Olaopa: Why Adebo, Akinyele Civil Service Era Was Successful

Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Prof. Tunji Olaopa, on Thursday offered insight into why the civil service era of great public administrators like the late Chief Simeon Adebo and the late Chief Theophilus Adeleke Akinyele was immensely successful.

Olaopa spoke at the 4th Theophilus & Elizabeth Akinyele Foundation Memorial Symposium held in Ibadan, Oyo State.

Paying tribute to Akinyele, Prof. Olaopa described him as a statesman, mentor and icon and commended efforts to keep the memory of the Officer of the Order of Niger and the Bobajiro of Ibadanland, and that of his wife evergreen in the past four years .

Olaopa spoke on the topic ” Reinventing Leadership and Ethics in Public Service in Nigeria From the Akinyele Era to Contemporary Institutional Reforms”.

According to Olaopa, the memorial events and other initiatives of the Theophilus and Elizabeth Akinyele Foundation “are the best gifts that anyone could give to a man who embodied the ideal of a public servant. A man who served his country and Ibadanland with unparalleled dedication and selflessness, thereby becoming the quintessence of the glorious era of the much-celebrated civil service that Nigeria will do well to continue to draw inspiration from and, as much as its practicable, reinvention.”

He noted that Akinyele was an exemplar among the vanishing breed of old guards and ancestors that represent the very best that the civil service system in Africa has produced.

Olaopa listed values the Akinyele corps of bureaucrats imbibed from the British that made their era successful. He said that Akinyele and others who made the civil service of their era great built on the values of public service left behind by the British colonialists .

His words : ” The pioneer bureaucrats inherited the founding public service values and virtues which were significantly flavoured by the British Victorian ideals and moral codes that underlie the British administrative tradition, with its elitism and divisive class system.”

He noted that when “Max Weber formulated the framework of his bureaucratic managerial model of public administration, he had in mind a bureaucratic authority that is not only determined by its rules, systems and procedures in a legal-rational sense, he conceived it as a hierarchical organization that is neutral, efficient, continuous, precise, strict, reliable and disciplined.

“He was also concerned that the public service should be conceived in terms of a vocation that is a calling. In other words, those coming into the service must see it as an honourable, spiritual and value-based institution. For Weber therefore, being honourable is key to understanding the integrity of the public servant. An honourable public official sees to the execution of a policy to the best of his ability even if she disagrees with the policy choice. This is an honourable act because it demonstrates that the bureaucrat’s sense of duty and of service overrides his personal preferences.”

L-R: Mrs. Elizabeth Akinyele, widow of Chief TA Akinyele; Engineer Seyi Makinde, governor of Oyo State; Prof. Tunji Olaopa, Chairman, FCSC; and Prof. Olanike Adeyemo, Oyo State SSG.

According to him, the public servant is also meant to pursue spirituality, which has to do with the search for meaning and significance through commitment, trust and dedicated loyalty to the tenets of professionalism.

“Service in this sense is not just a mechanical and transactional business that locks many people into a workplace that fails to improve their well-being. It is this search for meaning and significance that sets the template for seeing the public servant as being characterized by selflessness – and a deep sense of deferred gratification that constitutes the fundamental attribute of priesthood of the Levitical order. Indeed, in the Old Testament, the tribe of Levi was asked to forfeit its claim to any properties and portions in the promised land. Rather, as priests, they deferred their gratifications in the service to Israel and to God.”

Olaopa said that these key concepts of honour and spirituality made the public service system a value-based institution and custodian of democratic governance codes. He stressed that the foundational philosophical principles were meant to mold the character and actions of anyone who aspires to be a public servant.

He said: “There are therefore three fundamental virtues that stand at the core of what the public service represents, and what it means to be a public servant.

“One, public service as an endeavor is first a SERVICE. A public servant is called to serve others. And those others constitute the PUBLIC, rather than just the immediate or extended family or ethnic affiliation. This makes the first administrative virtue therefore to be that of PUBLIC SPIRITEDNESS
This separates the public servant from a mere CAREERIST who became educated or a professional just to fulfil personal aspirations or to make ends meet. On the contrary, to be a public servant implies tying one’s professional calling to the common good; to service to humanity, the sense in which public servants are the custodian of the governance codes which were called the general order (GO) and now the PSR; thus being the custodian of the commonwealth, the common good or the public interest, rather than one’s personal gratification

“The Second Administrative Virtue of Professionalism of the Public Servant is specialization and expertise earned on merit.While public-spiritedness provides the public servant with a broad sense of occupational responsibility which we identified as commitment to the public interest, professionalism arms the public servant with specialized skills and wherewithal to perform whatever functions will enable the realization of the objectives of state policy.

“Professionalism refers to an occupational code of conduct that regulates the activities of the professionals in a particular profession.”

He listed the third value as a public servant being a leader. According to him, this particular virtue encompasses the two others i.e. public-spiritedness and professionalism, meant to make the public servant a leader rather than a mere manager or administrator. For him, the public servant therefore needs to become transformational with shared capacity with the political leadership that draws all relevant stakeholders into the drive to make the public service an efficient mechanism for delivering public goods.

“The point made so far is that the British public administration system that provided the context for grooming the Adebo-Akinyele corps of civil servants did not just encapsulate the best in the theoretical and practical evolution of the public service, it also exported this administrative culture to Nigeria as a colony.

“Since the objective of the colonial office was an efficient achievement of law and order, it needed a cadre of highly skilled, dedicated and loyal public servants to carry out the requirements of colonial administration.
The crowning glory of the British really in the colonial service was the evolution of its administrative generalist cadre. This highly skilled cadre became the core of the civil service of the law and order development administration era which features became ingrained into the professional profile of the early administrative pioneers, from Adebo to Akilu to Ayida to Tejumade Alakija to Theophilus Akinyele.”, he said.

He listed these features of public service as including the following: “It was a service that cherished thoroughness. Submissions in files were well-thought out and thoroughly considered, leaving no stone unturned… The Service was highly disciplined and no officer was above the law. The British bosses laid good examples all the time and set a high standard of behaviour; merit was the order of the day, whether in recruitment or in progression within the service. These were the days before partisan politics came to dilute the otherwise high standards; corruption was unknown, thanks to strict discipline prevailing then…

“And so, when the British colonialist and its expatriates’ personnel left, the administrative pioneers, having been inducted into the nascent Nigerian colonial service with the fundamental responsibility of making the newly created Nigerian state perform, made success out of their administrative and leadership pioneering roles.”

Noting further the critical success factors of the glorious era of civil service in Nigeria, he said: “The Akinyeles sustained the value foundation of the Victorian British:
Similar to the Yoruba notion of Omoluabi – the imperative of truthfulness, personal responsibility, and public accountability which earned them much respect and conferred indescribable prestige on civil servants.

“The acute sense of duty and work ethic defined the relationship between self and service that led to holding sacrosanct the authority of knowledge, integrity and honour as their badge of professionalism. Talents, competence and hard work combined with moral rectitude, godliness, personal discipline and family values as significant personality attributes which combined as badge of professionalism to determine success, well-being and career fulfilment.”

To restore the glorious era of the civil service, Olaopa recommended reprofessionalisation; undertaking value audit; beefing up the IQ of service; deepening of some core skills; strengthening of PPPs and policy-research nexus ; adjustment of incentives and launch of a productivity and waste reduction programme .