Tunji Olaopa: The guru of public service reforms

This Thursday shall witness a gathering of reform-minded persons under the aegis of the greatest reformer of our times, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, to present to the public, ‘The Unending Quest for Reform: An intellectual memoir’ written by Professor Tunji Olaopa, a person I have always considered as the guru of public service reforms. The book chronicles Olaopa’s life and times, from his humble beginnings in Okeho, Oyo State, through the University of Ibadan, to the federal public service and now finally berthing at the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS).

He got into the federal service through the directorate of social mobilization (MAMSER) and almost immediately got fixated on reforming the public service. He had always been a voracious reader, writer, and confident speaker at public events since his student days and he found his métier at MAMSER.

It was inevitable that his talents would be noticed and as words got around to President Ibrahim Babangida’s ears, Olaopa got the invitation in 1992 to leave MAMSER and join the Speech and Policy unit of the State House.

The chicken had come home to roost. The entry into the State House bureaucracy was the apogee of his aspirations as it was there that Olaopa was exposed to the inner workings of government. It was also there he observed at close range the inequities that make government not to be efficient. He became passionately sold to the ideals of public service reforms.

For the next many years in government, he was to be associated with a myriad of activities associated with public service reform analysis and implementation. At a time, he even served as secretary of the White Paper Panel for Nigeria’s 1995 Ayida Public Service Reform with added desk responsibility for its implementation.

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I first met Olaopa sometime in mid-2004 when both of us were posted as directors in the newly created Bureau for Public Service Reforms (BPRS) to work with the newly appointed Director-General, Dr Goke Adegoroye, to kickstart the agency. I had just returned from a stint in NIPSS, on posting from State House, where I served as Secretary/Director of Administration (SDA), and Olaopa was posted from the Management Service Office of the Head of Service of the Federation (HOSF).  When we reported to Adegoroye, he was still occupying his erstwhile office in the SGF wing of the federal secretariat, where he had been a director. There were no offices or other facilities, yet, for the BPRS.

What I came to know later was that Olaopa had the blueprint for the BPRS. He had developed a concept note to use a critical mass of public servants who, as concerned bureaucrats understood the system sufficiently to want to transform it from within through a coherent change management programme.

He took his concept note to Professor Akin Mabogunje a close associate of President Olusegun Obasanjo who became immediately excited with the ideas. He eventually got him a private appointment to discuss the concept note with the President.

As expected, President Obasanjo snapped at the ideas in Olaopa’s concept note and gave him the marching order to crystallize the ideas for implementation. He was posted to the MSO to firm up his ideas and was lucky to have the patient listening ears of the Head of Service, Yayale Ahmed, with whom they worked together to present to the President the final form of what became the BPRS.

However, when the BPRS was created Olaopa being a middle-level staff was not appointed the DG. It was disappointing, but he soldiered on as its Director of Programmes.

My stay at the BPRS was destined to be short as I was posted back to the State House at the request of Professor A D Yahaya, Political Adviser to the Vice President. But we were to meet again with Olaopa in due course. Towards the closure of the Obasanjo administration in 2006, there arose the need to have an overall look at the structure of the State House administration to see whether it needed tinkering.

The structure had a major overhaul in June 2003 at the beginning of the second term of Obasanjo administration when all the independent offices were merged into a single unit with only one accounting officer. That’s how the office of the vice president, the state house clinic, and others lost their operational and financial independence.

It, then, became necessary to put forward some restructuring plans for the incoming administration to consider. I was chairman of the committee and was provided with the presidential suite in the Sheraton hotel as an operational base.

Olaopa joined the committee as a sounding board of sorts. His rich background and analytical skills were of immense benefit to the committee guiding us to submit a report that was of use for many years after.

After years of waiting, Olaopa was appointed Permanent Secretary in 2010. At last, the expert insider, the knowledge-motivated bureaucrat has reached the pinnacle. In a space of five years, he, however, made the rounds of five postings: Career Management Office, OHCSF, State House, Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity, Federal Ministry of Youth Development and Federal Ministry of Communication Technology. He left the service with an unfulfilled feeling that he could have done more if he had a more stable posting.