Olaopa: How to Transform Civil Service for Good Governance

The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has given insight into how to transform the country’s civil service to make it contribute significantly to good governance.

Olaopa , a professor of public administration and a former federal permanent secretary, spoke on Wednesday at the University of Ibadan, Oyo State during the maiden Distinguished Annual Public Lecture series of the Association of Retired Heads of Service and Permanent Secretaries of Oyo and Osun State (ARHESPSOOS).

The seasoned bureaucrat who spoke on
“Reengineering the Engine Room: The Civil Service as the Fulcrum of Sustainable Development” commended ARHESPSOOS for taking the initiative to “create this annual seminal platform to offer its multidisciplinary experts and professional capital to contribute to rethinking the intellectual bases of the working and practice of public service as engine room of governance in Nigeria.

“Indeed, it will be a real shame and gross disservice to the civil service in Nigeria, to have such a rich assemblage and mine of bureaucratic wisdom as resident in this association and not tap into it.”

Olaopa used what he identified as a Rolls Royce metaphor to convey the state of the civil service.

According to him, whereas the nation needs an administrative backend propelled by a jet engine, what it has in the bureaucracy is the engine of a Beatle car. He stressed that the service workforce structure is characterized by a situation where there are too many doing nothing, too many doing too little, and too few people doing too much.

He referred to a poor capacity to get things done “graphically painted in the 2005World Bank review finding that: 29% of programmes ever got completed, 45% of on-going projects are rated satisfactory 26% of such projects usually get cancelled.”

But noting the potential of the civil service for good governance, Olaopa described it as “the institutional bedrock for transforming the developmental agenda of the Nigerian state.
This means that the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs)—the engine rooms of the public service system—must be adequately capacitated to become effective and efficient as the formidable institutional framework that would be ready at all times to meet the challenge of nation building, good governance and national development.”

Revisiting the engineering metaphor that underlined his lecture, Olaopa said that the powerhouse of the bureaucracy that had been hitherto powered by the engine of a Beatle car, now needs that of a jet to fire up and make progress.

According to him, this requires a change management framework that is anchored around three critical frameworks: the quality of bureaucratic efficiency; the quality of service delivery and performance accountability within a democracy; and
the professionalism of the public servants.

He said: “These critical frameworks focus the objective of institutional reform: the public bureaucracies must be transformed to become:
Fast moving, intelligent, professional, information-rich, flexible, adaptable and entrepreneurial; less employee-focused and rule-driven, deliver quality service; performance-focused, accountable and productive — defined by objectives and measurable results, outputs and outcomes; capable of creating the policy climate that will unlock the energy of the private sector and other sectors and to install a new productivity paradigm in the national economy; operated by multidisciplinary team of new generation public managers and project teams signed on to performance agreements or contracts within carefully crafted ministerial scorecards to which everyone is held accountable; bound within a framework of social compact stewardship that sees citizens as clients deserving of effective and efficient services. “

According to Olaopa, the change management to achieve this vision requires adequate blueprints and action plans that connect present realities with future aspiration. Therefore , to him, the nation needs a planned change which relies on a programmatic change model that is focused on two issues which are (a) changing systems and structures, and
(b) changing people and work culture.

“Second, there is a critical need for a mix of (a) leadership-led radical change rooted in a transformation change model involving fundamental shifts; (b) incremental change implemented in a gradual manner based on conditions learning and incremental improvement. And third, the change agenda must proceed within an overlapping reform process, phasing and sequencing”, he said.

But he noted that this institutional reform must be undergirded by several fundamental systemic and structural changes that go straight to the heart of the old Weberian administrative tradition, and its business model and procedures.

He said: “It is essentially a transition from Theory X to Theory Y, according to Douglas McGregor. Theory Y is more transformational than transactional, and more managerial than administrative. The responsibility of a Theory Y manager is to provide the atmosphere that unleashes this potential of his already motivated employees.Theory X and Theory Y are not mutually exclusive in the formulation of the new public bureaucracies. Indeed, both are encapsulated within the context of what is called neo-Weberianism. The idea of the neo-Weberian is useful for two reasons. First, the managerial revolution in most Western countries was not an attempt to entirely jettison the Weberian model. Rather, the reform efforts were an incremental attempt to recalibrate its efficiency and effectiveness.

“Second, the Weberian bureaucratic framework has not outlived its utility, especially when considering the African context. The implication of this is that the new public management has to be brought into conversation with the Weberian tradition to be able to achieve the effectiveness and efficiency of the new public service envisioned in Nigeria. “

Olaopa also stressed the the urgency of rethinking the intellectual foundations of public administration as the vehicle for the administrative reconstruction of the Nigerian state and the quest for good governance.

“This will involve several developments. One, the need to reflect on a non-adversarial and cooperative relationship between politicians and administrators. Two, a firm and meritocratic gatekeeping measure that is founded on the principles of public-spiritedness and professionalism. And three, the necessity of keying into global and regional best practices in terms of competency and human resource framework for doing government business and articulating efficiency in the workplace”, he said.

According to him, this leads directly to the next imperative: building a new generation and cohort of public managers who are capacitated with the requisite values and competences to manage the demands of the new public service that the developmental state in Nigeria needs to make an appearance in the fourth industrial revolution.

“This will not only be the first immediate gain of the new public service; it will also necessarily serve as the first condition for the possibility of instituting a new performance management system and HRM framework that could transform the workplace efficiency and productivity.

“This is especially cogent as such a new HR function must not only be calibrated to accommodate the changing nature of work in the post-COVID-19 new normal, but also the emergence of the Gen Z and the flexibility required for the workplace.

“This will critically be important in beefing up the service IQ in the form of a strategic leadership intelligence through the creation of a multidisciplinary talents-reinforced senior executive service (SES). It is also the basis of creating a new ethical and professional basis that guides public service practices.

“There is the demand of facilitating public-private partnership dynamics, and moving them to a higher level that allows good corporate governance principles to drive the frameworks for democratic governance. This enables, as part of the HR function transformation, the possibility of incorporating commercial skills as part of the HRM capacitation of the public managers”, he said.

But according to him, none of these reform imperatives would make any sense if the public service does not facilitate a paradigmatic shift away from an adversarial to developmental industrial relations that makes it possible for the workplace to generate the level of performance and productivity commensurate with the reform inputs.