Public administration and national transformation

A major gap in the ongoing debate about political and constitutional reform centres on the role of the civil service. There has been much concern about fiscal federalism, the executive and the legislature, local government and the lot, but little or nothing regarding the role of civil servants.

This is rather surprising. The Nigerian public service employs over 3 million people; about a million in the federal service and 2 million at the state and local tiers of government.  The public sector accounts for probably 16 percent of our gross domestic product. Government is big business. While the private sector is the engine and locomotive of growth, the public sector is a key catalyst in the development process, both as employer and as financier of critical economic sectors, including construction and real estate, infrastructures and social services.

I draw a distinction between the civil service as narrowly defined in terms of civil servants who man the various ministries, departments and agencies of government (MDAs) and the public service which includes judges and employees in the judiciary; the education sector from school teachers to the professoriate; health workers, including doctors, pharmacists and nurses and others. There are also the armed services – the military, customs, road safety corps, immigration and the prison service. 

It is generally acknowledged that one of the positive legacies that the British left us was a highly effective civil service. The distinguished American economist, Wolfgang Stolper, was one of the architects of our first national development plan during 1959 to 1961. He described our civil service as among the best in the Commonwealth ahead of India, Malaysia and Kenya.  He was in awe of some of our great civil servants of those days; men such as Chief Simeon Adebo, Mahmud Attah and Ali Akilu.

During the difficult years of 1966—1970, the higher civil service was the bulwark of national patriotism; a moderating influence on the excesses of the politicians and the army. Today, the civil service has sadly become a by-word for corruption, nepotism, sloth and rent-seeking. Several factors account for this fall from grace.

The first is recruitment. In contrast to what obtained in the past, recruitment into the public service is based on nepotism rather than merit. Governors, senators, ministers and permanent secretaries all have their “slots” for new candidates. Nobody looks at qualification anymore. Merit has literally been thrown to the dogs. 

Linked to this is the abuse of the “Federal Character” principle. One appreciates the need for fairness and representation in the recruitment process. But this must never be at the expense of merit as currently obtains. I know of many instances in government departments and agencies where deadwood are slotted in merely for the sake of satisfying state quotas.

Thirdly, training and skills development hardly takes place anymore.  The early crops of Nigerian civil servants underwent professional training at Cambridge, Oxford and at the Royal Institute of Public Administration in the United Kingdom. The National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), where I once served as a Fellow, was the “finishing school” for the most promising candidates for promotion to the higher administrative cadre. Training and skills development were encouraged in those days. Today, there is little that goes by way of training.  I understand we now have a new Civil Service College. The inauspicious buildings located on the noisy highway from Abuja to Kaduna do not seem promising at all.

Lastly, political interference and lack of tenure are the bane of the civil service. A weakened civil service with hardly any technical competence is in no position to muster the professional and moral authority that would impress its political masters. The politicians end up with little or no administrative guidance. The result is poor implementation of government policies and plans. The decision to let off directors and permanent secretaries after a maximum of 8 years of continuous service is a serious erosion of the principle of tenure which has further compounded matters.

What is the way forward?

I start from the premise that a government can never rise above the level and quality of its administrative service. This is so because the science of government in our twenty-first century requires that public policies must be formulated and implemented within the framework of intellectual and professional rigour.  Where such professionalism and rigour are lacking, we have incompetence, failure and folly.

The way forward for us in Nigeria is address frontally all the key challenges facing public administration in our day. We had the Udoji Commission in the 1970s. We had yet another reform Commission under my former boss and mentor Adedotun Phillips. With all respect to my mentor, I think the general thrust of the Phillips report was misguided. Anxious to clip the wings of the so-called “super-permanent secretaries”, Phillips ended up weakening the higher administrative service and eroding tenure. If the Murtala Mohammed purges strangled the civil service, the Phillips Commission administered its requiem mass.

I also think it was an act of folly for the Obasanjo administration to believe the civil service itself could undertake its own internal reforms. These things never work in that way. Going forward, we need a national commission headed by a top former public servant of international repute to put a team to work on real structural reforms of the civil service.

We need a merit-based bureaucracy based on a rigorous competitive examination system as obtains in countries such as Britain, France, Japan, India, South Korea and Singapore; one that attracts the best that our country can offer. And we must pay them at par with the private sector. Promotion must be on merit and performance.  Tenure should also be reinstated. The age of retirement should be raised to 64 as obtains in Britain, Belgium and other countries. We need a new civil service that can serve as the brains trust for national transformation and nation building. Without a world-class civil service, our dream of greatness would be illusory.