Professionals in government: Issues in navigating policy space in Nigeria

All across the world, the policy space has always been a critical and contested one. It is critical to the extent that it is within this space that government consolidates the social contract with the citizens through sound programmes that inform the development of the state and the well-being of the citizens.

It is contested because it is a space where government no longer has the sole prerogative of determining what should constitute the specifics of governance dynamics. The policy space is traditionally reserved for bureaucrats and bureaucratic expertise. It is the public servants whose original task it is to assist the government in policy design and implementation.

By the turn of the 20th century, especially when the Second World War happened, with all its attendant administrative, political and social consequences, this reality started to change. With the emergence of the United Nations after the war, the foreign policy relationships and dynamics amongst nations became all the more significant. The UN became a structural standpoint to prevent further war.

And thus, this led to the need for multilateral cum bilateral agreements and global partnerships that will facilitate the cordial relationship and collaborations between NGOs and development partners with states across the world. This brings these global partners into the policy management architecture of the states. It is however the United States’ policy management experience during and after the war that signalled the widening of the policy space beyond the remit of traditional policy imperatives.

America facilitated the inclusion of scholars and intellectuals, as well as the introduction of think tanks, into the policy space. This is further accentuated by the U.S. spoils system. This practice within the context of the U.S. presidential system is a double-edged sword. It has the potentials to both muddle the policy management space as well as strengthen it. It began as a means of allocating juicy appointments and positions to loyal party members when a president gets to power. And it eventually led to gross inefficiency until the Pendleton Federal Civil Service Act of 1883 put a stop to it. However, it still provides a solid administrative frame for injecting fresh technocratic and expert presence into the policy space.

Even though it is customary, all through public administration history, to enlist scarce skills and core expertise to bridge knowledge, information and competency gaps at different stages of the policy process, there has always been a charged relationship between the bureaucrats as the gatekeepers of the space and the technocrats and experts that are meant to complement their policy efforts. The relationship between the public servants and bureaucrats on the one hand, and the technocratic team (technical advisers, policy experts, consultants and subject specialists) on the other has been governed by the tension between two fundamental issues. On one hand, there is the need to keep all policy processes and actions within the purview of technical rationalism.

This is what activates the totality of administrative governing framework, from the famous General Order (GO) to the public service rules, circulars and other legal and administrative procedures, guidelines and instruments by which the policy management processes are streamlined. However, there is also the pervasive pressure to subject bureaucrats to a general accountability control in accordance with the imperatives and demands of democratic principles and governance.

But the bureaucracy is just what it is—a turf that is guided with all sense of propriety and aggression. It is a space where the task of policy management is jealously guided from intrusion by perceived outsiders. This raises a genuine dilemma: the policy space can no longer be policed solely by the bureaucrats whose policy actions must be complemented by non-bureaucrats. And yet the bureaucratic policy space is professionally unique and cannot be arrogantly transgressed by those who think they have better expertise. This makes the policy space a very charged one. Like the larger governance space, the task of governance can no longer be left to the expertise of the bureaucrats and government officials alone.

The demands of democratic governance insist that non state and non-governmental actors be drawn in to contribute their own perception, thoughts and expertise to the task of governing the citizenry better than the government alone is ever going to manage. When managerialism made its appearance from the 1960s, the pressure to modernise policy and make it more efficient redoubled the urgent need for reforming the policy space and forcing the bureaucrats to comply. The managerial revolution was motivated by the need to transform the operational dynamics of the traditional administrative framework in line with modern technologies and administrative machineries, especially as determined by the private sector and its efficiency, capacities and competences.

Managerialism asks for effectiveness, flexibility, leanness, efficiency, performance and productivity. And it compelled a lot of attention on the insularity of the public service in relation with the imperatives of the larger governance and policy space. With managerialism, the policy management space can no longer be the same. Thus, as dominant paradigm in public administration, and with its emphases on upending action and policy research, entrepreneurial culture, it contributed to the need for expanding the policy and governance space and deepening the relevance of technocratic experts and professionals from outside of the bureaucracy.

Within the Nigerian policy space, it is the managerial imperative of enlarging the space, coupled with the fundamental development predicament of the Nigerian state after colonialism, that facilitated the entry into policy management of such experts, scholars and technocrats like Pius Okigbo, Wolfgang Stolper, Ojetunji Aboyade, Taslim Elias, Adamu Baike, Ben Nwabueze, Jibril Aminu, Claude Ake, Kalu Idika Kalu, and many others who brought skills and competences into the policy processes. And yet, the governance and policy space in Nigeria demonstrates most tragically the charged nature of the relationship between the bureaucrats and the technocrats.

Indeed, the diagnostic literature in Nigeria’s administrative history regards the civil service as a significant part of the development challenge Nigeria is facing. Apart from its institutional reform issue and the need to inject critical meritocratic competence, the civil service has a reputation for being too closed up. Technocrats, professionals and experts over the years have lamented the challenge of working closely with bureaucrats on policy issues. One critical nature of the Nigerian state and its governance dynamics has to do with the ease with which the system reward mediocrity. Even as the bureaucracy harbours significant high-end talents, often times, mediocre, rather than the brightest and the best, find themselves at the top of the administrative and technocratic ladders where they are served by the best the Nigerian nation can afford, from the university scholars and intellectuals to top-notch professionals.

Unfortunately, this technocratic best that could serve the nation are forced to look up to their mediocre bosses, especially with regard to issues and policies that shape the direction and performance metrics of the structures and institutions they oversee. And who would want to blame those who had to keep their distance from the policy space when they cannot continue to bear the brunt of mediocrity in a nation with a huge demographics of core professionals and experts of global standing?

How does a nation like Nigeria that wants to be a global economic player in 21st century account for countless first-class graduates languishing in the unemployment market? And the agony doubles because the university teachers who are tasked with the responsibility of forming the human capital Nigeria requires to become a developmental state have been effectively pauperized! One of the greatest challenges that the experiment of democratic governance in Nigeria faces is that of managing crossover professionals (COPs); a term I first picked up at Patrick Okigbo’s Nextier seminar. COPs being those who, through a significant dose of patriotism and motivation, transition from private practices, diaspora, academia and civil society organisations to public service.

This is even more fundamental a challenge because governments across the globe are caught in the managerial search for administrative and institutional reforms that will yield efficiency, flexibility and productivity. And the private sector provides a model for rethinking traditional bureaucracy ala managerialism. And this is all the more urgent within the context of the erosion of meritocracy and the breakdown of competency-based human resource management the Nigerian public service has witnessed. There is however a constant clash of perspective between the vision of independent expertise that stands at the heart of a depoliticized model of policymaking, and the imperative of bureaucratic control and democratic accountability that locates the Weberian policy context and its public service general order (or PSR). But then, COPs transitioning into the public service in Nigeria are usually not prepared for the dynamics of what I have called bureau-pathology—the sets of structural and institutional deficiencies—that ambush their good intention of injecting new and scarce competencies into the public service.

Thus, when bureaucrats protect their turfs, it is the administrative outsiders and their critical skills that are often on the receiving end of the bad deal, and the government pays the price in terms of productivity. Ultimately, the idea of COPs introduces the need to reflect on a model of bureaucrats-COP relationship that will facilitate the transformation of the public service for effective and efficient performance. And for my concern in this piece, such a model gives due credit to patriotic technocrats who are eager to cast their competences and skills into the task of nation-building and national development. The other side of the equation is equally valid. Public administration is a profession with its own code of practice, attitudinal framework and value-system.

The point there is that for any outsiders to make significant impact on the task of working together with the public servants in the policy and governance space, they must demonstrate some levels of understanding and empathy with the public service code of practice with full recognition that public administration is a profession in its own right. That learning curve becomes all the more rewarding if they demonstrate professional humility that enlists skilled bureaucrats in their technical team rather than creating private enclaves populated by outsiders as is the common practice. Coming into the public service is all by itself a daunting experience for any technocrat, without bringing along any professional arrogance that on its own has to engage with the turf war that the bureaucrats also have ready.

Quite unfortunately, and despite the best reform intentions and efforts of successive Nigerian government and bureaucratic leadership, the Nigeria’s administrative system still operates a one-size-fits-all codes of administrative operations usually activated by circulars and a whole range of governance codes which civil servants are experts in.

This is so because many of the key reforms since 1974 have not gained ground or are far-between.
Many of these standard operating systems are sadly not embedded by new and efficient management innovation, procedures and technologies at the rapidly growing frontiers of policy and project management techniques. They therefore tend to be annoyingly rigid, unimaginative and even stifling of any innovative possibilities. This procedural matter is further compounded by the civil service structure of authority, which embeds positions and persons in manners that could be dysfunctional especially where occupants of posts do not have the skills, knowledge and competence that performance and productivity require.

This dynamic is aggravated by the weight that the civil service put on seniority and hierarchy at the expense of knowledge, competence, administrative discretion and teamwork. It is therefore no surprise that the entire system, outside of the best objectives of managerialism, is heavily oriented towards input and process at the expense of output and results. Thus, within this context of dysfunctionality and professional/technocratic arrogance and ignorance, the stage is set for collaborative conflict founded on an adversarial model that preclude any form of agreement between the bureaucrats and the technocrats on the resolution of the problems of policy management. It is this conflict-ridden model, rather than the collaborative one that facilitate consensus and mutual respect, that had led to the humiliation of many well-meaning and patriotic cross-over professionals and technocrats who had made the bold move to serve the Nigerian state and make better and functional the policy and governance space for the betterment of Nigerians.

I particularly cannot forget the sad experience of a full-bodied and world-class scholar, Prof. Adenike Grange, the former minister of health, and her tragic story within the policy space. Like many significant others, she was embroiled, in the course of her national service, in issues that led to an unwarranted and most annoying persecution and resignation in ways that could have tarnished the reputation she has spent a significant part of her life accumulating.

For daring to stick her neck out, she paid a huge price simply for offering herself selflessly to render patriotic service to her country. But this is what I suspect—if these technocrats are invited again to national service, they just might overlook the wrongs done them. Patriotism seems to cover a multitude of sin. If we are agreed that the enlarged space of policy management is required to transform democratic governance in Nigeria, then we need to explore the reform possibilities that will enable the bureaucrats and technocrats to work together and bring the full weight of their skills and competences to bear on the challenges of modernizing the space into a flexible, performing and productive enterprise.

There is for instance a policy gap in the public service, MDAs without strategic plans; poor policy analysis due to non-professionalization of departments of planning, research and statistics; lack of action/policy research work that harnesses policy-research and global knowledge networks to strengthen strategic policy intelligence and for problem-solving as part of contingency planning; poor data culture; poor monitoring and evaluation (M&E) as well as project management capabilities. There is therefore an urgent need to modernize the policy architecture in ways that allow policymaking to facilitate the transformation of the lives of Nigerians.

The changes involved in modernising the policy making process would include: (i) designing policies around outcomes; (ii) making sure policies are inclusive, fair and evidence-based; (iii) avoiding unnecessary burdens on businesses; (iv) involving others in policy-making; (v) becoming more forward and outward-looking; and (vi) learning from experience. And this transformation of the policy management space will require the joint effort of both the Nigerian government, the bureaucrats and bureaucratic leadership and the team of technocrats, policy advisers and professional experts that could be taken as significant stakeholders to the policy process.

The essence of the collaborative partnership is to be able to transform the policy space into a significant recipient of productivity, which emanate from an administrative reform of the civil service. What is required to make the civil service a world-class source of fundamental policymaking effort that orient good governance are not far-fetched: instituting competency-based HR practices; installing performance management accountability culture; injection of deep policy implementation techniques and project management praxis; changes in wage and incentive structure that attracts and retains high-end scarce skills and core competences; enabling a talent management system that enables only the very best to get to administrative leadership positions to cure subsisting menace of inbreeding; and establishing the best practices in the SES to beef up services’ IQ of the top administrative leadership cadre as the lead motivator of performance in the civil service system.
Olaopa, a retired Federal Permanent Secretary& Professor, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos tolaopa2003@gmail.com