It is this very attempt at preserving the professional capacity of the public servant that necessitates the need to prevent the politicisation of the public servant. The apolitical bureaucrat is expected to be neutral, dutiful, impartial and professional even though the political space is impassioned and contested. And this is what enables an administrative continuity that undergirds political succession.

Government come and go, but it is that solid space of administrative diligence, capacities and continuity that sustains the very business of government and governance. Once that space is compromised by the very status of the politicised public administrators and managers, then it is not just the dichotomy that is breached. It sends a signal to the politicians to tamper with the sacred vocation of public administration.

In a most significant sense, breaching the politics-administration dichotomy activates an identity crisis. It calls to question the identity of a public servant, and her status within the governance space. The real point here is that the status of the politicised public servant is ambiguous, compared to the traditional roles and expertise she has been trained for, and which requires regular reskilling to meet current administrative and governance challenges. Within the political space, the public servant is asked to maneuver and exercise her discretionary acumen blindly.

The professional credentials of a public servant are founded on her capacity to maintain a strict neutrality that enhances her capacity to mediate policy formulation and design for any government. However, when politics intervenes, the public servant is confronted by a conflict between ideological and professional interests. And sometimes, the ideological would plausibly override the professional because it is inherently political.Here, professionalism coincides with the essence of being a public servant—the publicness of public service. In other words, publicness demands a level of accountability that derives from engagement with the citizens.

And this is enabled by a professional dedication to an impartial deliberation on public values, social equity and policy intelligence. However, all these would be compromised once the public servants have to weigh their loyalty to the government as well as to the citizens. In all likelihood, politics almost always wins!

Politicians are known for their pursuit of quick wins. This facilitates their constant attempt to store political capital. And this often stand in stark contrast to the policy objectives of the civil servants, among which is the deployment of technical expertise and policy intelligence towards concretising long term governance and development matters. Political partisanship, without doubt, would involve not only the padding of the bureaucrat’s technical expertise, but also the compulsion to step down the expertise in favor of less informed opinions.

And this ultimately compromises the responsibility the public servant owes the state and its citizens.
Beyond the compromise of the technical expertise, there is also the deeper issue of the breach of public ethics. To ask a public servant to be brazenly political and partisan is to drag her into the murky realm of political matters that seems to abhor ethical ad moral consideration which underlies administrative dealings.

And yet, a public servant must not just be traditionally defined by the imperatives of the politics-administration dynamics; she must also be found adequately qualified to handle the demands of democratic governance. In my view, a public servant must be able to balance the significance of her traditional vocational expertise with the necessities of administering and managing institutions in a VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—world.

A public servant does not need the disruptive tendencies of politics to operate and deploy her expertise in a twenty-first century world already disrupted by many challenges from pandemics to political conflicts. Thus, a public administrator or manager needs to evolve in line with the demands of the time. Three such evolutionary phases have been identified. The first is the traditional rule-based Weberian bureaucrat. The second phase is that of the performance-oriented civil servant who embodies managerial tools, values and techniques in the pursuit of measurable productivity in business-like fashion.

And lastly, there is the public manager as collaborator who manages a network of governance actors working together to facilitate infrastructural development and ultimately good governance. All three are not different and distinct, but usually morph into one another. All three would be undermined if the public servant ever strays into politics.

All these do not require a civil or public servant to compromise on her professionalism, expertise and sense of neutral and impartial commitment. On the contrary, she is called upon, in the service of the political and policy mandates of the politicians, to keep sharpening her professional competences and credentials in order to be able to better deliver on her own constitutionally approved mandate of instilling the policy formulation and implementation responsibility with technical expertise and ethical soundness.

Politics intrudes in this fundamental evolution of the public servant and compromises her capacity to genuinely deploy her evolving competences to serve democratic governance. Nigeria needs more of the impartial than the politicised public servant if her democratic governance project would ever be concretised.
Concluded.
Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration, Abuja.