Proposed review of the civil service: Key policy indications and action focus

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is on the roll with series of policy articulations and initiatives that speak to the intended directions he wishes to take Nigeria’s policy architecture and development agenda for the next four years. The policy conversation has been raging since the inauguration of the new administration, especially around taxation, the petroleum subsidy and the student loan.

And now, the president has revealed that aside the comprehensive audit of the Central Bank of Nigeria that is ongoing, the government has set its eye on a structural review of the civil service payroll. This becomes a most significant policy move given the obvious drain on the government’s pocket due to the large number which, as the president admits, is mindboggling. To say, as he did, that the reform will be targeted at “the way we work, change of attitude and…on educating our people,” the president already hits what is core to institutional reform right on the head.

That the new administration sees the crucial link between civil service reform and the ease of doing business is a masterstroke. The civil service operations constitute the sum of institutional frameworks around which the ease of doing business index is measured. And hence, the reform of these institutional dynamics stands in direct proportion to the more productive enhancement of the ease of doing business. And in attending to the loopholes that drain financial capability of the Nigerian state, President Tinubu is confronting a significant institutional challenge heads-on.

We can surmise that the fundamental objective of this is the active containment of the protractedmenace of cost of governance. The challenge is huge. Given that Nigeria’s governance system is one of the most expensive to run in the world, we are then faced with the consequence that a huge budgetary allocation goes into recurrent expenditure, with barely enough left over for capital and infrastructural projects that constitute the core of the service delivery outcomes to Nigerians. One immediate manifestation of the cost of governance problem in Nigeria derives from the creation of ad hoc structures and units of government business parallel to the existing bureaucratic structures. This is compounded by the replication of these parallel structures across each state of the federation.

Another unique dimension of the cost of governance that broke the dam on recruitment without the aid of due process in human resource management is the gradual effacement of the internal establishment control mechanism. This internal administrative mechanism was built around the control tool of Organisation and Method (O&M) and the treasury control of establishment that benchmark the ratio of capital and recurrent budget. The core elements of this controls were the manpower forecasting and planning system of identifying, planning and acting upon human resource requirements and problems related to the conceptualisationof the role of the state in the running of the national economy, as well as the trend analysis of service’s growth in size and expansion of the scope of responsibilities.

When this became eroded, administrative decline and operational inefficiency became inevitable. In 1975, there was a significant downsizing of the civil service due to the fundamental boomerang of the adoption of the principle of representativeness consequent on the Nigerianisation Policy after independence. And yet, the size of the civil service workforce is still a serious cause for alarm for any government, like the Tinubu administration, with the objective of capitalizing on the capability readiness of the public service to achieve efficient service delivery.

Though the jury is still out on the question of whether or not the civil service is over-bloated in spite of the obvious and urgent need for rightsizing.However, there is no gainsaying the fact that the system’s heavy dependence on experts, consultants, donors’ technical assistance, and all sorts signals a low public service institutional IQ. This is due majorly to the near absence of competency-based human resource practices, as well as the inability of the system to attract, recruit and retain the core skills required for the civil service to function as a world class institution for democratic service delivery to Nigerians.

The dependence on external assistance and consultancy services takes its own unique expenditure toll on government coffers. And quite unfortunately, and 17 years after I came to that conclusion as part of my doctoral thesis, the public service in Nigeria is still an inefficient space where “too many people do practically nothing (virtual redundancy), too many do too little (in a state of under-capacity utilisation), while too few are doing too much.”

Thus, if the significant issue faced by the civil service is the IQ of its workforce, the challenge becomes that of confronting the overall skill composition of that workforce as the launchpad for determining the existing skill and capacity gaps, and how to resolve them through a thoroughgoing HR and competency gatekeeping and re-professionalization.

The urgency of re-professionalizing connects the reform of the civil service by the Tinubu administration to the overall goal of transforming Nigeria’s productivity proficiency. Once we are able to tie the imperative of re-professionalization to that of productivity, we can deduce the path to a world class new public service system in Nigeria. And from the perspective of institutional reform that will transform the present service into a future performing institution, two reform paths are already obvious.

The first is systemic and organisational. It concerns a system-wide restructuring that is both operational and cultural. On the one hand, a cultural adjustment programme is imperative through a deliberate attempt at culture change and value reorientation in ways that will re-ingrain the public-spiritedness that makes the public service a vocational calling. This requires inculcating action-molding values and virtues: ethical values (i.e. integrity, honesty, respect); democratic values (i.e. responsiveness, representativeness, rule of law); and professional values (i.e. excellence, innovation).

On the other hand, there is the urgency of putting in place a result-based performance framework that is aimed at translating the old bureaucratic system into a technology-enabled, flexible, smarter, efficient and citizen-centered value-based institution. This definitely coheres with the value reorientation that redefines the remit of the public manager as that of a transformational leader who is guided by the elements of public ethics and professional accountability to guide the public service into the imperatives of democratic governance, the dynamics of the knowledge age and the demands of the fourth industrial revolution.

The second reform path the Tinubu administration must take seriously is more operational, and it concerns the restructuring of the internal dynamics governing government business in the MDAs. This is key because these ministries, departments and agencies are the engine room of productivity transformation, if the reform of their operational dynamics are successful. First, such a reform must immediately enforce a distinction into core and non-core function in a way that frees up the MDAs to focus on growing their core capabilities, while the non-cores are outsourced, among other alternatives as documented in the literature.

This is also important in strengthening the pubic-private and public-public partnership that will ensure that the public service and industry do not antagonize or obstruct their respective responsibilities. Second, and following on the issue of institutional IQ mentioned earlier, the MDAs’ productivity capability rests on a rigorous skill and competency audit matched against the system’s skill requirements through workforce data, and benchmarked against global competency imperatives for efficiently running the business of government in the 21st century.

This establishment of a competency-based performance accountability will require, for example, implementing job evaluation reports and regrading in order to achieve enhanced, competitive and productivity-induced new pay and compensation structure that is capable of attracting and retaining the best and the brightest.

And lastly, to return to the challenge of the cost of governance, the Tinubu administration needs, as a matter of urgency, to insert into the reform of the MDAs an efficiency and productivity audit that targets the entire recurrent expenditure of the government through a thorough assessment of the existing cost centers (deriving from wastages and redundancies).

It should allow the system to regain its internal mechanism of efficiency around the following: the systematic planning for short and long-term needs; forecasting of retirement; anticipated vacancies founded on periodic functional reviews (to determine changes in tasks as a result of government’s new policy targets and programme emphases); structural changes and quantum of workload incidental; basic restructuring due to privatization of government concerns; outsourcing (monetization policy as for example); periodic personnel and process audits; review of the scheme of service; abolition of vacant posts; control of the creation of new post, units, departments and agencies; accounting for voluntary retirements, retrenchments, and staff reduction due to process reengineering; automation and system changes; etc.

What I have tried to do in this piece is to take on the reform intentions of the Tinubu administration and see how they could be pushed to their logical conclusion in policy implementation terms with the lens of an expert-insider. Policy articulations must have their ends in the enhancement of democratic governance that demonstrates that the new administration really mean business.
Olaopa, is retired Federal Permanent Secretary and Professor of Public Administration. [email protected]