Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister, was, in office, a stickler for government effectiveness. As prime minister, he established a Delivery Unit to track the delivery of government priorities. This innovative model has been copied round the world. Another passion of Blair, as prime minister, was Africa. He set up the Commission for Africa, which, in March 2005, produced an excellent report entitled ‘Our Common Interest’.
When he left office in 2007, Blair combined these two passions, Africa and governance, and set up the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), a charity designed to help African countries address their governance problems. The central theme of the AGI is that delivery is at the core of governance. Good policies are not enough. As one British permanent secretary puts it, they need to be “implemented with professionalism, rigour and as much pace as is consistent with effective delivery”.
So, any failure of delivery is a failure of governance. But the civil service is central to delivery. Therefore, when the bureaucracy fails, governance fails too. While delivery requires political commitment and leadership, it is the professional duty of civil servants to implement government policies on the ground and ensure the delivery of worthwhile outcomes that citizens are entitled to expect. This requires expertise and professionalism, as well as a commitment to honesty, competence and reliability, which, according to the philosopher and Cambridge University professor, Onora O’Neill, are the key requirements for earning and maintaining trust in a modern society.
Now, judged by any of these metrics – professionalism, competence and reliability – there are deep problems with Africa’s bureaucracies. That Tony Blair had to set up the Africa Governance Initiative in itself is poignant. But, let’s face it, while there are problems with the bureaucracy in all African countries, few have a more acute bureaucratic challenge than Nigeria. This is because Nigeria’s bureaucracy is troubled by two terrible demons. The first is a severe capacity deficit; the second, a deep cultural malaise.
Recently, Danladi Kifasi, head of Civil Service of the Federation (HOS), lamented the abandonment of government projects in the country, saying that “the act of abandoning projects in some ministries is a worrisome trend”. Furthermore, according to the HOS, the government has now resorted to using consultants to do what civil servants are paid to do because of poor performance. The capacity deficit is also compounded by a troubling cultural or behavioural problem. When words such as “habitual late coming”, “truancy”, “lukewarm and shoddy attitude to the discharge of duties”, “indiscipline”, and “corrupt practices” – words contained in various press releases from the Office of the Head of Service in recent months – are used to describe a nation’s civil service, there is, indeed, a deep problem.
This parlous state of affairs exists, of course, because instead of a professional civil service, Nigeria has a politicised one. And it starts with recruitment. Any organisation is as good as the quality of its staff. But a recruitment and promotion system that is not meritocratic and free of political or other external influence will not produce a first-class civil service. In the UK, graduates of the elite universities want to work in the civil service, not because they are unemployable elsewhere, but by choice. And private sector employees frequently seek secondment opportunities in government departments. In Nigeria, however, thanks to a culture of patronage and what a Nigerian permanent secretary describes as “the subordination of merit to representation”, the civil service is unable to attract, let alone retain, enough competent people to make a difference.
A former head of service, Yayale Ahmed, once revealed shocking statistics about the civil service. “About 70 percent of Nigeria’s civil servants,” he said, “belong to the unskilled, non-graduate levels, while over 60 percent are within the age brackets of 40 years and above.” Of course, that composition is unlikely to have changed much today. Yet, no world-class civil service can be built on such a decrepit structure.
Add to that the problem of an oversized bureaucracy. The Japanese taught the world, through their manufacturing model, that leanness helps to eradicate unproductive and wasteful activities. A bloated organisation, whether public or private, has the opposite effects. Thus, in Nigeria’s bloated bureaucracy, “there are too many people doing nothing; too many doing too little; and too few people doing too much”, as Tunji Olaopa, permanent secretary, Federal Ministry of Communication Technology, put it recently in a speech.
Then, there is the problem with continuous improvement. A modern public service requires, as the Institute for Continuous Improvement in Public Services (ICIPS) in the UK points out, a focus on continuous improvement. Today’s public servants need to acquire and regularly update skills in project management, problem-solving, stakeholder management, and information and communications technology (ICT). Most of Nigeria’s civil servants lack these crucial skills. It is beyond belief, for instance, that in today’s digital age day-to-day activities in most of the ministries are still paper-based, with little or no capacity for storing and retrieving information digitally.
A few years ago, I visited a ministry in Abuja. After a conversation with a director, he took me to a room full of new computers. “The Japanese gave these computers to us,” he said, “but our staff can’t use them.” Just recently, the current head of service highlighted the nature of the problem when he urged civil servants “to begin to have a rethink” about developing themselves in the area of ICT. This is a sad reflection on the quality of Nigeria’s civil servants. Yet Nigeria has the highest number of internet users in Africa, according to a recent survey.
Now, why does this matter? It matters because no country has ever become truly great without a first-class civil service. The success of the economy depends on it. The private sector, which creates the wealth of a nation, needs the public sector to work for it and not against it; to be an enabler of, and not a barrier to, business growth. Foreign investors want to deal with professional, efficient and transparent public servants. And the citizens need the public sector to deliver critical services, in education, health and basic infrastructure. So far, on any of these counts, the bulk of Nigeria’s public service is not fit for purpose. The private sector is surviving in spite, and not because, of the public service. And the citizens are not getting the service delivery they deserve under the social contract between them and their government.
There is always a solution: professionalise the civil service; bring in some of the best and the brightest Nigerians; modernise the incentive structure; prioritise continuous improvement, based on global best practices; and embrace the digital age. All of these are doable, but there is no political will to see through any reform. Nigeria’s leaders talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. They talk the right language, the language of reform, but lack the will to take the radical measures needed to achieve change.
Of course, let’s not be naïve about it, public service reform is politically charged. Public choice economics also tells us that those who stand to lose from a radical change will oppose and fight it to the hilt. But if Nigeria wants to join the comity of truly great nations, it must radically transform its public service. Nigeria’s bureaucracy is broken; it’s time to fix it. That won’t happen by chance; it needs action!
Olu Fasan
