‘Reflections On Nigerian Public Service: An outsider’s perspective’ (3)

The third part of this reflection on public service as perceived by an outsider is an executive summary of the way we are and that is what our leaders should focus on through public policy formulation

Our public schools are not attracting students whose parents have the resources to pay fees in the developing world. Our healthcare system is out of control. Our courts and prisons are so overcrowded that convicted felons are always breaking loose. And many of our proudest cities and states are virtually bankrupt. They can’t maintain public institutions and can’t pay for electricity. Confidence in government has fallen to record lows.

At the moment, Nigerians surveyed by metro reporters always said they would not like to choose government services their preferred career.

Nearly three out of four Nigerians said they believed Abuja and 36 state capitals delivered less value for the trillions of naira than it had 10 years earlier. In similar fashion, there those who believe today that reinventing government can set off to solve a problem, plug a deficit, or skirt a bureaucracy.

We are not running government according to a new world order. We need to understand the times too that we have bumped into a new world of digital technologies. Almost without knowing it, the world has become so small and information travels in the new big, data age with the speed of thought and modern governments are beginning to invent a radically different way of doing business in the public sector.

Just as Columbus never knew he had come upon a new continent, nay of today’s pioneers – from governors to city managers, teachers to social workers – do not understand the global significance of what they are doing.

We hope this conference will provide something like a road map; a simple, clear outline of a new way of conducting the public’s business.

It is high time began to provide entrepreneurial governments, and we should begin to outline simple principles on which they appear to be constructed. We offer these principles – this “map” – not as the final word about reinvented government, but as a rough draft.
We are not seeing what we wish government would be. We should develop our map by looking around us, at some successful public sector organisations we want to see emerging, piece by piece, all across this country.

We are not inventing new ideas so much as synthesizing the ideas and experience of others when there was decentralisation of governance through federalism – even before 1960.
Some countries we visit for holidays and to invest in real est30/03/24ate even in Africa, Middle East and Asia are reinventing government. There are literatures we have reviewed that show clearly that United Arabs Emirate, Qatar, that just played host to Football World Cup are reinventing their government. South Africa, that have Multi-Choice, MTN, etc have been reinventing government for economic growth and development.

First, we should conduct public’s business to make people believe deeply in government. We should not make people to perceive and look at governments as necessary evil. All civilized societies have some form of government.

Government should be seen as the mechanism we use to make communal decisions: where to build a highway, what to do about homeless people, what kind of education to provide for our children.

It is the way we provide services that benefit all our people: national defense, environmental protection, police protection, highways, dams, water systems.

It should be seen as the way we solve collective problems. Think of the problems facing Nigerian societies today; drug use; crime; poverty; homelessness; illiteracy; toxic waste; the spectre of global warming; the exploding cost of medical care. How do we act collectively? Through government. This is what we should reinvent.

We should believe that civilized society cannot function effectively without government – something that is all too rare today. We should tailor our education reforms to meet up to the challenges of a rapidly changing information society and knowledge-based economy.
We need to have re-orientation in the news media to note that the people who work in government are not the problem; the system in which they work are the problem. The media should have enough understanding to write not to berate public employees, but to give them hope. At times it may sound as if we are engaged in bureaucrat-bashing, but our focus should be to bash bureaucracies, not bureaucrats.

We have known thousands of civil servants through the years, and most – although certainly not all – have been responsible, talented, dedicated people, trapped in archaic systems that frustrate their creativity and sap their energy.

We should be made to believe these systems can be changed, to liberate the enormous energies of public servants – and to heighten their ability to serve the public.
We should be made to use the phrase entrepreneurial government to describe the new model we need to see emerging across Nigeria. This phrase may surprise many veterans, who think of entrepreneurs solely as businessmen and women.

But the true meaning of the word entrepreneur is far broader. It was coined by the French economist J.B. Say, around the year 1800. “The entrepreneur,” Say wrote, “shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield. “An entrepreneur, in other words, uses resources in new ways to maximize productivity and effectiveness.

Say’s definition applies equally to the private sector, to the public sector, and to the voluntary, or third, sector. Dynamic school superintendents and principals use resources in new ways to maximize productivity and effectiveness. Innovative airport managers do the same. Welfare commissioners, labor secretaries, commerce department staffers – all can shift resources into areas of higher productivity and yield. When we talk about public entrepreneurs, we mean people who do precisely this.

When we talk about the entrepreneurial model, we mean public sector institutions that habitually act this way – that constantly use their resources in new ways to heighten both their efficiency and their effectiveness.

We in the civil society should care deeply not only about what governments do, but how they work. For more than 60 years, political debate in Nigeria has centered on questions of ends: what government should do, and for whom. We believe such debates are secondary today, because we simply do not have the means to achieve the new ends we seek.
Through a reinvented government we need to witness the degree of change taking place in our cities, local governments, states, and school districts.

Our purpose today is not to criticise government, as so many have been doing, but to renew it. We are as bullish on the future of government as we are bearish on the current condition of government. We do not minimise the depth of the problem, nor the difficulty of solving it. But because we have seen so many public institutions transform themselves from staid bureaucracies into innovative, flexible, responsive organizations, we believe there are solutions.

Marcel Proust once wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.” Our goal, in writing this book, is to help you see with new eyes.

It is my prayer that at the end of this discussion, there should be enthusiasm to join the thousands of other Nigerians who are already working to reinvent their governments at federal and sub-national levels.

Why and how Abuja works and doesn’t as perceived by the public
As I wrote in an article titled, Abba Kyari and collapse of public service in 2021, (The Guardian, Sunday February 20, 2021, Back Page/Inside Stuff with Martins Oloja, I would like to draw our attention to why so many bad news are coming out of the nation’s capital, Abuja every day: It is the collapse of the public service, which used to be very robust. And here is why that perception emerged from my contextual reporting:

Before the Obasanjo administration, there was a distinction between the civil service and public service. But the administration through its reform agenda integrated the service(s) mechanism by changing even the organic Civil Service Rules and Regulation and Financial Regulations to Public Service Rules and Regulations (some of the senior civil servants who participated in the restructuring of the documents are in this hall, any way.

It is just unfortunate for us here that we in the media hardly cover the public service in Abuja. Only very few journalists now navigate the labyrinthine state of public affairs in Abuja and even in the 36 states of the federation.

Besides, the public service arm of the national and state assemblies are hardly covered by our digital journalists these days. Remarkably, that is where the unusual happen.

That is where the documents of the system are generated. No one covers or probes the presidential bureaucracy comprising the office of the Secretary to Government of the Federation, (SGF) at the federal level, Secretary to the State Government (SSG) at the state level, Head of the Civil Service and Office of the Federal and State Civil Service anymore. That is the pillar of executive bureaucracy.

If these pillars are weak, there will be a crisis of coherence in the public sector. As I have been writing regularly since 1999 when the Adebayo Adedeji ad-hoc reform committee whose report set the tone for the choice of James Abu Obe as first Head of the Civil Service of the Federation under President Obasanjo (1999-2007), that is what happened to the Buhari Government, which has had a bandwagon effect all over the federation in the first last seven years (2015-2022). I have been writing about the Buhari and collapse of public service under him since 2016.
To be continued