Professor Tunji Olaopa

By Tunji Olaopa

One of the founding theses of public administration reform philosophy is that the dysfunction and reconstruction of the administrative system must be figured out both in theory and in practice, and public administration had therefore historically functioned within frameworks of communities of practice and service and their knowledge networks. And that, among other things, implies that theory and practice must first be seen as being two sides of the same coin rather than two mutually exclusive frameworks. When I made the decision so early in my public service career to study the theoretical foundations of the Nigerian public service system, it dawned on me that dissecting the dysfunctional dynamics of the public service system provokes theoretical insights by which to engage with these same dysfunctions. However, the gross anti-intellectualism of the policy space in Nigeria contributes to one of the fundamental deficiencies in the institutional framework of the public service in Nigeria: a mix of conception-reality and passion without knowledge gaps that manifest in terms of a mismatch between theoretical and reform paradigms on the one hand, and local conditions, circumstances and realities on the other. Indeed, administrative reforms are conceived and implemented to a significant extent with scant recognition that public administration has a theoretical foundation that is way distinct from the theoretical assumptions of the core management science.

We therefore arrive at a most significant reason why the public service system has been struggling to constitute the institutional mechanism to backstop democratic governance and its dividends for Nigerians. If we take it as axiomatic that the bureaucracy is a necessary complement to democracy, then it implies that the public service must be in topnotch shape—in terms of human resource management, performance accountability and productivity metrics—to be able to deliver on the imperatives of good governance. The public service system in Nigeria has however been struggling with the necessity for institutional reform that will transform it into a worldclass mechanism that could serve the need of a developmental state and its democratic requirements.

Ultimately, the fate of the public service and its optimal functionality—its capacity readiness to service democratic governance anywhere—lies firmly in the type of theoretical questions we ask in terms of what should drive the practice of public administration. The big questions are fundamental questions that articulate the relationship between theory and practice, and provide the directions that enable theorists and practitioners to make sense of any endeavor. The big questions that public administration is confronted with help to shape how it grounds its frameworks, dynamics and paradigms, especially when applied to the working of the state and the imperatives of governance.

Three initial big questions have been offered that are meant to ground public management. One: how can public managers break away from non-innovative fixation with excess of procedural rules which prevent pubic agencies from achieving measurable result and outcome? In other words, how might we ignite the shift from current input-process fixation to an output-outcome-impact-results-based management framework? Two: how can public managers motivate their workforce to achieve more in performance terms? Three: how can public managers measure these achievements?

These how-questions underscore the capacity of the public manager and her capacity to facilitate the capacity readiness of the public bureaucracy. This approach, especially in public administration, focuses on the public managers and their objective of capacitating the public agencies as an organization with its own unique character. However, as the objection goes, such an approach is limited in its failure to connect the functionality of the public bureaucracy or agency to the institutional demands of a democratic government. Public administration in a democracy is a whole ballgame all by itself. Once we see the intimate connection between public administration and a democracy, then we immediately see how there is a need for new set of big and fundamental questions that will adequately guide public administration practice within a democratic context.

Seven of such questions have been provided in the literature. “(1) What are the instruments of collective action that remain responsible both to democratically elected officials and to core societal values? (2) What are the roles of nongovernmental forms of collective action in society, and how can desired roles be protected and nurtured? (3) What are the appropriate tradeoffs between governmental structures based on function (which commonly eases organizational tasks) and geography (which eases citizenship, political leadership, and societal learning)? (4) How shall tensions between national and local political arenas be resolved? (5) What decisions shall be “isolated” from the normal processes of politics so that some other rationale can be applied? (6) What balance shall be struck among neutral competence, representativeness, and leadership? (7) How can processes of societal learning be improved, including knowledge of choices available, of consequences of alternatives, and of how to achieve desired goals, most importantly, the nurturing and development of a democratic polity?”

Unfortunately, it is not just sufficient to align public administration and public management to the imperatives of democratic government, as these seven questions by John Kirlin of the University of South California has attempted to do. A further criterion is missing. And this, because the experience of public administration and democracy differs from context to context. The contextual criterion ensures that the fundamental big questions we need to ask will be those that will take seriously the peculiarities and uniqueness of the context within which public administration will be expected to interact and backstop democratic governance. This is even more so in the Nigerian context where public administration and democratic government must factor postcolonial circumstances into the type of fundamental questions they are meant to engage with.

The Nigerian state, since its post-independence trajectory, has generated its own unique experience of public administration. This can be framed in terms of the myriad attempts at achieving institutional reform of the public service system inherited from the British colonialists. The commencement of the democratic experiment in 1999 puts a new spin on the urgency of bending public administration to the demands of democratic governance that will transform the quality of life of millions of Nigerians who have been promised the dividends of democracy. How then can we articulate the fundamental questions that should guide our understanding of the relationship between public administration and democratic governance in Nigeria? What are the critical issues that the government, its bureaucracy and public administration theorists ought to make the core of their reflective endeavor?

In what follows, I frame seven of such big questions in line with my many years of theoretically and practically engaging with the perils and promises of the public service as a mechanism for democratic fulfilment in Nigeria.

One: How can public managers break away from non-innovative fixation with excess of procedural rules and regulations that prevent public agencies from producing results and outcomes that translate to better life to the people in a democracy? This question speaks to the centrality of the “I-am-directed” Weberian tradition and the centrality of the input and process-oriented business model that undermine the output-oriented model which demands performance, efficiency, productivity.

Two: ⁠How can the public service resolve the seemingly jinxed pay and remuneration policy problem which has prevented the public service from achieving an excellent talent management regime that enables attraction and retention of talented professionals and some of the scarce skills the service requires to perform at optimal levels? This is a question that stems from government’s loss of status as the employer of choice which in turn has eroded civil service’s prestige as a brand, as well as the inability of the public bureaucracy to attract and retain the brightest and the best while managing adversarial industrial relation that undergirds employer-employee contractual obligations.

Three; ⁠How can public managers measure the achievements of their agencies in a way that is game-changing for performance of government and the productivity of the national economy? The success of democratic governance in Nigeria is aligned to the urgent need for a shift in the productivity paradigm that ensures that the public service system becomes motivated by a performance management that increases the productivity profile of the Nigerian state.

Four: ⁠How can the nature and role of the state be sustainably redefined and how to leverage same to organize and utilize government resources to better achieve the collective good? The nature and the role of the state keeps changing in relation to its governance responsibility. And this demands that the success of public administration is seen in terms of the state’s relationship to other non-state and nongovernmental actors that are stakeholders in the governance space.

Five: ⁠How can the public service regain public trust and foster social equity within framework of stewardship relationship with the people in a democracy? This question addresses the modalities by which the public service system function as a democratic institution that is transparent, accountable and open to the citizens as the most significant component of a democratic government.

Six; How should NGOs be empowered so they can play more positive role in society and in getting public policy to achieve the common good, and how can their desired roles be better protected? NGOs, as a nonstate actor, opens up the governance space (hitherto dominated by government and its agencies), and serve as the critical mediator between the government and the citizens.

Seven: ⁠How can the public service strike a balance between the values of being neutral and non-partisan as basis for strengthening professional ethics and the public servants’ capacity to speak truth to power? The founding dichotomy in public administration—the politics/administration distinction—insists that the politician and the administration must operate on different level of the policy divide. However, this dichotomy must be balanced with the capacity of the public servant to confront and engage with policy somersaults that fails the test of policy intelligence and action research.

These big questions constitute core issues which the public administration profession in Nigeria must foreground as the central reflective points for rethinking the functionality of the public service in Nigeria’s quest for democratic distinction on the continent.

*Prof. Tunji Olaopa, Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission & Professor of Public Administration, Abuja