One critical question that I have contended with for some time as a public service institutional reformer is, why has it been so very difficult to institute performance-oriented values and systems to alter the inherited ‘I am directed’ traditional public administration tradition in the civil service in Nigeria? Indeed, implementation of the performance management system has been largely rhetorical, entailing moving in circles since the Jerome Udoji Public Service Reform Commission reforms’ first attempt in 1974. Why is this so? One, civil servants generally take on their job as a career, largely because of job security. They, therefore, would generally resist any reform that threatens their jobs, even if such reforms are in the public interest. This attitude translates, for all practical purposes, into a general dislike for change and an unreflective defence of the status quo.
Two, civil servants are accustomed to a tradition of ‘wait for your turn’ to gain seniority within hierarchical structures, and, therefore, value the respect and authority that their positions carry jealously. This orientation contrasts with performance management’s need to reward individual initiatives, creativity, authority of knowledge, and proven expertise, while rewarding officers based on evidence of performance, usually measured as outputs, outcomes and impact within results-based management frameworks. Three, in any governance context and administrative environment where entitlement mentality prevails, where cultural practices of patronage and nepotism that would usually override merit on the altar of ethnic, religious and sectional parochialisms prevail. One where personal connections and loyalty influence appointments with brazen disregard for merit, as is common in our clime, it is usually difficult to achieve the flexibility that enables the fairness and objectivity required for a performance-based system to function effectively. Let us now proceed to put this set of theoretical statements in context, to explain how the failure to institute performance-based systems in Nigeria’s public administration system over the years has, in part, been responsible for Nigeria’s arrested development.
Let me start with an axiom that has guided my reform optimism about the Nigerian state and the unfinished business of institutional reform. That axiom is that there is definitely no shortage of development visions, blueprints, development ideas and paradigms, well-intended policies and programs, or even expert or professional advisory support. As a public service institutional reformer and policy implementation researcher, I recognise all these as the very first step in the trajectory of getting reform done. Thus, while consecutive Nigerian governments could be said to have a surfeit of the visions and ideas that ground institutional reforms with varying levels of impacts, the momentum that translates these visions, ideas and paradigms into efficient institutions and transformative development progress has been missing.
Unfortunately, the institutional and developmental impacts have been less than salutary because of the lack of political will that backstops the success of any reform effort. This is the second level of the reform business that unlocks the possibility of success. We can all agree, without prejudice, that many Nigerian governments have played bad politics with development programs. By this, I mean that Nigeria’s political orientation, from independence to date, has made it extremely difficult to achieve the right composition of elite nationalism that triggers national development. First, there is the problem of policy short-circuiting due to administrative discontinues—each government always desires to reinvent the political and administrative wheels rather than building on the foundations the previous administrations have laid. Most fundamental is the lack of any genuine ideological bases for political parties that connect to an overarching philosophical construct for rethinking national integration and national development. Since 1999, when Nigeria resumed its democratic experiment, politicking has been more about trivial issues of religion and ethnicity than that of issue-based discourse on taking Nigeria seriously.
In institutional reform terms, therefore, we have been witnessing political administrations that have been entrapped in the conception-reality gap in the sense that they have demonstrated some real passion for institutional reforms, given the availability of outstanding ideas, insights and blueprints. However, the passion lacked deep knowledge that could have enabled the governments to intimately and critically interrogate the binding constraints that limit and undermine institutional reforms in the public sector change space, as well as the institutional architecture that the space represents. This failure makes it very difficult for these governments to recognise the devils in the details of development policy execution. This conception-reality gap is further complicated by the ready default of the prebendal culture of primitive accumulation that colours elite nationalism. This makes it difficult for any successive administration in Nigeria to take a gamble on development by initiating development bargains around which the Nigerian Project could have taken off efficiently and with the right dose of political will to raise the possibility of success.
From an institutional reform perspective, many of Nigeria’s past governments have moved from electoral victory to administrative performance to unlock the dividends of democratic governance without a thorough knowledge of the binding constraints that require dismantling within the governance, administrative and institutional dynamics of the Nigerian state and its public service.
Thus, every effort to ignite structural and developmental transformation has remained futile. From the technical angle of policy and development management, therefore, Nigeria has been benchmarking failures through change management initiatives that have been marred by several limitations: poor policy and programme design; poor resource allocation; unstable macroeconomic climate not matched with required policy intelligence and analytics; lack of disciplined and performance managed development policy and programme execution; policy and programme discontinuity; low public service organisational intelligent quotient and sub-optimal institutional capability readiness; and the wide-ranging sociological and cultural issues generally summed up as the Nigerian factor.
0 Comments