Unending passion for reform: A peep into my memoir and the future of Nigeria

In 1976, Karl Popper, easily one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, published his autobiography, the Unended Quest. It was the philosopher’s attempt to capture in graphic, simple and autobiographical form, the trajectory of his intellectual life—how his existence came to be circumscribed by series of philosophical ideas that eventually defined not only his fame as a philosopher but also his existential fulfillment as a human person.

“An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived,” says Herbert Samuel, the British liberal politician. Of course, for Karl Popper, the intellectual autobiography is a testament to a life that became philosophical at a young age. It was while working between 1922 to 1924 with a cabinetmaker, Adalbert Posch, that he first fell in love with epistemology and started wrestling with the dynamics of knowledge that derived from the early influences a book-filled house had on him.

By the time Popper published the Unended Quest in 1976, I was still in the process of my preliminary educational formation, with no clear clues as to what life held or in what directions I was headed. I was deeply enmeshed in the exuberances of a secondary school student who sees life in terms of the day–to- day excitements and rascality. But then, I had also began accumulating some specific life experiences in terms of social relations and unexplained incidences. Three are significant here for my intellectual, political and spiritual life formation.

The first, my first brutal initiation into Nigeria’s zero-sum politics, happened in 1965 when the horrific consequences of the political antagonism between Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief S. L. Akintola landed squarely in my little world in the South-West. I was right in its path. The terrible fact of a person being doused and burnt by thugs was kept indelibly in my confused and shocked mind that would later start groping for answers to human inhumanity to human.

The second encounter was more intellectual—I met Plato on a shelf in the personal library of my uncle, Chief Alfred Olaopa. His copy of Plato’s Republic became immediately fascinating to me because of its dialogic form. But then, my grasping mind got more than the dramatic form that gave form to Plato’s philosophical ideas, insights and arguments. By the time I had arrived at the University of Ibadan for a long immersion in political science and political theory, I had already found a way to connect between the degenerating democratic experiment of ancient Athens that instigated Plato into philosophic reflection when Socrates was killed, and the debilitating condition of post-independence Nigeria that I witnessed as a six-year old boy in a small corner of Oyo State, in modern Nigeria. My university sojourn gave me the theoretical framework with which to make sense of my groping for meaning of the Nigerian experience.

My third encounter was more spiritual. In 1976, after my witnessing thuggery and just about when I encountered Plato’s reform vision in the Republic, I suddenly developed an intense headache that snowballed into incessant migraines that lasted for ten years. There was not anything we did not try, from tablets to herbs; and from hospitals to churches. Of course, my parents concluded it was a spiritual attack. I took the mental pain to my days at the university before it was finally resolved well after my graduation and youth service. But I learnt a lot about spirituality and God from that trauma.

By the time I joined the Presidency in 1992, and eventually the civil service, I had come full circle in my introspection and reflection about my place in the world, my research focus and direction. All of what I considered to be Nigeria’s cogent predicaments, the fundamental problems with the public service, the role that the civil service can play in reconstructing the Nigerian project. And at this point in my personal formation, I have developed a philosophy of reform in its administrative, technocratic and social dimensions. This is where I found the uniqueness of my life trajectory—and the urgency of publishing a memoir: my intellectual and professional maturation is tied in with the concerted efforts to find resolutions for Nigeria’s postcolonial predicaments.

And it is my desire to share my own little efforts with those who have similar patriotic aspirations and would want to keep holding up the flag. This is the key import of The Unending Quest for Reform. I am in the forefront of the narration because I believe that providence had projected my being into the cauldron of the unfolding and unraveling of the Nigerian state at the time I was born, just some few months before Nigeria came into politico-administrative existence via her flag independence.

As I narrated in all the pages of the memoir, the entirety of my intellectual development, from secondary school to the University of Ibadan, as well as the entire trajectory of my professional coming of age and maturity had been devoted to understanding the Nigerian project and assembling the credentials and competences to find ways and means by which to make Nigeria work positively for Nigerians. I consider myself to be a minor protagonist in a narrative that maps how the Nigerian state has evolved over the course of its independence, and how it has failed to keep up with the imperatives of her greatness. The Unending Quest for Reform is a narration about the historical unraveling of the Nigerian state, the great ideological conceptualization of its future, especially during the first republic, the operationalization of the colonial landmines, especially through one of the greatest institutional inheritances (the civil service system), the weaponization of Nigeria’s plurality by those who would undermine Nigeria’s greatness for their greedy primitive accumulation, the struggle to get back on track, especially by the civil service and its effort to administratively redirect Nigeria’s infrastructural development—all from my perspective.

Even as a minor protagonist in Nigeria’s political drama, I consider myself to be significant in her search for greatness. The Unending Quest for Reform is my account of my diagnosis of my life within the trajectory’s Nigeria’s protracted search for nationhood. Therefore, I do not see as self-indulgent in any sense. Eleanor Roosevelt got my intention quite right. For her, “Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyse may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.” There is a generational and professional handholding gesture that I intend this memoir to concretize. Even though the memoir speaks about some dimensions of my life, it is meant to specifically outline my journey from the first encounter with Nigeria’s institutional dysfunctionality to the administrative philosophy that could transform her governance and institutional reforms.

I remember vividly that this is the clear mandate I received from Chief Simone Adebo, in one of those crucial encounters I had with him that clarified my incipient yearning for administrative and institutional transformation through research and praxis. He was worried that civil servants in Nigeria are often the butt of derogatory representations and scurrilous analyses that tied them to damages done to the Nigerian state. And yet, these civil servants fail to provide the insights into their professional intervention in the administrative dynamics of Nigeria, especially through personal narratives and systematic documentation. The Unforgettable Years, Chief Adebo’s
autobiography, serves the grand purpose of outlining the critical years of the founding of the Nigerian civil service system and that was tied to the working of Nigeria’s plural unraveling. That autobiography had to have been written because Adebo himself constituted a legacy that represents the golden age of Nigeria’s public service.

To read The Unforgettable Years is to not only understand how the civil service system came into existence and developed, it is also to understand the roles that the civil servants and politicians played in the first few years of Nigeria’s postcolonial existence. More than this, it is also to understand how the famous Awolowo-Adebo model of politics-administration dichotomy was operationalized in ways that gave birth to the infrastructural wonders of the old Western Region.

This is the same sense of immersion that one gets when reading Chief Theophilus Akinyele’s Beyond Pushing Files, or Prof. Akinlawon Mabogunje’s A Measure of Grace. It was partly what I wanted to achieve when I compelled the late Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade to approve the biographical narrative of his life and experience as an intellectual and civil servant. In A Prophet is with Honor, I narrated how Aboyade embodied the town-and-gown framework, and how the trajectories of his life and professional experience were connected with the deep desire to enhance the development of Nigeria.

I am therefore hoping that this memoir will also be a part of the existing and excellent personal narratives of significant public servants that complement Nigeria’s political and administrative histories, and critically gesture at the fundamental place and roles of the public service in Nigeria’s development agenda.

The Unending Quest for Reform was written within the best tradition of memoirs. Caroline Knapp, the American writer, captures this essence beautifully: “By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.” The self-disclosure that underlies this memoir is meant to point outside of myself and the experiences I have accumulated to a larger national context that facilitated most of these experiences and how the dynamics of governance and institutional reforms that define my professional and philosophical endeavors could be turned towards the betterment of Nigeria and Nigerians.

In eighteen chapters, I wove a long story that began from my native town in Aáwé and ended within the trenches of institutional reforms within the public service space in the presidency and other MDAs in Abuja. The contours of that intellectual and professional unraveling took me to several parts of the world and brought me in contact and engagements with several people. I was
brought to critical points in my understanding of the trouble with Nigeria, to quote Chinua Achebe. Since, for me, the civil service represents the most crucial point in the developmental awakening of the Nigerian state—as a democratic and developmental state—I dare say I was brought to a fundamental understanding of what is wrong with that system and how it can fixed. I did the rounds of all the significant institutional nodal point, and I researched theories and administrative practices across the globe that could shed light on the way forward. I have been a part of some of the fundamental attempts at administrative restructuring in the Nigerian civil service.

I have also partaken at some high-level and high-powered committees and sessions to hammer out some of the crucial documents around which institutional reforms have been anchored. By the time I became a permanent secretary, I had been able to harness all my knowledges and administrative competences, and formulated a three-pronged framework.

First: I was able to craft my objective around the need to understand and add value to the ongoing reform efforts geared towards strengthening the capacity base and professionalism of the civil service as a critical factor in national development. Second: I gradually commenced developing a reform philosophy and strategy premised on the need for the evolution of a productivity paradigm designed to generate a dynamic thinking process to resolve the crisis; which requires a workforce that is professional, confident and productive and a reform that effects critical structural and behavioral changes that motivates the redefinition of the Federal Civil Service in the pursuit of performance and innovation at all levels. And third: from the objective to the reform strategy, I was able to formulate what I consider to be the fundamental role of my status as a permanent secretary. It became clear to me that my reform philosophy automatically places a huge responsibility on a permanent secretary as a change agent.

From the Career Management Office to Information Technology ministry, I was presented with multiple opportunities to bring my reform philosophy to bear on the internal administrative limitations and possibilities of the MDAs. By the time it dawned on me that deep-seated systemic changes required far more strategic alignment of the administrative and political, retirement had already happened in 2015. Fortunately, I was not caught napping. One of the most significant lessons I learnt from my many years of mentoring by the late Aboyade was the critical link between Nigeria’s development agenda, the civil service system and think tanking. The business of reform cannot be understood in terms of insider dynamics alone. There must be a way to carry it on with
patriotic fervor even right from outside the institutional frames of the civil service. This was the reflection that led to the emergence of the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy (ISGPP). The ISGPP is conceived to be an independent organisation devoted to research and executive education for those in government and other sectors of society in Nigeria and the rest of Africa. Essentially, it is meant to function as a policy and research think tank whose fundamental objective is to address the skills and competence deficit that would transform public bureaucracies and the political arrangements of Nigeria and other African states in ways that will make them work even better for a responsive democratic governance and inclusive development.

Without blowing my own trumpet, I believe that with The Unending Quest for Reform I have created a narrative on the necessary imperative of keeping the business of reform always on the front burner of administrative and institutional performance and productivity through change management and reform. That is what the title of the memoir is meant to address. The need to keep modernizing the institutions of performance and productivity that will enable the public sector to keep delivering services efficiently never ends. And this unending imperative is frankly and bluntly juxtaposed with the protracted but not-so-successful reform efforts of consecutive Nigerian governments since independence. The Nigerian reform landscape has never lacked genuine agenda and blueprints that critically diagnose and assess the imperative of reforms and what needed to be done. Unfortunately, they have all ended in the trash bin of haphazard implementation. And so, from the perspective of my reform experience, the discerning reader ought to have fathomed why I would think this memoir should matter within the transition to another republic in Nigeria. The Unending Quest for Reform sums the entirety of my experience, passion and reflections about transforming Nigeria, and the strategies and tactics by which I reckon the transformation could be achieved. We cannot afford to let the fifth republic be another wasted effort in governance and institutional restructuring.

In the memoir, and as a framework that signposts the future of a revamped public administration system that backstops the larger governance agenda that any new administration might want to leverage for national transformation, I set out series of recommendations for reform. These could be taken to be part of the tangibles that my academic researches and professional experiences as a scholar-practitioner have yielded over the years. The most fundamental logical reform step for the new administration in Nigeria to take, as a governance and administrative imperative, I noted, is the creation of a change space. This is a space that enables the new Nigerian leadership to harness competences, skills and strategies that enable it to push institutional and governance changes despite contextual circumstances and pressures. A change space is therefore the context that facilitates transformation through the committed efforts of several change agents, from the politicians and government functionaries to the civil and public servants. This automatically focuses on the fundamental role of a transformational leader as the moving force that catalyzes the change space into a domino effect of several innovative changes and reforms. The focus of the desired transformation to be initiated in the change space is the transformation of the policymaking dynamic such that policy becomes strategic and motivated by policy intelligence and research emanating from a technical configuration of town and gown institutional arrangements that bring the strategic offerings from the universities, think tanks and industries to bear on how the government make and implement policies.

Reforming the public service system is meant to facilitate a deep-seated culture change that transforms professionalism and public-spiritedness. This is meant not only to improve the efficiency of the civil servants, but to also galvanize the system into optimal performance and productivity. This must necessarily commence with a very high level of a revamped gatekeeping dynamics through the civil service commission that not only streamline recruitment metrics, but also collaborate to facilitate the emergence of a critical and functional communities of service and practice, like the National Association for Pubic Administration and Management (NAPAM).

Internal administrative reforms commence with the institutionalization of performance management systems that are underpinned by competence-based HR function and practices, as well as the inauguration of a multidisciplinary platform that serves as the launching pad for the emergence of a senior executive service drawn from sectors of the Nigerian societies, including the Nigerian diaspora. The essence of the performance management framework is to serve as a precursor to a full-fledged modernization of the service delivery capacity of the public service through the transformation of government business, transformation of corporate governance principles, and the undermining of the adversarial elements in labor unionism. The new administration cannot also underestimate the crucial significance of the public-private partnership protocol as the engine of efficient service delivery to Nigerians.

All memoirs hold some form of enlightenment for the assiduous readers. I want to believe that The Unending Quest for Reform possesses the same possibility. The advantage of reading it is that it provides three levels of engagement. For those interested in the pure narrative of my coming of age within a Yoruba Christian home, chapters two, four, five and the coda are your starting point. If your forte is an understanding of my intellectual becoming, then chapters one, three, four and seven are critical. I outlined my spiritual trajectories in the coda, and chapters five, six and seven. My professional development, administrative challenges and achievements, and reform philosophy are the subject of chapters eight to eighteen. But then, since no narration of a complicated life can be that seamless and smooth, an immersive reading of The Unending Quest for Reform is required for full enjoyment. I hope you will be able to pick a copy to get an insight into how my life intersects a vision of Nigeria as a democratic and developmental possibility.

Olaopa is retired Federal Permanent Secretary and Professor of Public Administration Founder, Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy (ISGPP), Bodija, Ibadan. tolaopa2003@gmail.com