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Reform as Learning Curve and Change Management: A Policy Think piece
By Tunji Olaopa
This piece is a contribution to an emerging policy conversation around the management of development policy dynamics with commendable traction. This is a field that is now taking center point given the fact of the sundry expectations that Nigerians have about the Tinubu administration. It is a field larger than my core expertise around policy implementation and institutional reform through the capacitation of public institutions for capability readiness. And yet, this larger policy conversation is so multidisciplinary that it requires all hands to be on deck. Such a conversation is too significant to leave to public commentators, government functionaries and officials alone. It becomes an imperative for institutional memory and core public sector expertise to weigh in too. This is where this piece is coming from.
Series of expert policy discussion was ongoing as patriotic concern, as should be normal, before the inauguration of this administration, on the urgency of moving from election victory to agenda setting and policy design cum articulation and national change management. Indeed, the conversation organized by the Nextier group in April in Abuja on the theme of “From Election to Governance and Performance” was meant to aggregate opinions and arguments on what the Tinubu administration can and needs to do to be considered a successful administration compared to preceding ones. And in close to three months of the administration’s inauguration, President Tinubu has exceeded all expectations in terms of the roll out of diverse policy initiatives, from subsidy removal, taxation, student loan scheme and strategic communication as stakeholder engagement. Even the burst of commentaries and criticism in the public sphere attest to this.
And yet, the overall demands for good governance transcends this initial burst. Yes, the new administration has hit the ground running. But Nigerians are already reacting to the consequences of the policies the government has rolled out. The shockwave rolling across the country signals that Nigerians are still not able to fathom what directions that policy architecture will take them. How then does one connect between the good intentions for the governance of Nigeria that the Tinubu administration has brought to its election into office, and the reality of the seeming policy disarticulation that is already causing untold hardship with just a few weeks in office? The idea is simply that policy design and articulation are not enough to articulate good governance that is facilitated by institutional and governance reform. The critical trajectory demands transiting from policy strategies to change management that bring the policy initiatives alive for qualitative changes to the lives of Nigerians.
Thus, one way to come to a quick understanding of the discrepancy in the new administration is that governments often rely on technicist solution to the existential challenges of their citizens, when all this can achieve is to muddle up the relationship between policies, the policy implementation and the objective of making the citizens better. Reliance on technicist solutions weighs the dice in favor of technical appraisals and frameworks for institutional renewal and policy thrust as an end in itself, against the end of making the institution work for the betterment of the citizens.
The meaning of good governance everywhere across the world is first about the well-intentioned policies of government meant to better the lives of the citizens. However, for good governance to even take off, the government must be well-prepared to embark on a rigorous and comprehensive sets of institutional and administrative reforms around which policies can then have the dynamics of succeeding in improving the quality of life of the citizens. This automatically implies that no government can overlook or underestimate the importance of theoretical and conceptual issues in governance and the policy process.
This immediately tells us that the ideas of development and reform are crucial concepts that ought to underlie the very policy efforts of government to transform the lives of their citizens. To ask the fundamental question of what development means is to interrogate the policy direction a state intends to take, and what ideological orientation would determine that development direction. Does a state want to toe the capability, income, welfare or basic needs approach to development? Dudley Seer, for instance, insists that development is measured by the extent to which a state ensures a steady decline in the levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality. When these are measured to have declined over time, then we can say the state is gradually developing. And whatever development path a state chooses hinges on the reform program of the government and how it is pursued.
Reform, in simple terms, implies the readjustment or repositioning of an organisation (in this case, the policy space) in order to be able to effectively and efficiently meet the dynamism and challenges of its universe of operation. It often requires a trajectory of moving from a present but unfavourable state through series of strategic and institutional stages of change towards a future state marked by efficient and effective improvements leading to better performance. It suggests that the country is going through a present phase of decay and dysfunction, and requires deliberate efforts aimed at changing its state systems, structures and processes in order to make them perform them designated function better and effectively. Thus, reforming the state system and the policy space involves the idea of improvement in the ways and manners in which government is managed and public goods and services are delivered effectively, efficiently, economically and with value for money.
While we can concede that Nigeria is a reforming state, it has now become unfortunate that reform, going by historical data, hardly achieve the core of the policy, governance and development objectives they are meant for. Reforms are essentially historical and ideological; they answer to contextual demands and principles. In fact, they allow a state to frame the values that will best facilitate governance objectives. But rather than allowing reform to enable the framing of a democratic governance vision, Nigeria seems to have been “benchmarking failure,” to quote a graphic phrase by Prof. Francis Egbokhare. The lack of a solid and sustainable reform dynamic has made it so that a failed past government suddenly become better in the light of the failure of the present government and its inability to achieve what the past government also failed to achieve!
One explanation is that institutional reform in Africa has often been designed in terms of redefining the role of the state. This is a highly ideological framework which speaks to the declining relevance of state-managed economies, especially in the third world, vis-à-vis the growing rate of progress recorded in the market economies of the Western societies. And this ideological constraint has been the source of the discourse on development paradigms that put Nigeria, like other African states, on two opposing sides of adherence to the neoliberal Washington Consensus, on the one hand; and the developmental state theory that sees the utility in neoliberalism even if it is modified and monitored as exemplified by Asian Tigers. Government must therefore make ideological assumptions that, in the case of Nigeria and the Tinubu administration, will jumpstart a democratic governance that is founded on a people-oriented development.
The key therefore lies in the change management programme that the government can commit to and assiduously push through a messy trajectory that has the potential of yielding distinct successes. And such change management dynamics, hitched to development policy framework, is founded on several axiomatic principles and methodologies that the new government, as well as Nigerians, will do well to put in mind if it must make the urgent transition from policy articulation to implementation. First, and in layman’s term, it will most likely get worse before it starts to get better. In other words, there is no change management that comes easy. Thus, to be able to make the omelet of inclusive development outcomes, wealth creation, poverty reduction, infrastructural development, service delivery of public goods and global competitiveness, the government and the people must know that eggs must be cracked; no gain without pains. This realization derives, first, from the understanding that reform is essentially messy, non-linear and often deeply complex. It possesses a multidimensional nature because the casual relationship of sub-systems is usually complex. Since there are no single or predictable set of cause for system’s dysfunction, there is hardly a simple formula (one-model-fits-all) or strategy for their resolution or for easy control to alter the behaviors of the national economy, its development institutional parameters and management systems.
This understanding leads in several methodological directions. One, this nature of reform must create in the government the willingness to make tough decisions that is however undergirded by credibility, sincerity and exemplary leadership which invests in the famous national resilience that Nigerians are known for, supported by innovative frameworks of palliative support programmes to cushion the storms. Two, the government also needs a strategic communication framework—rather than silence—to convey to Nigerians the trajectory of moving from our present state to a better one. This enables a gradual change of national mental models from rampant cynicism to vibrant optimism once the people believe the government and its willingness to work on their behalf. And the message to pass across, with sincerity and credibility, is that fundamental policies with far-reaching development impact often take very long to gestate and mature. This is what accounts for why governments balance between short (the constraining 4-year tenure) and long-term development objectives.
Once the fundamental axioms are taken care of, the Tinubu administration then needs further follow up on the nature of reform that must underlie its change management. The first lesson the Tinubu administration must learn from the messy and complex nature of reform is to get the basic right. This translates into thinking through the sequencing and phasing of reforms. This demand an acute methodological creativity that balances between reform as continuous institutional learning and improvement and reform as a comprehensive big bang transformation. And in this regard, part of the juggling between short-term and long-term objectives might be the determination of what is of immediate value to Nigerians, i.e. “stomach infrastructures”, and what takes a while to accrue as development legacies and benefits that are capable of creating the quantum of transitions that ultimately ignite desired national transformation.
Finally, past governance experience has taught us that there is no way to reach the goal of national productivity without first nipping the cost of governance tragedy in the bud. This therefore demands a national waste management framework that can contain the unbridled chains of redundancies and unnecessary institutional multiplications that burden our fiscal accountability. And this is a reform move that cannot be achieved without bringing the labour unions into a developmental journey whose aim is to undermine the existing adversarial industrial relations and substitute it with a developmental one.
By going back to the basics in terms of governance and reforms, the Tinubu government will not only be ensuring it will not be repeating the mistakes and errors of the past, it will also be laying a solid foundation for a better Nigeria—after sixty-three years of trying.
* Tunji Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary & Professor of Public Administration
