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Research agenda to reform the civil service – Part 2

By Tunji Olaopa
08 July 2022   |   2:41 am
What kind of public service does Nigeria need to successfully manage the dynamics of democratic consolidation reinforced with a developmental state capable

Dr Folasade Yemi-Esan, Head of the Civil Service of the Federation. Photo: WOMENOFACRICA

What kind of public service does Nigeria need to successfully manage the dynamics of democratic consolidation reinforced with a developmental state capable of providing required support as Nigeria enters the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its huge technological and knowledge backend?

This research question is, for me, the most fundamental. It is a question that has been asked since Nigeria began experimenting with reforms, especially from the Udoji commission to date. This question encapsulates all the others, since the end of the public service reforms is to enable the emergence of a public service that a developmental state in Nigeria can rely upon.

With the idea of a developmental state, this question rides on the need to honor the social contract between the government and the governed by inaugurating a public service that works in terms of efficiently achieving service delivery for the citizens. This, for instance, was instantiated with the service compact with Nigerians – the SERVICOM reform.

The emergence of efficient public service in Nigeria is undergirded by a deeper objective that conduces to the well-being of Nigerians, and that is radically overhauling Nigeria’s productivity profile. Thus, the next research question: how does the reform of the public service system eventuate in the crafting of a new national productivity paradigm? This question speaks to perhaps one of the most fundamental reform hurdles in Nigeria’s governance and administrative challenges—the issues of the role of the state, institutional streamlining, rightsizing, redundancy and cost of governance.

Nigeria’s presidentialism and democratic governance for instance have become too expensive to the point of suffocation. The wisdom of redundancy management commences with deep reflection on how to manage or contain the cost of governance, while still achieving buy-ins and strategic partnership by labour unions who are most concerned about the deals their members will get through social assistance while shifting from the adversarial to being understandably and ostensibly developmental for the sake of the country.

The issue of national productivity intersects that of efficient public service and performance management. This leads us to generate the third research question: What are the appropriate human resource policies, pay structure and operational budget cum cost ratios that are most cost effective and consistent with the optimal productivity level of the national economy? This question enables administrative reformers, practitioners and policy researchers and academics to focus attention on the skills, competency and productivity deficits in the public service system through a rigorous
program of re-professionalization and business model reprofiling. This is what I have called the imperative of creating a new generation of public managers with the capacity to rethink the intellectual bases of skills and the reskilling of the cadres, through a systematic injection of scarce skills to alter the IQ of service, and prepare it for the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in a vulnerable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) postcolonial administrative environment.

In situating itself within the VUCA environment, the public service in Nigeria must not only battle operational and tactical issues but also the concern of rebranding and reprofiling its vocational essence. So many Nigerians have lost faith in the public service system as the conveyor of democratic service delivery within the pervasive theory that neither can governments in Nigeria deliver development nor are public institutions working. Hence the fourth research question: What cultural adjustments programme needs to be implemented as a rebranding imperative to undermine the moral and trust deficits of the public service in the public perception? The public service is a value-based institution, a vocational calling with public-spiritedness at its core. How can that public-spiritedness and values-based work culture be rescued?

Since the public service cannot be isolated from the national need for an ethical framework that binds all citizens and government officials in mutual institutional relations around a national integrity system, we arrive immediately at the fifth research question: What are the structural, institutional and ethical demands of a national integrity system that could strengthen public administration as bulwark against seemingly confounding incidences of bureaucratic corruption?

Part of the transformation required is for the public service system to ditch its Weberian “I-am- directed” bureaucratic essence, or what Douglas McGregor refers to as Theory X, in a shift to a more flexible, entrepreneurial and open-government oriented paradigm, or what he calls Theory Y.

It is therefore within the context of the deconstruction of the Weberian institutional foundation of the public service to achieve the status of a world-class institution that we generate the sixth research question: What should MDAs be doing differently within the framework of performance-managed systems and democratic consolidation? This is fundamentally a cumulated question that takes in all the other ones concerning the much-desired image rebranding and operational reform of the public service.

In other words, everything that is reformed about the system leads to the one question of how to get the MDAs efficiently and productively functional. And this question also leads to a correlative question: Since there cannot be an interregnum, how might the MDAs, in the intervening period, take advantage of technical support and assistance from consultants, think tanks, subject specialists and international development partners, especially in terms of learning, development, and skills transfer?

The last research question superintends all the others as a gatekeeping imperative: How should the agenda of resuscitating NAPAM as a professional gatekeeping platform for a community of practice and service be achieved and harnessed to catalyse the overall objective of getting the public administration profession and management system back on track? One significant means of doing this, which has not really been under research focus, is the collective gatekeeping of the public administration curricula, knowledge pack and competency framework as well as institutional
reengineering of public service training institutions or MDIs. This is one of the achievements of the pioneer public administrators at the Ife, Zaria, Nsukka and other institutes of administration in the
70s and 80s. It should be part of the remit of a revamped NAPAM.

This question takes us right back to where we started this piece—the concern about a platform that will serve as a generational purveyor of learning in ways that will keep pubic administration scholarship and public service public-spiritedness always at the edge of disciplinary and professional progress, and which will be leveraged to harness the vast and daily growing global knowledge fronters within carefully managed networks and knowledge management. These questions have been there all along, as soon as public administration and the public service system in Nigeria began nosediving.

Part of the tragedy is that they have been lying under the surface of
the collective and institutional rot for far too long, with no one caring about their significance. If we love this profession and believe that public administration is a bulwark against national debility, then we can no longer ignore these research questions.

Concluded
Prof. Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary & Professor, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos tolaopa2003@gmail.com

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