The government environment is inhabited by two quite different species: ministers and civil servants. Both enjoy a symbiotic relationship, and good government depends on each fully understanding its role and playing it well. Ministers provide political leadership and policy direction: they set a clear vision, goal and objective. Civil servants turn the objective into workable policy that delivers worthwhile outcomes. The different characteristics, roles and relationships of ministers and civil servants are therefore indispensable to the process of government. My intervention last week on President Buhari’s unwillingness, so far, to appoint his ministers was thus to make the point that Nigeria doesn’t yet have a fully functioning government since a significant part, the cabinet, is still missing.
To be fair, President Buhari has been meeting and giving political direction to permanent secretaries and chief executives or directors-general of parastatals, who now report directly to him. The president is, effectively, playing the roles of all his future ministers combined. But, for the sake of effective governance, this is not sustainable for much longer. It is certainly not sustainable or even prudent that, at a time of serious economic crisis, there is no finance minister to provide political leadership and policy direction. Instead, the central bank governor is acting as the de facto finance and trade ministers, making far-reaching fiscal and trade policy decisions. During the global financial crisis in 2008, the Americans did not leave the fate of their economy solely in the hands of the chair of the Federal Reserve nor the British solely in the hands of the governor of the Bank of England. Rather, the US and the UK had in place, respectively, the Treasury Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer to take charge of the situation and to become the political and public faces to whom the markets could relate and from whom they could derive some confidence.
However, as I also argued last week, the rationale behind the president’s decision to delay the appointment of his cabinet is sound and reasonable. I believe that the current hiatus in the process of governance is a price worth paying for laying a robust foundation for good governance in this country, as the president has promised. But the delay must be worth the wait, and the president should at some point soon unveil his “new rules of conduct and good governance” and name his irreproachable ministers! I wait with bated breath!
In the meantime, I would like to turn my attention to the second unique specie in the government environment. Much of the public discourse has focused on Buhari’s future ministers, the more visible of the two species, as if once the ministers are in place the state will conduct its affairs. But, as the political theorist Max Webber made clear, particular attention should also be paid to the civil service, because the state will not conduct its affairs without the bureaucracy. So, my concern here is the civil service. However, I am not talking about the whole of the civil service, but that tiny part known as the administrative or policy civil service. This part is usually so small that, for instance, in the UK, it is under 5 percent of the whole civil service; the rest are executive or operational staff. So, who are policy civil servants? What do they do? What skills do or should they possess? And does Nigeria have this category of civil servants? I will come back to these questions in a moment but, to provide context, let me first touch briefly on the relationship between Nigeria’s civil service and its system of government.
Nigeria practises the US-type presidential system of government, but adopts the British-type permanent civil service. The US has an openly politicised senior civil service. For instance, a new US president could, under the constitution, sack all existing senior civil servants, from deputy-director level or even lower, and nominate his own people to replace them. There are approximately 1,150 to 1,250 presidentially nominated positions in the executive branch. By contrast, British civil servants – senior and junior – enjoy continuity of employment or job security regardless of change of government. Nigeria inherited the British model at independence, but in the late 1980s, under the Babangida regime, there was a recommendation that the civil service should be aligned with the presidential system of government that the country practises. Consequently, Decree No 43 of 1988 abolished the post of permanent secretaries and created the political post of directors-general, who would be appointed directly by the president and would leave office once a new president was elected, unless retained. But, unsurprisingly, the reform faced stiff resistance from the civil service, and was later abandoned. So, Nigeria continues to operate the British-style permanent civil service while practising the US-based presidential system of government.
To be sure, permanence is more efficient and more capable of building and maintaining trust in the process of government than any other alternative. Its key benefits are political impartiality, institutional memory and continuity. But there is also a clear division of labour that exists between ministers and civil servants in a British-style permanent civil service. Ministers bring democratic legitimacy and accountability as well as political direction and a common-sense approach to government, while civil servants bring expertise, specialist knowledge, experience in specific policy areas and objective, first-class, advice. Indeed, this division of labour – the political leadership of ministers and the expertise of civil servants – is the reason why, in the UK, ministers are seldom appointed to a particular department because they have an expertise in its work. Instead, the minister is appointed to bring a common-sense and political approach to government with expert advice provided by civil servants. For instance, Gordon Brown, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) for more than eight years before becoming prime minister in 2007, is a historian with a PhD in History. The current Chancellor, George Osborne, also studied History, while Alistair Darling, another former Chancellor, read Law and practised as a solicitor. But while they are very intelligent people, they led and were supported by Treasury civil servants whose expertise and specialist knowledge and skills are second to none!
In a democracy, civil servants help mediate the social contract between the government and the people. Their task is to ensure that democratically determined programmes and promises can translate from the pages of a manifesto into practice. They do this by discerning the nature of the government’s programme or objective, by being innovative and creative in identifying good ideas and solutions, and by advising accurately on which specific policy or decision will be most likely to achieve the objective. The ability of civil servants to supply the expertise, provide ministers with a range of options, give evidence-based advice or recommendation and, in the end, help ministers decide and implement policy is critical to the proper functioning of government in a liberal democracy.
But, let’s be clear. As one senior British minister puts it, “The special tasks required of the administrative civil service to enable ministers to operate a liberal democracy are very special indeed. And the skills involved very great. The possession of these skills on the part of the administrative civil servants is very precious”. British ministers value the possession of policy skills by their administrative civil servants so much that they continue to invest in their development. For instance, the Fast-Stream scheme is designed to attract some of the brightest university graduates into the civil service and to provide excellent training and development for them so they could achieve rapid promotion to progress to the senior civil service. The British civil service has also recently launched the policy profession scheme, which is aimed at “the development of people with the talent and drive to reach the very highest levels of the Civil Service Policy Profession”. The scheme involves sending suitable civil servants to study for the prestigious Executive Master of Public Policy, run by the London School of Economics. This focus on expertise is, of course, consistent with having a permanent civil service. And the upshot is that the UK has one of the best civil services in the world!
Now, that brings me to the questions that I posed earlier. What is the situation in Nigeria, which, like Britain, also has a permanent civil service? Does the Nigerian civil service have a core of administrative civil servants that can expertly develop policy? For example, can they turn the programmes or objective in the APC manifesto into a fully specified policy or a fully specified decision? Have they, in any case, proactively studied and discerned the nature of the manifesto programme or promises to understand how they might work in practice, including the challenges to their delivery? Or are they simply waiting to be instructed or directed by the president or his in-coming ministers and then simply say “yes sir”, without providing the depth of evidence-based policy analysis, including challenging implicit and explicit assumptions, which goes with proper policy making?
Well, the evidence, sadly, is that the Nigerian civil service lacks any appreciable policy-making expertise. Everyone now seems to accept that the civil service is not fit for purpose. In a recent interview in the Vanguard newspaper, Philip Asiodu, a respected former permanent secretary, lamented the extinction of the administrative class in the Nigerian civil service. The federal character principle and quota system has “destroyed the administrative class concept”, he said, adding that the civil service is “no longer the destination for high fliers”.
The result is that, despite its “permanent” status, the Nigerian civil service lacks the expertise and specialist knowledge that should come with such permanence. Indeed, Nigeria prefers to have ‘expert’ or technocratic ministers than a technocratic civil service. But the technocratic ministers often become hubristic and lord it over their ministries, instead of fostering an open, honest and trusting policy environment. On the other hand, the civil servants are noted for simply taking direction. They lack the ability and the confidence to provide internal challenge and robust stress-testing that help produce successful policies.
Of course, ministers matter. They provide political leadership and policy direction. Indeed, the individual leadership of ministers and that of permanent secretaries can make significant difference to policy outcomes. But ministers or even permanent secretaries cannot perform the functions of the core administrative or policy civil servants. In addition to strong leadership, the civil service also needs a cohort of experts that can develop and implement government policy effectively. Unfortunately, Nigeria’s civil service currently lacks such critical expertise, which is a serious blow to effective governance in this country.
President Buhari is right to tackle corruption in the civil service, and I applaud his plan to restore the service’s “old glory”. But this must include building genuine expertise in the bureaucracy. No great economy exists without a first-class civil service. The president’s plan to create a new governance framework for Nigeria should therefore involve having a competent and efficient civil service. This includes creating and nurturing a class of administrative or policy civil servants, as well as attracting and developing excellent talents in the civil service. A good starting point would be to adopt the UK’s Fast-Stream scheme. Ministers and civil servants are the two parts of government and the linchpins of successful policies. Nigeria needs a civil service that can play its part well.
Olu Fasan
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