Post-2027 reform advisory: Reprofiling the civil service for next-level performance

IT is the task of the institutional reformer not only to push for concrete reform steps and policies, or take stock of the steady achievements of reform articulation and implementation. It is also very cogent for the institutional reformer to always stay ahead of political and electoral dynamics. The civil service was founded on its capacity for administrative stability and continuity that defies political and regime changes. In other words, despite the regular changes in government, it is the task of the civil service system to keep up the administrative frameworks that undergird the business of government. If, as it has become axiomatic, the public service is a complement to democracy and democratic governance, then it becomes important for any government hoping to achieve legitimacy in governance to keep reforming its civil service system or to keep consolidating its reform achievements.

This is the fundamental basis for this piece. It is founded on a serious question: How must we start thinking about next-level civil service reforms in Nigeria—all consolidated together in the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration and in the institutional reform programmes of some state governments, LGAs inclusive—after the 2027 elections and the constitution of new governments across the Nigerian federation? For the institutional reformer, this question implies that it does not matter which government is in place as long as such a government is either dedicated to consolidating its own reform agenda or continuing to deepen the frameworks of institutional reform left by the previous government. Administrative reform is a continuous business, given that its objective is to keep the civil service system sufficiently adaptive and creative to pre-empt challenges and generate resolutions of administrative problems.

The challenge before the communities of service and practice in Nigeria therefore derives from their responsibility to keep holding up Nigeria’s governance, administrative and institutional reforms to the mirror of global best practices and national imperatives. In other words, it is our responsibility to spotlight where we are coming from, where we are at the moment, and what possibilities for more inclusive reform the future holds if we articulate specific change management frameworks and scenario reflection. All across the world, proactive governments are recognised by their attention and dedication to continuously reassessing their policy implementation, performance effectiveness and service delivery efficiency. In the United Kingdom, for example, the government is focusing on, among many other reforms, a very strict emphasis among senior civil servants on performance management, which necessitates tying performance to pay and incentives. This also involves some kind of negotiated exit for those who are not able to meet the performance contract and its requirements.

In the United States, there is an ongoing tension in the relationship between merit and patronage, and between job security and administrative performance. In other words, the struggle lies in the need to balance political correctness with the need for professional civil servants to exercise policy discretion. In Latin America and Africa, reform efforts are directed towards transitioning the civil service away from (neo)patrimonial frameworks founded on clientelist and political patronage to meritocratic and performance-based bureaucracies that have the capacities to backstop developmental states.

The charge for the communities of service and practice is then to determine how we can align ongoing civil service reform agendas across the world with the realities of the unfinished business of administrative and institutional reforms in Nigeria. We need to determine how we can keep renewing the transformative edge of institutional reform to backstop democratic governance, especially in the next four years that the 2027 general election is set to herald. To be able to do this, we must be able to give cogent attention to a series of diagnostic questions which first emerged in my attempt to grapple with the task of researching the civil service and its reform challenges.

i. What, in the light of lessons from high-performing administrative systems across the world, can the inherited Weberian civil service achieve that will be suitable for the purpose of Nigeria’s current governance and development objectives?

ii. If delivery of democratic dividends and restoration of public trust in public institutions is a clear objective for any reform thinking, how can we reengineer the MDAs’ management system into a performance-oriented, technology-enabled, socially compliant and accountable institution in a stewardship relationship with the public under a social compact?

iii. What fundamental changes can be made to the MDAs’ personnel policies, structure and operational cost ratios that are most effective and consistent with the optimal productivity level of the national economy while restoring the status of government as an employer of choice in the labour market?

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iv. How can the MDAs’ skills deficit be corrected in a manner that would achieve a mix of reskilling, regulated injection of fresh skills and some measure of rightsizing and the reduction of redundancies, if unavoidable, within a framework that labour unions will like to sign on to and partner with to spiritedly implement?

v. How would policy work and the civil service be more sensitive to the political objectives of the government and at once be accountable to the public in the context of democratic consolidation without its capacity for relative independence as an apolitical and professional entity being undermined?

vi. How can the political leadership be encouraged to commit the much-needed political will that is a defining factor in investing in the transformation of the public service?

In applying these questions to the MDAs as the operational engine room of the public service system, the fundamental issue is not just to transform their business model but also to determine the scope of reforms to prioritise in each MDA. Focusing on the federal service, therefore, this will eventually raise the crucial matter of which MDAs are the most critical in delivering on the objectives of the Renewed Hope Agenda specifically, and the national development agenda generally. And finally, how might such prioritised MDAs be re-engineered to better be able to efficiently and effectively manage the business of government for enhanced performance and productivity?

Given the depth of my interaction with the system and my research connection with its inner dynamics, I will hazard a recommendation that the government needs to prioritise three sets of MDAs: one, those at the forefront of delivering on national priority programmes and projects like wealth and job creation; two, those tasked with the implementation of infrastructural and project-rooted master plans involving investment possibilities, SMEs, rule-based market players, etc.; and three, those MDAs delivering human capital development, and welfare-oriented and social impact services. To jump-start their institutional reform, these MDAs will have to first be taken through basic reform housekeeping that helps them to get the basics right in terms of the fundamental elements of any effective management system that can make the public service functional. And second, there is the need to beef up the organisational IQ of the MDAs through the mobilization of technical support that will facilitate a service-wide capability review that will attempt to fill the capability gaps while reinforcing the framework of performance improvement plans that must necessarily be implemented

In the rest of this piece, I will highlight some critical reform points to signpost the next level of performance of the public service as we look to 2027 and beyond in terms of the institutional transformation of the public service. One, given the deep erosion of the status of the public service as a vocation that is a complement to a democratic government, the government must constantly work on (re)launching a cultural adjustment programme that enables it to regain public trust in the public service. This can be done through the mainstreaming of codes of ethics and codes of practice that reinvent the public service as a value-based institution. This serves as the first level in consolidating the building of a new generation of public managers that can keep driving the transformation of the system. In this regard, the establishment of a multidisciplinary talent-reinforced senior executive service (SES) feeds into this need to reinvent and rebrand the public service, and beef up its organisational IQ. In pushing for the SES model for beefing up the brain and capability readiness of the civil service, we defer to Bob Garratt’s idea that in administration, the fish always rots from the head first.

Two, rebranding the public service and establishing a senior executive service must be reinforced by the deepening of the ongoing professionalisation of some core cadres in the service. This allows the service to restore the government and the public service as an employer of choice by connecting meritocracy to diversity and talent management in recruitment. In constantly revising the intellectual contents of skills for running the business of government through benchmarking globally available competency frameworks, the public service is then able to regrade skills and competences that are accompanied by the installation of new and competitive wage structures and incentive packages, the rightsizing and downsizing alongside considerable social assistance programmes and severance packages, which deserve to be funded with a major credit facility given the incredible value that their return on investment (ROI) promises.

Three, it is inevitable and urgent that the government must keep reengineering the operating and management system of the MDAs as a safeguard to make them structurally capable of backstopping results-based performance management systems which connect talent management with knowledge, performance and productivity. We must do all it takes to create performance-managed backends in MDA operations, ones that not only displace the discredited APER scores, but also deploy new performance appraisal metrics and instruments that will henceforth account for what officers have contributed or accomplished or have the capabilities and competences to achieve. The performance management system is, of course, meant to instigate the consolidation of competency-based human resource practices, career management protocols and leadership pipelining in the service.

Four, the emergence of the new normal consequent on the COVID-19 pandemic demands that the public service, post-2027, will not be able again to ignore the critical utility of digital technologies, including the pre-eminence of artificial intelligence in the public service workplace. This demands, therefore, that if the Nigerian state is to successfully navigate a place in the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions, the public service needs to deploy new technologies in strengthening its policy management function. This can be done through reprofiling and professionalising its planning, research and statistics function, concretising the policy-research-consulting synergies as a means of deepening policy intelligence, strategic thinking, evidence-based analytics and problem-solving. The system also must consider upgrading its M&E systems, as well as consolidating and significantly upgrading its programme, project and change management capabilities.

After the general election is conducted, won and lost in 2027, what will continue to matter is the state of the public service and its capability readiness to deliver the dividends of democratic governance to Nigerians. We cannot afford to lose sight of that significant issue.

• Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.