From elections to governance and performance

There was a symposium yesterday organised by Nextier for the presentation of Prof. Tunji Olaopa’s latest book, ‘The Unending Quest for Reform: An Intellectual Memoir’.

Olaopa’s life and commitment has been one of an intellectual in government devoted to seeking pathways to public service reform so that the Nigerian State can produce and deliver necessary public goods to a people that desperately need public service.

In Nigeria, there has been a high consciousness of the lack of effectiveness in the delivery of public services leading to many efforts to reform the public service so as to improve its performance. Indeed, for the past 35 years, Nigeria has been undergoing a regular process of public sector reforms aimed at increasing the capacity of state actors to provide public goods to citizens.

The reforms have not been very successful. They have simply led to a series of disruptions in the organisation and power equations in the public sector that have led neither to increased efficiencies nor improved service provisioning. 

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Central to the crisis in the public sector has been the marginalisation of key actors in the policy community that could have been a positive force in the reform movement. Specifically, the Nigerian reform-minded public servants; academic and research community has been placed at arms-length in relation to public sector reform and policy development.

Civil society is acclaimed as a key partner in public sector engagement but the reality is that civil society is acclaimed essentially in rhetoric while it only plays a minor role in practice. The key issue is that over the period, the Nigerian State has gradually lost its capacity to perform its key functions and rebuilding public administration would require a strengthening of State capacity. Indeed, one of the most important signifiers of the crisis of the Nigerian state is the collapse of public administration.

The major change that has occurred in Nigerian public administration since the 1980’s has been to settle the question of source of power in favour of political office holders who have now succeeded in subordinating the professional and above all, the administrative cadre of the civil service.

This important change took a long time to occur because the tradition of the civil service, established since the colonial era, has been characterised by the pre-eminence of the administrative cadre. We recall that the system of colonial administration had all powers – legislative, executive and judicial invested in the hands of appointed officials.

A former colonial official used the concept of “Administocracy” to describe the system (Nicolson). 

The adjectives currently employed to describe post-colonial public administration have since been inverted. The service is now generally acknowledged to be inefficient, incompetent, corrupt and lacking in motivation and commitment to its duties.

At the root of the decomposition of public administration in Nigeria has been the rise of kleptocracy – the institutionalised robbery of state resources by those who are supposed to be custodians of state power. Immediately after independence, bribery, graft, nepotism and other corrupt practices increased rapidly.

Gradually, public administration was transformed into the instrument for “administering” this systematic looting of resources of the Nigerian state and its citizens. The colonial ethos of an efficient, selfless and committed civil service declined at the same pace at which a patrimonial state evolved in the country. 

There has been a major transformation in the structure of governmental functions, which occurred essentially during the Babangida Administration – 1985-1993. Rather than focus on improving learning in the public service to improve performance, the easy way out of alternative services was adopted. The process started with a concentration and replication of government functions – regulation, planning, policy-making, policy-implementation and evaluation under one umbrella, the Presidency.

On the other hand, there was a multiplication of extra-ministerial agencies, commissions, boards, committees etc charged with various governmental functions. The reason was that a reform process developed on the assumption that improving the existing system of public administration was impossible.

The strategy adopted therefore aimed at creating a new parallel public administration, as they could not dissolve the one they found. The conscious decision to sideline existing structures of public administration led inexorably towards the marginalisation of ministries. 

Following the inauguration of the democratically elected President in 1999, the new administration tried to revive public administration by motivating civil servants. The main strategy used to motivate the civil service was by increasing their salaries in the first year of the Obasanjo Administration which initiated a new process of public sector reform after the president won a new term in power in 2003.

The decision was to develop more long-term strategies that would address the crisis of structure and agency that had crippled policy-making and policy-implementation in the country. At the core of the new reform agenda developed by his Dream Team was the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS). It was a comprehensive economic reform programme aimed at laying the foundations for economic growth, employment creation, national value orientation and poverty reduction.

The policy package for the reform was based essentially on the precepts of the Bretton Woods institutions and essentially the team believed it did not need national actors to think through policies that could work.

Drawing essentially on World Bank policy papers, they developed transparency and accountability measures to address the crisis of public administration. They also set out to privatise the commanding heights of the economy. The outcome of the process was that Nigeria abandoned its core policy-making process:

Green Paper: A process of extensive consultations between government ministries, departments and agencies to elaborate a new policy direction in relation to the analysis of the inadequacies of existing policy and the resources available – this process leads to the inter-ministerial committee publishing a Green Paper.

Stakeholder Consultations: The Green Paper is then widely distributed to the policy community and stakeholders including the media, universities and research centres and all interested parties for comments, criticisms and inputs on the suggested policy direction. Under the World Bank approach, stakeholder consultation became a one-day affair where “stakeholders” were expected to respond to a policy document they had only received that morning. In the past, weeks and months were devoted to the process.

White Paper: Government then revisits the Green Paper following the stakeholder inputs and then adopts a revised policy direction, which it then issues as a White Paper.

Act: The White Paper is then translated into an executive bill, which is sent to Parliament for enactment as a law of the Federation with modalities for implementation and finance of the new policy direction. 

It is this policy process of extensive consultations within and outside government leading to a policy document that has ownership and the backing of law and is integrated into the normal budgetary process that has been lost in Nigeria. It is this re-integration of the policy community into the policy-making process that should be the first step into developing policies that work. The in-coming governments need to take this seriously.

Public service needs to work hard to re-institute the process of learning within the institution. The easy way out of relying on ready-made policy documents obtained from the World Bank and the UNDP can only undermine capacity, not build it.

Effective public service reform requires the reversal of the marginalisation of ministries and a stop to the multiplication and duplication of extra-ministerial agencies. The expansion of the number of parastatals, mostly under the Presidency should be curbed.

The excellent report of the Oronsanye Panel on rationalising, merging and suppression of parastatals has not yet been implemented after so many years. Over the period, law-making processes in the National Assembly have led to the creation of more agencies of government. That process must be curtailed of that we can fund the really essential agencies of government.