Olaopa Blames Civil Service’ Woes on Military, Low Pay

Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has blamed the problems of the nation’s civil service on the incursion of the military into governance, and the poor remuneration of public workers.

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.”

Blaming the military for the decline of the civil service, Olaopa said
” that the civil service indeed evolves within a growth trajectory that was distorted significantly by military rule, and a series of other disruptions, hiccups, misconceptions, administrative misses, and fortuitous breakthroughs.

“Some of its evolving systems and structures were decimated after 1966 by the ‘with immediate effect’ military tradition. The transition from parliamentary to presidential system since 1979 created its own issues that were not systematically resolved.

“The public service system that Nigeria inherited from the British was not just Weberian, it was overly legalistic and top-down control (‘I am directed’) fixated, making the administrative system unresponsive to public demands and therefore weak in terms of democratic accountability

“The classification of personnel emphasised job in the person, not person on the job, with work done largely in terms of functions/duties as scheduled, rather than as tasks, day to day.

“There is also the phenomenon of ‘trained incapacity’ deriving from the fact that skills development and training investments were seen as isolated processes, without coherent linkages to HR planning, employee appraisal, and pay and reward system.In other words, staff performance appraisal system which relied on APER, in the absence of institutionalised performance management system (PMS), remains as ever vague about what is being assessed and rewarded.”

Noting that the remuneration system was also responsible for the decline of the civil service, Olaopa said: ” Since the 1974 Udoji bonanza, the pay and remuneration system has been disconnected from the productivity trajectory in the national economy, with adversarial industrial relations looming large in its wake.

“Indeed, the public service pay system was reasonable as at independence until the early 1980s. As the economy slowed, revenue faltered, and staffing numbers continued to rise, driven by the expanding role of the welfare state and the federal character policy.
Pay level became stagnant, with low wages eventually becoming irredeemably the norm. By the mid-80s, retiring officers were coping with a pension that was formidably less than purchasing power, while serving officers earned subsistence wage
The collapse of the pay system inexorably destroyed the employment contract between government and public employees. Informality then set in, and performance plummeted .

“Officers started to invent a series of coping mechanisms, ranging from moonlighting, manipulation of travel allowances and per diems, connivance with contractors and outright theft of public assets and alteration of date of birth to guarantee prolonged tenure.
Professionals with scarce skills left the shore to work in other sectors or relocated overseas. Training budget evaporated, and systemic corruption, the culture of ‘something for nothing’ which replaced the value of deferred gratification and honour cum excellence in service, became new normal, with public interest and merit emasculated.

“Overall, the bureaucratic system started to function outside of its assumed tradition and values. In its place, an unsavoury culture wherein officers followed rules and regulations for its own sake was enthroned
Compliance with rules and regulations then ceases to embed flexibilities required to innovate to build and install results-based management framework in the era of managerialism which set in since the mid-70s.
Staff progression and promotion system acquired negative logic, as one that rewarded officers order than those making real contributions. It in turn discouraged risk taking and creativity, within a structural regression into silos operations, with officers protecting boundaries of authority while foreclosing team work, networking, results-orientation and whole of government approaches.

“The civil service gradually closed itself to ideas and intellectual discourses in manner that became a culture of anti-intellectualism and insularity due in part to closure of entry to other talents from other sectors, occasioning over time deep-rooted inbreeding, structural inertia and obsolescence .”

Earlier, Olaopa highlighted the various reforms that have taken place in the civil service .

He said that 1974 was a fundamental administrative year in the history of the Nigerian civil service. He said it was the year that Nigeria got its first opportunity to fundamentally rethink its public administration system .

But he decried a situation where the Udoji Commission got caught up in the deeper managerial challenges raised in the UK in 1968 when the Lord Fulton Report was set up to reassess the efficiency problem of the British civil service.

“The Fulton Report itself took bearing from a theoretical wave set in motion at the time by the new public management (NPM) revolution at the time.
The concern of administrative reform at the time was to reflect on the possibilities of how the Weberian administrative system could take advantage of expanding innovations in the market system and private sector good practices.

“The Udoji Commission tackled its terms of reference head on. It saw a fundamental problem of the civil service in Nigeria as that of administrative inflexibility that finds it hard to respond to positive changes.
It therefore advocated the need for a total reassessment of the public service and its capacity to internalise and adapt global best practices.”

According to him, the commission was also bold enough to tackle the generalist-professional issue (the ‘cult of the generalists’) when it recommended a new style public service infused with ‘new blood’ working under a result-oriented management system operated by professionals and specialists in particular field.

“Like the Fulton Report in the UK before it, these cogent recommendations never saw the light of day.
From the Dotun Philip Report of 1984 to the Ayida reform of 1994, the Nigerian state took forward the managerial recommendations that would give birth to a new public service. The recommendation was the basis of the Decree 43 of 1988.

“The Ayida Review, against the backdrop of some conception-reality gaps in the Philips reform, reconstituted the civil service system along the Weberian traditional principles,” he said.

According to him, since 1999 and the inception of Nigeria’s democratic experiment, some critical defining reforms have yielded lots of significant (though not sufficient) reform achievements. These reforms include the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), SERVICOM, pension and pay reforms, the professionalisation of the FOS/NBS, FIRS/NEITI, the price intelligence and procurement reform, and fiscal responsibility.

But he lamented that the bureaucratic model served the civil service well up to the mid-70s before the decline he identified as bureau-pathology set in .