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Why Govt Depends Less on Local Research Output, Olaopa Explains
Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Prof. Tunji Olaopa (5th left); Director- General, Nigerian Institute for Social and Economic Research, Prof. Anthonia Simbine (4th left); Permanent Secretary, FCSC, Mr Philip Ndiomu ( 3rd left); Commissioner representing FCT and Niger State, Dr Hussaini Adamu (2nd left); Commissioner representing Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara States, Mr Shehu Aliyu (left); Commissioner representing Akwa Ibom and Cross River States, Mr Ededet Eyoma (third, right); Commissioner representing Benue, Nasarawa and Plateau States, Dr Jonah Madugu (2nd right); and Commissioner representing Anambra, Ebonyi and Enugu States, Dr Chamberlain Nwele (right) during the courtesy visit in Abuja on Wednesday.
The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has explained why government depends less on the output of local researchers.
According to Olaopa, it is probably because local research does not contain deep and practical content that solves the specific problems of government .
The professor of public administration spoke on Wednesday when the Director General of the Nigerian Institute for Social and Economic Research ( NISER), Prof. Antonia Simbine, paid him a courtesy visit in his office in Abuja.
To Olaopa, the interface between the policy space and research industry needs a “recalibration with a significant dose of strategic communication which requires a lot of research evangelists with the essential research elite and the public intellectuals and the press.”
He noted that NISER was deployed by policy experts to create seminal conversations to set the tone for development .
But he lamented that he had observed at a personal level and based on his “experience of over three decades and the significant expertise that is built in the course of my working on international development projects, and much later when I rose to senior positions in the civil service, that each time that I led major development projects or policy design works that required deep analytics, our most reliable allies were the foreign development agencies, who alone appreciate the range of expertise and knowledge that such efforts require and are ever willing to fund them.”
He said until lately when some foundations were rising up to the challenge, “the unfortunate reality in the policy space was that local capacities and institutional capabilities of our research institutions, think tanks, and experts have not been systematically built and harnessed , thereby making our experts’ output to be gradually irrelevant and consigned to publication and for individual promotion and professional development and not as input into the public policy making process.”
He further lamented that the research agenda of national research centres and local experts is now generally dominated by themes of concern to external partners who are the major funders of international research.
“This has to do on one hand with what has been globally recognised as African contribution to global research and funding being abysmally infinitesimal and on the other hand, it has to do with the level of research relevance, with policy researchers complaining that their works are not being used by government. It also explains why the bulk of useful developmental statistics are funded by foreign development agencies. It is the reason that some scholars think that some African countries do not understand what development is all about.”
Earlier, Prof. Simbine had explained that her visit was to congratulate Prof. Olaopa on his appointment as the chairman of FCSC and to express the readiness of NISER for collaboration with the commission in areas such as research and training.
