Advisers and Political Advising

By Bunmi Ayoade

The Office of Adviser does not exist in a parliamentary system. It became part of the Nigerian political process with the adoption of the presidential system. It is fraught with a lot of unanswered and even unanswerable questions. Advisers are the personal staff of their principals. They are not subject to the scrutiny of the party or the legislature. The principal appoints them to advise him/her on the critical programmes of the administration. The appointment of advisers is a critical pointer to the seriousness of any principal. Any principal at whose table the buck stops and bears the burden and responsibility of any decision is well advised to appoint advisers that can add value to his/her performance and political future.

It is for this reason that the rule is relaxed to enable the principal to scout for, screen and appoint advisers that can deliver. Ideally, an Adviser is a professional in his/her field set apart for his neutral technical competence. He may or may not have a loud party affiliation but must believe in the mission and vision of his principal. Partisanship may colour his/her advice negatively or, to put it more bluntly, affect his/her professionalism.

 In fact, for advisers who are licentiates of professional bodies, their poor performance may jeopardize their professional standing and/or licence. The post of Adviser is not for novitiates. It is not a field for trial and error because errors at that level are too expensive both for the principal and for the system. An error in the national public advisory system could be tantamount to mass murder. Unfortunately, policy errors in the public domain are difficult to reverse and, if ever reversible, costly in time, effort and credibility of the administration. Advice must therefore be professionally targeted. Advisers must, therefore, not only be sharp-shooters but also great marksmen. Anything less than that is a policy liability or even a disaster. Nigeria has witnessed a gross abuse of advisers over the years in terms of quality and quantity. First, there is the alibi that there are no set constitutional or statutory qualifications for advisers. The principals therefore unfortunately solely decide the qualifications which have turned out to be, in most cases, a potpourri of sorts inadequate for the governance of human beings.

Normally, advisers constitute an elite corps of professionals at the core of governance. They are to augment, supplement and complement the elected officers whose qualifications may be as low as being ‘educated up to school certificate level’. It is not impossible that some of them may not even be that endowed. Even if the elected principal is a universal genius, he would be so distracted in office that he needs the assistance of less pressured people. It is therefore a disservice to both the principal and the system to appoint family members and friends who cannot add value such posts. It is not an uncommon experience in Nigeria that Principals advise their Advisers. It is an orchestrated redundancy.    

Who are Advisers?

Political Advisers are people appointed by elected public officeholders to guide them to initiate, fine-tune, monitor and/or re-order public policy for the maximum political advantage of the principal and the welfare of the electorate. The political adviser is therefore a political image maker and a vote maximiser. Without saying so, he is a technical expert to apply the mechanics of public policy to add value to social service delivery to the electorate and thus enhance the electoral prospects of the principal. No matter what fields they cover- economy, energy, security, legislative relations, intergovernmental relations, they are all, broadly speaking, political advisers. They must have basic education in the respective fields and be professionals in their own right. For peer recognition, approval and credibility, they must, before appointment, attain a level of professional and social visibility. Their status will also be enhanced if they engage in continuing education within their area of expertise because currency in theory and praxis is critical to the investment of political trust. Readers are leaders because they are knowledgeable in comparative political best practice and success case-studies.

Furthermore, the adviser must not only be proficient in his field of practice but equally able to equip his principal to convince and influence the public. He must be a proficient communicator with ability to transmit the kernel of policy to his principal because the reception of policies is not only based on quality but also on presentation, delivery and timing.

The practice of political advising requires not only continuing education but also a multi-disciplinary exposure. Policies are by nature polygonal and polycyclic. The adviser must therefore be a psychologist, a social historian, a logician, an experimentalist, a behaviorist and a visionary to be competent in the analysis of complex public issues.  

More importantly, the adviser must understand the basics of national politics, regional sensitivities and professional proclivities. Although he is not a politician, he must be able to smell politics from a distance and analyze politics in an apolitical fashion even though policy is ultimately political. The Adviser must be conversant and agree with the project vision which he must align with project scope as well as human and material project targets. It is important to inform or advise advisers that they are not bosses whose words are laws. Their advice may be turned down. The success of an Adviser is a function of the quality, the timeliness and the persuasiveness of the presentation of his advice bearing in mind that it is the Principal that takes the flak and the praise. Official advice may also be turned down in favour of the advice of unofficial and informal advisers who have more political weight. Such unofficial advisers must not be underrated because they are ‘suya’ spot paddies, fellow old boys or business associates. That is reality in the political world.

Methodology of Political Advice

An adviser must be a competent researcher with a good mastery of archival, primary and secondary sources. He must also be able to tease out relevant information through interviews, questionnaires, focus group discussions, participant and non-participant observations. Any method of getting relevant and useful information must be employed because information is the most critical input of policy. It is also important for the Adviser to obtain information from all strata of relevant stakeholders because the electorate is a composite group with varying and even conflicting needs. The interaction of needs within the electorate generate demands. For example, salary awards for a section of the electorate has a tendency to spike demands in other classes of the electorate. The reality is that the electorate is not monolithic.

The adviser must therefore be aware that the various classes of the electorate   are connected and interconnected. Even if the electorate were monolithic, the solution proffered by a policy creates a new problem either in its details, content, context or application. An Adviser must devise anticipatory positive insulation techniques to avoid or counter a resultant chain of demands and/or complaints arising from any and all policies. No matter how good a policy may be, an Adviser must expect and be alert to its consequences. He must, therefore, be adept in policy consequence management (PCM) because poor or careless consequence management can fracture or even frustrate the best policy. Policy consequence anticipation is part and parcel of policy design architecture. A policy should be simulated ahead of its finalization. The simulation takes place in a social incubation laboratory where, according to Murphy’s  law, whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Failures at the level of simulation afford the policy adviser a golden opportunity to either backtrack/retreat or review the policy itself. Policy simulation is confidential and performed out of public view. In the case of policy failure at that point, there are neither individual nor systemic casualties. Simulation is a policy cost-saving device as well as a technique for minimising public damage. In addition to simulating a policy, the policy adviser can also trouble-shoot in the process of deciding on a policy. Trouble-shooting is an experimental process of thinking outside the box to ascertain what can work as well as what the prospective end-users think. It is an embedded consultative system of sampling people’s opinion. A more explicit method is conducting focus group discussions (FGD) as a form of opinion sampling and the initiation of policy ownership through informal consultation. The two methods of trouble-shooting and focus group discussion are aimed at the saturation of critical constituencies.

A policy must not be abandoned after it has been made. Even abandoned children grow lean. Any policy, must therefore be monitored, nurtured and managed to conclusion. The monitoring and management of policies can start with a test run which is usually a small scale experimentation. The system seeks to discover the strengths and weaknesses of a policy in actual operation. The test run provides a final opportunity to put the policy to test in action before its public launching. It also affords the policy Adviser the opportunity to correct or edit out errors and weaknesses that manifest in the trial operation of the policy. All the above steps are necessary and should be painstakingly taken because a public policy error is very expensive to both the people and the political regime. In fact, it may be very critical to the electoral survival of that regime.

One of the weaknesses of the policy advisory system is the fact that Advisers hardly coordinate their activities or see the need for coordination or cooperation. It is very important that the policies of a regime should be synchronized for effect. Advisers must cooperate to align policies for synergy because the policies of a regime must not work at cross-purposes. Advisers must work together as a team because administrative departmentalization is merely for convenience rather than for functionality. The ultimate target of all policies is unitary i. e. the people. It is in fact advisable that a regular meeting of Advisers be convened for experience sharing and general policy coordination. Advisers must come to the understanding that they serve the same principal.

The advisers of the President and the advisers of the ministers must meet periodically to deliberate on and synchronise the policies of the federal government. The advisers of the Ministries must not only meet when there is a crisis. To all intents and purposes a strike is not just an issue for the Ministry of Labour. It is a cross-cutting. Their meetings should address the inevitable process of policy interaction which they can manage through the process of policy triangulation. This will lead to proper policy integration issuing from the same government. The advisory system in Nigeria at the federal and state levels by the same party lack coordination as they cannot be identified as having the same pedigree. Presently, there is no meeting point for the advisers to the President with the advisers to the various ministers. This lacuna has a tendency to occasion leakage of funds, policy overlaps or duplication and gross under-capacity utilization. These issues call for attention.

Appointment of Advisers

Advisers, when carefully selected, are essential for effective governance. There are however many socio-political constraints in the recruitment of competent Advisers. Some constraints inhere in the personality of the principals while others are systemic, statutory or constitutional. A principal who is not given to standards is likely to opt for mediocrity either by being nepotistic or clannish. Incompetent principals cannot recruit competent Advisers. What determines the quality of recruitment by a principal comes under the minimax rubric, namely that the principal who makes his own level of efficiency and competence the minimum requirement for recruitment of Advisers will recruit excellent people. On the other hand, a principal who makes his own level of efficiency and competence the maximum requirement will invariably recruit mediocre and sycophants. Such a principal will be comfortable with such officers because they meet his mark. In such cases where the criterion of recruitment is not competence, it is illogical to expect competent performance incompetent officers.

The recruitment of Advisers is also affected or even dictated by systemic factors. In a plural society, members feel that their protection, welfare and share of public amenities is a function of their representation in government. This mindset is a product of ethnic mutual distrust that no ethnic unit can be an honest trustee of another ethnic group. The result is that government is divided for the people by the people such that the people think that the interest of each ethnic group can only be protected by members of that group. Sometimes this feeling is so deeply ingrained that it is written into the statute books and even into the constitution. That is the case of Nigeria.  In local parlance, Nigerians want it implemented by demanding government presence in their localities. In Nigeria, therefore, the people perceive the Federal Government as the product of what the relevant invisible mental ethnic slice represents. In this sense, therefore, the Federal Government is local. While the abstract division of government along ethnic lines ostensibly sets out to ensure social equity and determines the location of the individual in the polity, it is responsible for the sub-optimal performance of government. Every appointment is located in the mental construct of the ethnic slice of the federation.  

The above constraints notwithstanding, the principal still has to recruit personnel into these and other positions. As President Tinubu is now poised to recruit personnel into offices, he must carry out the functions to the best to the best of his ability in the best interest of the country and mindful of the fact that he is not immune from blame. The late Timi of Ede, HRH Tijani Oyedokun, Agbonran II summed up Palace 101 for me in one sentence: “The Palace is a refuse dump”. All and sundry, rich and poor, young and old throw, and are entitled to throw, refuse into the palace. That is also a defining right of democracy. What reduces the dumping of refuse is doing what is right rather than what is good. Right and good have their appropriate occasions.

Another antidote and consolation is that: “Abuses do no break bones”. The Principal must therefore not be tempted or driven to the other extreme which my first year Political Science teacher, Prof James O’Connell, summed up in another sentence: “Once a king receives the staff of office, he no longer gets good advice”. Good or bad, everybody praises the king’s actions. Unfortunately, when the King falls, everybody says “We warned him!!” It is power that makes people powerful. Nobody makes way for a former horse owner. The principal must always remember that it is the Adviser that is rich in options, adds value and honestly speaks truth to power, that is the sincere, competent and loyal adviser.

·      Ayoade, an Emeritus Professor of Political Science, writes from Ibadan