Professor Tunji Olaopa

Tunji Olaopa

The public service has been at the core of the theories and practice of public administration for centuries. And this is because it is key to defining the successes or failures of any state or government.

Indeed, and most specifically in contemporary times, the critical transformations that have attended the idea of governance has led to further iterations of what the public service could mean in any contexts. What is called the “new governance paradigm” emerged within the historical context of the fall of the former USSR and the simultaneous rise of the neoliberal orthodoxy that decreed the redefinition of the role of the state in the economy and in governance. With the neoliberal insistence that the state must be a minimal one, the governance space became enlarged in ways that dislodge the hegemony of the state in governance. In other words, once the space of governance is expanded, two significant developments became possible.

One, government’s role in governance became essentially regulatory, and this enables the possibility of delivering non-core functions through the exploration of alternative models of service delivery, as well as a mx of corporatization, privatization, lease contracting, agencification and commercialization. Two, the expansion of the governance space brings in nonstate and nongovernmental actors to complement government’s capacities and capabilities.

From this historical and theoretical perspectives, it becomes immediately clear why the idea of the public service has equally gone through a similar rethinking such that it becomes also possible for service delivery by the public service to be undertaken by independent, voluntary and non-profit organizations and agencies. This begins to affect our understanding of what is “public” if the essential services that are meant to be delivered by the public service have now been either transferred to nonstate or private sector, or they are delivered through a public-private partnership (PPP) contract.

Unfortunately, the understanding of the idea of the public service that operates in states like Nigeria derive from an almost fossilized version enshrined in critical legal instruments like the constitution and the public service rules and other legal instruments that govern the operational and administrative logic of the institution.

This therefore not only raises the prospect of a disjuncture between theoretical, administrative and practical concerns in the way the meaning of the public service has evolved. Put in other words, if the government fails to take notice of the changing connotation of what we call the public service, there is the probability that its understanding of its nature will always be lacking. This is because transforming the meaning and nature of the public service through the imperative of institutional and modernizing reforms are meant to make the public service more flexible and hence more efficient in the task of service delivery to the citizens.

This reflection then inevitably leads us to raising fundamental questions that no government can afford to smoothen over in the rush of political and developmental exigencies. These questions include: What is the “public” in the public service? What makes the “public” public? Are the public service and the public sector synonymous? What is the relationship between what is public and what is private? These are crucial questions that could assist a government in situating the fundamental significance of the public service, within the changing parameters for doing public administration across the world, and thus in adequately outlining the requisite reform frameworks that will greatly improve the capability readiness of the system to deliver goods and service.

The usual ways the public service is designated is functionally, through what we perceive the public service to be doing. And this includes (a) the public functions of government like the public healthcare, law enforcement, security, etc.; and (b) activities that are specifically performed to benefit the public, like education, road maintenance, and other infrastructural services. This descriptive assessment of what a public service does seems straightforward. But it does not do enough for our understanding of how the public service can become the engine room for transforming the citizens’ lives.

One reason for this is that these activities that are ascribed to the government are not often in the domain of the government. Some of them can pass off as commercial activities provided by individuals or private organizations.

But more important is the argument that the public service should be denoted normatively—we understand the public service by what it should be doing, and what its structures, procedures and organizational modalities ought to be. What makes a public service speaks to a value judgment about what activities it should perform. For example, is the railway necessarily a public service even though it serves the public? Pharmacies serve the public, but should they not be a public service?

This immediately tells us that what we call the public services do not necessarily fall within the purview of the government, even though the public sector is solely controlled by the government. Universities usually fall under the public sector, but are also usually provided by private independent actors and agencies.

So, the first thing to note is that what we call the public services are defined as essentially provisions for the public. It is secondary whether those services are provided by the government or private agencies. Of course, the government has a grip on what is provided by the government; the point is that these activities are not entirely confined to the government. The provision of these services straddles the government and nonstate organizations.

The second point is that the publicness of the public service stems from the fact that they derive from carefully calibrated public policy—from critical stakeholders in the governance space—that objectify the intentions of the government for the citizens. The other side of the coin is that the “service” the public service provides are meant for the citizens—the public service provides services that are critical for improving welfare and well-being. The literature has also identified the idea of the redistributive nature of the public service: there is a difference between those who pay for the services and those who benefits from it.

And the last critical point: government, even though not solely, holds the responsibility of trust for providing these services.
What then are the necessary lessons to draw from these definitional issues around what makes the public service “public” and a ‘service”? Let us recall that we began this piece by situating the public service within the context of the new governance paradigm.

This implies that institutional reform must factor in the government and the public sector on the one hand, and the nonstate actors on the other. For the government, the challenge is to deepen the institutional reform of the public service. Essentially, the most significant involve instituting competency-based HR, installing performance management and accountability culture, deepening project management praxis, transforming the wage and incentive structure, enabling talent management system, and establishing the senior executive service (SES) as the core of beefing up the system’s IQ.

This systematically leads to the second level of reform which has to do with structurally articulating and enhancing the professional environment to enable a public private sector integrated governance model according to a globally adapted practice. This demand building up the managerial and institutional capacities of the public service to achieve efficient service delivery; and second, enhance and solidify its collaborative capacities for partnerships and networking. These partnerships require shared learning platforms that make for coherent frameworks that align corporate and public governance structures.

The second dimension of the institutional reform targeted at the public sector, and specifically the public service, is that there is a need to re-professionalize the public service and the public manager in ways to fit into the new partnership imperatives demanded by the new governance paradigm. This will require that the manager’s capacity for understanding and adapting to systems thinking, deploy big data for policy intelligence, create foresight techniques for generating scenarios that strengthen the policy design dynamics to be resilient is deepened sufficiently.

The new public manager also needs composite competences to, one, be able to first manage third party service providers (through service contracts, grants to non-profit organizations, social impact bonds, and other contractual obligations which require a range of commercial, legal, and regulatory skills), and then learn to design contracts that embed performance indicators and deliverables which help in tracking values for investment; two, be better at smartly managing citizens engagement by leveraging the benefits of the social media, opinion research, user-data analytics, crowdsourcing, etc.; and finally be trained adequately in acquiring the skills needed in effectively managing the change management programs that facilitate proper implementation trajectories.

The other side of the reform expectation involves the participation of the nonstate and nongovernmental agencies and private sector professionals in the governance space. Given the difficulty that has been experience in the relational pattern between the public servants and private sector professionals, especially those we regard as cross-over professionals, there is the urgent need for the nonstate agencies and professionals to recognize the structural imperatives of the public service as a profession in its own right with its own unique code of practice and ethics.

Secondly, reforms must be targeted at developing and enhancing collaborative parameters and structures that enable technocrats, professionals and bureaucrats to work productively together.
The public service is the fulcrum that services the social contract between the government and the citizens. If a government must be developmental and democratic, the public service system must be the focus of ensuring that infrastructural development and public services are distributed effectively and efficiently to facilitate the well-being of the citizens.

*Prof. Tunji Olaopa, Retired Federal Permanent Secretary
& Professor of Public Administration
[email protected]