Just recently, and in a demonstration of institutional support and a signal to institutional progress, the Council of Retired Federal Permanent Secretaries (CORFEPS) paid a courtesy visit to my office at the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC). The visit provided another opportunity to deliberate on mutual concerns around the well-being of the federal service, and especially the civil service system and public administration profession in Nigeria.

The visit particularly afforded me another opportunity, for the umpteenth time, to restate my call for the resuscitation and revitalisation of the National Association for Public Administration and Management (NAPAM) as a key stakeholder that holds the community of practice together in Nigeria.

The visit also raises critical and fundamental questions that bother on what it means to categorise the public service as a profession and a vocation; the factors that short-circuit the growth and development process of the civil service in organisational development theory; the place of a vibrant professional body like NAPAM and the role it should play in rescuing the system; as well as the critical roles that significant stakeholders like the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Heads of Service of States, the Federal and State Civil Service Commissions, departments of public administration in our tertiary institutions, government training institutions, research institutes and think tanks across the country, etc. have to play in facilitating the vocational status of the public administration profession in Nigeria. In this piece, I attempt to bring all these fundamental issues together as an advocacy piece.

My objective is to provide a methodological framework that could guide the revitalisation process for the reestablishment of NAPAM as a significant avenue for constituting a vibrant community of practice that could instigate theoretical and practical questions and issues around the organisational development of the civil service system.

The civil service system is currently in its bureaucratic phase. And this phase is determined by the evolution of the subsisting industrial revolution era-bureaucratic culture of command and control hierarchical cum seniority-based and rules compliant ‘I am directed’ managerial orientation of the civil service in Nigeria; one that is renowned for stifling innovation, administrative progress and performance effectiveness. I have termed this dysfunction as bureau-pathology.

It is a phase that undermines the capacity of a government to deliver on the dividends of democratic governance. And that failure is experienced by Nigerians in terms of bureaucratic red tapes all across the MDAs at federal, state and local government levels.

A bureaucratic civil service system implies that a lot is wrong with the system and its capacity readiness to deliver on its core mandates in terms of service delivery and institutional relevance to democratic imperatives that increase the welfare and well-being of the citizens.

Institutional and governance reforms are therefore required to articulate a convergence of theory and practice, as well as the injection of smart, good and best practices that enable the system to stimulate continuous learning and incremental improvement of management system. This serves to foreclose administrative inbreeding and dysfunctional decay at the heart of Nigeria’s public service bureau-pathology. And as is usual in this kind of diagnostic analysis, a recourse to administrative history becomes imperative.

The golden age of public administration in Nigeria in the 1960s till the mid-1970s was marked, among other things, by the alignment between town and gown especially with regard to policy-research partnership and networking that facilitated the emergence and functional relevance of the community of practice and its contribution to the optimal capacity of the public service.

From a recognition of the urgent need for a collaboration with academics to solidify policy initiatives, in the Western Region (which is one good practice that I had studied a lot closely), Chief Simeon Adebo constituted the “A Club” which took critical advantage of the proximity of the Universities of Ibadan and, subsequently, the University of Ife and their academics, to strengthen the capacity of the civil service and its economic analysis and policy intelligence. The A Club later morphed into the Regional Economic Planning Advisory Committee, and was later reinforced by an Administrative Research Group, all dedicated to critical and analytic reflection on the state of the civil service.

This town-gown synergy contributed in no small measure to the significant achievements of the civil service in terms of infrastructural developments for which the western region is known even till today.

And in this regard, we immediately see the significant roles that a professional body like NAPAM can play in strengthening the core mandate of the central governance cum personnel agencies as the preeminent gatekeeper that facilitates the entry requirements and career management that solidify the vocational status of the civil service as a critical profession for complementing the relevance of democratic governance in a state like Nigeria.

The FCSC for example has the constitutional mandate to recruit, appoint, deploy, and discipline civil service in a bid to profile a model civil service that is needed to make the civil service a world class institution. Its objectives are: (a) To appoint qualified candidates to man the different Ministries/Extra-Ministerial Departments in the Federal Civil Service; (b) To ensure that such appointments maintain/represent the Federal character of the Federal Republic of Nigeria; (c) To make recommendations to the Federal Government on Personnel policies aimed at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the Federal Civil Service; and (d) To ensure that Personnel decisions are taken objectively, promptly and competently in accordance with the policies and interest of the Federal Government.

To be continued tomorrow

Prof. Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission. He wrote from Abuja.