Report saw the problem of the civil service as that of administrative inflexibility in the idolisation of the status quo making it therefore hard for the system to internalise and adapt global best practices as measure of response to positive changes.

The non-implementation of the report and evident deafness in receiving the new thinking and the more fundamental idea offered by the report beyond the wage bonanza was a missed opportunity for administrative renewal and rebirth, one that would have set the nation on the path to transform a colonial heritage into a postcolonial engine room of a developmental state.

Fast forward, by the time the Muhammed-Obasanjo military regime got underway in 1975, the rot and corruption in the civil service system, which may not have been so significant in the yesteryears, had multiplied abysmally in the regime’s estimation. With the impact that representativeness and quota system, to attend to ethno-religious balancing created, the decision to critically and massively downsize became almost inevitable in the reading of the new helmsmen, within the general framework of development and governance imperatives.

In other words, the regime must have reasoned, that if Nigeria was to make developmental progress, the civil service system must be brought into a significant level of professionalism and capability readiness. And hence the purge of the civil service was carried out “with immediate effect”!
To be continued tomorrow.
Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration, Abuja.