Reengineering bureaucracy as engine room of government

The recently concluded maiden annual distinguished public lecture of the Association of Retired Heads of Service and Permanent Secretaries of Oyo and Osun State, held at the International Conference Centre, University of Ibadan, provided another opportunity to brainstorm on the present challenges and future possibilities of the civil service system in Nigeria. The occasion is a significant one for the fundamental reason that it pools the administrative experiences of retired heads of service and permanent secretaries who in their own rights constitute a legitimate institutional memory that ought to be harnessed in all the conversations that reflect on and rethink the capability of the civil service in Nigeria.

For those familiar with my public commentaries on the civil service and its institutional reform, my preferred methodological approach is to deploy a mix of historical and analytical methodology to outline a trajectory of administrative development, philosophies, and management design thinking to interrogate the current state of the civil service in Nigeria, as the basis for our reflection on the future of public administration in Nigeria. This method not only allows us to make critical deductions from the narrative about the administrative history and praxis in Nigeria and how they have influenced and affected the series of reform strategies and programmes that have been put in place to redirect the civil service system. Further than this, these deductions allow us to explore extrapolations and scenarios for future reform possibilities, with the objective of excavating a number of recommendations that could possibly feed into the policy intelligence of the political and administrative leadership in Nigeria in their spirited efforts to transform the institutional capability requirements of the civil service necessary for achieving democratic service delivery, infrastructural development and ultimately, national socio-economic transformation.

Public administration has come a long way in historical reckoning. From the ancient pharaonic society to the height of Roman sociopolitical requirements, public administration was a phenomenon whose necessity has increased in complexity today. The ancient Pharaohs needed to dam the River Nile and build the mathematically complex pyramids. The ancient Romans needed to efficiently win many complex wars and ingeniously build many engineering feats. From the scribal authority of the ancient pharaohs to the tenured and salaried profession that public administration demanded in the Roman Empire, public administration eventually evolved into a noble vocation that mirrored the Levitical spiritual order of the Hebrews. With Max Weber, the bureaucracy was modelled into a legal-rational command-and-control structure that reflects the Prussian military governance system.

This is the origin of the “I-am-directed” Weberian administrative tradition that Nigeria, as well as most countries of the world, inherited. This tradition conceives of the bureaucracy as a neutral, hierarchically organised, efficient organisation, which demands precision, continuity, discipline, strictness and reliability. The framework of the legal-rational authority privileges written rules and procedures. Each position in the bureaucracy has its duties and rights, which are clearly defined; rules and procedures are laid down to determine how the given authority is to be exercised. Bureaucracy therefore promises a stable organisation despite the fact that its incumbents come and go. How did the bureaucracy then earn its bad reputation? What is it about the bureaucratic system that makes it so powerful as to threaten its very own essence as well as the service it is supposed to carry out on behalf of the government? The short answer is that as the locus of governmental power, the bureaucracy is saddled with the coordination of complex administration that raises the possibility that street-level and front-line bureaucrats follow rules for their own sake.

This is the origin of the bureau pathologies of the civil service system, a pathological predicament that is aggravated in a postcolonial context like Nigeria. Douglas McGregor characterised that tradition as Theory X, a transactional model that conceives of the administrator as a thermostat regulating an organisation founded on a bleak picture of employees. Theory X is undergirded by the perception of human nature as indolent, lacking motivation, naturally egoistic and resistant to change. This is why it became necessary to impose a legal-rational framework. The General Order represents the codified operating standard for this administrative model.

By 1968, the Fulton Report had already been submitted as Britain’s concession to the new managerial revolution of that time, and the urgency of reforming the British civil service had become a great rock in the tideline. By 1974, the Udoji Commission Report had taken the challenge of reorienting Nigeria’s civil service system away from the Weberian tradition towards managerialism. The report’s assessment of the system is its administrative inflexibility which makes it difficult to anticipate and respond to governance and administrative challenges and positive institutional transformation. This particularly concerned, for example, the generalist-professionals rivalry, and the need to inject the system with new blood working within a result-oriented performance management model. Since this report, and the failure to ground its fundamental recommendation that would have strategically transformed the civil service system, Nigeria has been swinging between moving away from the Weberian tradition (as in the Dotun Phillip Report of 1984 that would have managerialism as the foundation of the civil service) and the Allison Ayida administrative revisionism that reconstituted the system along the Weberian order based on the conception-reality gap it detected in the Philip Report.

And yet, since the 1999 commencement of Nigeria’s democratic experiment, the civil service system has witnessed a series of institutional reforms that keep pushing the system towards the goal of being a world-class institution. These reforms include the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, SERVICOM, pension and pay reforms, the professionalisation of the FOS/NBS, FIRS/NEITI, the price intelligence and procurement reform, fiscal responsibility plus MTSS/MTEF, to name just a few. But these achievements are too small and far in between to short-circuit the already distorted trajectory of organisational development through the five-stage life cycle: birth-adolescence-maturity-institutionalisation-reformulation. We have majorly the military intervention in Nigeria’s political development to ‘thank’ for this.

An engineering metaphor helps make the point of reform very clearly: Whereas the Nigerian state urgently needs an administrative back end that is efficiently propelled by a jet engine, what the many years of administrative hiccups, institutional disruptions, reform misconceptions and fortuitous breakthroughs have equipped the bureaucracy with is the capacity inherent in the engine of a Beatle car. Essentially, the service workforce structure can be characterised by a situation where there are too many doing nothing, too many doing too little, and too few people doing too much. It is not surprising therefore that a key part of the diagnosis of the system’s dysfunction is the execution trap derivable from the system’s inability to achieve capability readiness for democratic service delivery.  In a 2005 study, a World Bank review reported the finding that 29 per cent of development programmes ever got completed, 45 per cent of ongoing projects are rated satisfactory, and 26 per cent of such projects usually get cancelled.

How then can we move from institutional debilitation to bureaucratic reform? Institutional reforms underscore the possibility of creatively evolving a developmental democratic state in Nigeria. Such a state, in global discourse, is backstopped by a functional, effective, efficient and optimal civil service system. And so, the reform of the public service is the first condition towards such an objective. This means that the ministries, departments and agencies —the engine rooms of the public service system and therefore of governance—must be adequately capacitated to become effective and efficient as the formidable institutional framework that would be ready at all times to meet the challenge of nation-building, good governance and national development. This requires a change management framework that is anchored around three critical frameworks of significantly reprofiling the quality of bureaucratic efficiency, the quality of service delivery and performance accountability within a democracy, and the professionalism of the public servants.

These critical frameworks focus on the objective of institutional reform: the public bureaucracies must be transformed to become fast-moving, intelligent, professional, information-rich, flexible, adaptable and entrepreneurial; less employee-focused and rule-driven, deliver quality service; performance-focused, accountable and productive—defined objectives and measurable results, outputs and outcomes.

The public bureaucracies must also be transformed to become capable of creating the policy climate that will unlock the energy of the private sector and other sectors to install a new productivity paradigm in the national economy. The public bureaucracies must be operated by a multidisciplinary team of new-generation public managers and project teams signed on to performance agreements or contracts within carefully crafted ministerial scorecards to which everyone is held accountable. They must be bound within a framework of social compact stewardship that sees citizens as clients deserving of effective and efficient services.

To achieve such a new public service demands several systemic and structural imperatives in change management that go straight to the heart of the old Weberian administrative tradition, and its business model and procedures. The first is that a developmental state demands a neo-Weberian administrative framework. The idea of the neo-Weberian is useful for two reasons. One, the managerial revolution in most Western countries was not an attempt to entirely jettison the Weberian model. Rather, the reform efforts were an incremental attempt to recalibrate its efficiency and effectiveness. Two, the Weberian bureaucratic framework has not outlived its utility, especially when considering the African context. The implication of this is that the new public management has to be brought into conversation with the Weberian tradition to be able to achieve the effectiveness and efficiency of the new public service envisioned in Nigeria.

The second imperative is the urgency of rethinking the intellectual foundations of public administration as the vehicle for the administrative reconstruction of the Nigerian state and the quest for good governance. This will involve several developments. There is first the need to reflect on a non-adversarial and cooperative relationship between politicians and administrators. Secondly, the system demands a firm and meritocratic gatekeeping measure that is founded on the principles of public-spiritedness and professionalism. And thirdly is the necessity of keying into global and regional best practices in terms of competency and human resource framework for doing government business and articulating efficiency in the workplace.

The next imperative is correlative. The new foundation on which the public service must be based needs a new generation and cohort of public managers who are capacitated with the requisite values and competencies to manage the demands of the new public service that the developmental state in Nigeria needs to make an appearance in the fourth industrial revolution. This will necessarily serve as the first condition for the possibility of instituting a new performance management system and HRM framework that could transform workplace efficiency and productivity, especially in the face of the new normal that COVID-19 has imposed on the world, and the flexibility demanded by the Gen Z. This is the move that transforms the service IQ in the form of a strategic leadership intelligence through the creation of a multidisciplinary talents-reinforced senior executive service guided by a new ethical professionalism.

Next, the new public service must deal with the demand of facilitating public-private partnership dynamics and moving them to a higher level that allows good corporate governance principles to drive the frameworks for democratic governance. This enables, as part of the HR function transformation, the possibility of incorporating commercial skills as part of the HRM capacitation of the public managers. Lastly, none of these reform imperatives would make any sense if the public service does not facilitate a paradigmatic shift away from adversarial to developmental industrial relations that make it possible for the workplace to generate the level of performance and productivity commensurate with the reform inputs.

Transforming the civil service system is not an issue to be politicised. The simple but fundamental reason is that it is the fulcrum for achieving sustainable development that constitutes the most significant objective of the developmental state. That, in the overall analysis, is where the Nigerian state should be headed.