The Awolowo-Adebo administrative model emerged from Nigeria’s inheritance of the apolitical British civil service system. This tradition of public administration is common all across the Commonwealth countries. The British civil service system was designed to be thoroughly impartial; civil servants are trained to serve the government of the day with utmost impartiality regardless of whatever political opinions or views they hold.
The system however gives room for special advisers who are specially appointed, hold temporary position and are exempted from the rule of impartiality in their duty to provide political advice and direction to ministers.
This was the framework of the politics-administration distinction that gave Nigeria the golden age of the civil service in the immediate post-independence period. Unfortunately, one of the traumatic fallouts of the military incursion into Nigerian politics is the terrible distortions of Nigerian governance, political and administrative coherence.
The massive purge of the public service in 1975/76 for instance, was in part a playout of the politics to contain the audacity that General Gowon enabled the super-permanent secretaries to have in the policy space; the audacity to step into the arena of politics at the time; one which must have put them in opposing camp with the war generals who then assaulted their rank in revenge, when the Murtala-Obasanjo assume the reign of power. When the Babangida administration began its Public Service Reform agenda, there was already on board the reform to transit Nigeria’s governmental structure to presidentialism.
The Dotun Philips study group that preceded this reform framework was tasked with the objective of a professionalised civil service circumscribed by a managerial philosophy and grafted into the institutional context of presidentialism. Unfortunately, with the promulgation of Decree 43 by the Babangida administration, the objective of professionalising the civil service system was jeopardised with the politicising of the position of the permanent secretary which was then re-designated as the Director-General.
How do we then tie this historical and conceptual reflections together? I suspect that the Supreme Court judgment which grounds the provision of the 1999 Constitution on partisan political engagement of Nigerians cannot be the final answer on the matter. And this position is far from being counterintuitive, coming from the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission. This is my argument.
The Constitutional order of the Nigerian state cannot answer to all realities, economic, political, sociocultural, administrative, and even governance. The Nigerian state has weathered all sorts of circumstances that had to be handled through legal pragmatism. Thus, while the Constitution is fundamentally right, at the most general level of the fundamental, to state that every Nigerian has the right to be political and to hold political views and participate in politics, the said constitution cannot legislate at the level of the concrete on what is best for the civil service system as both an administrative system and a profession in its own right.
That has to be handled with an administrative wisdom and legality that would not undermine the constitutional order must be top in the next level administrative reform agenda for the Nigerian civil service, going forward. It is at this level that stakeholders in the administrative framework can decide what is best for the Nigerian public administrative system now and in the near future.
This whole discourse on the political status of civil servants in Nigeria’s political and constitutional order therefore speaks to the urgency of what it takes to institutionally reform the Nigerian civil service system. The discourse, in other words, brings to the fore cogent and fundamental questions: How should the classic politics-administration dichotomy be reconceived within the framework of a new theory of change for institutional reform given Nigeria’s peculiar socio-political reality? What system of public administration is best for Nigeria at this stage in its evolution and for its transformation journey? What should be the role of the state and its constitutional order in that journey? These are key questions to reflect on in the light of two important objectives.
The first is that Nigeria needs to become a developmental state that pushes the boundaries of democratic governance that elevate the well-being of Nigerians. A developmental state has to plug into the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions in ways that provide the technological and infrastructural wherewithal to make development happen. The second objective is that the public service must in time, even if aspirational, become a world class institution that can effectively and efficiently backstop the developmental aspirations of the Nigerian state.
At the very heart of the institutional reform of the civil service system is indeed the nature and status of the civil servant as a public spirited and professional administrative persona with the twenty-first century public ethical conduct and competences to mediate the evolving knowledge society of the fourth industrial revolution.
At the moment, the dysfunction of the system is due to its inability to jettison its old Weberian, “I-am-directed” structural modalities that engender bureau-pathology which prevents administrative efficiencies and promotes a culture that politicices everything governance and development. This pathological condition calls for a re-professionalisation strategy that capacitate the civil service system and its civil servants to function optimally in their vocational calling to serve Nigerians in manner that insulates it from distortionary politics.
This is where all critical stakeholders, from the OHCSF and the Federal Civil Service Commission to the NLC owe the public administration a sacred responsibility. This is a far better focus than the intermittent public filibustering over how political the civil servant can be. This is a democratic system that requires a competent, efficient and impartial civil servant to help the government achieve its policy objectives for Nigerians. The best way to go is not to embroil these civil servants in Nigeria’s political complexities. This, I believe, is the cogent insight the HCSF is trying to pass across.
Concluded.
Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration.
