Investing in reform as tonic for deepening post-2027 federal bureaucracy capability

In this piece, I am interested in distilling the consequences, in economic and governance terms, of what investing in public service institutional reform would mean for the Nigerian government, going forward. And by investment, I speak to the possibility of the government being willing to facilitate foreign low-interest loans from the entire gamut of multilateral partners that could be committed to the urgent task of rehabilitating the administrative and institutional structures on which the efficient and effective operational performance and productivity of the public service rests. Foreign loans have often been secured to fund physical infrastructures. But then, what arguments can we marshal for not extending the same measure to the funding of human and institutional infrastructures, especially those core institutions that make up the civil/public service, given their relevance to Nigeria’s democratic governance and national productivity?

Why must the government pursue this option? The sole justification is none other than the weak capability readiness of the civil service administrative system (in spite of the numerous reforms) to backstop institutional performance that will deepen and consolidate democratic governance and national development policy outcomes for the benefit of Nigerians. In the past, development plans and contingent administrative reforms have failed for three out of several cogent reasons. The first is that there has remained a lack of willpower both at political and administrative leadership levels, backed up with significant investment and resourcing in all the past reforms. This, in a measure that could enable reform blueprints and change programmes to fully reengineer the old Weberian bureaucratic structures and processes, so that reform managers and change agents could follow through with the reforms to the point of their institutionalisation within the operating systems of the MDAs. This would have firmly enabled them to achieve the installation, beyond pronouncements and mere rhetoric, of the capacity, capability and resilience needed to execute complex policy processes, projects and programmes required to shape development management in the twenty-first century.

Secondly, the public service is confronted with the curse of resource-use efficiency. This implies that budgets and resources are often lost or swallowed up by often bloated and inefficient administrative processes and systems that by that very reason are unable to, and incapable of, facilitating the creation of public value. At the third level, and quite so unfortunately, the wage and remuneration structure is designed to support, in a manner of speaking, the retention of a thousand mediocre employees where only two hundred well-remunerated, self-motivated and well-trained highly skilled professionals could be employed to do the same level of jobs much more smartly and with a higher level of productivity. This lack of competitive wage structure is one cogent reason why the government has lost its status as the employer of choice to the private sector.

Investing the infusion of low-interest foreign loans into these structural and institutional administrative reforms is meant to boost the chances of the civil service in picking up on its institutional transformations in terms of performance management systems, the continuous financing of professional and managerial training, competitive wage structures, and the blocking of systemic leakages through which bureaucratic corrupt practices are enabled, and more. We must again be grateful for the ongoing HR audit of the federal civil service approved by HE President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. In its fullness, this auditing exercise and its iteration will lay open the massive institutional gaps across the MDAs that such an investment of funds will be directed at. And before this audit is completed, the process for sourcing for and procuring the loans must have been jumpstarted to coincide with the end of the audit and the commencement of the institutional reform, as much as it is practicable.

There are already several nodal administrative and structural/institutional points that will be the beneficiaries of the investment. One of the most immediate recipients of such a critical investment will be the federal secretariat complex that is very crucial to any reform efforts. The secretariat is a physical structure that plays a fundamental role in structural and institutional transformation of the workforce. However, many of the critical facilities and infrastructures that will be needed to enable workforce productivity need urgent upgrade in order to be able to become operationally efficient. Some of these facilities are the very basics: reprofiled workspaces, decent furniture upgrade, good lighting, proper ventilation, low noise levels, getting the office spaces internet-ready through upgrade with high-capacity ISP cum fibre optic connections, implementing structured maintenance policy that enables asset tracking, routine servicing, energy efficiency and safety compliance, and dedicated collaborative spaces. Another immediate investment is demanded by the urgency of automation for resource planning through deployment of digital tools and AI to manage budgets, government assets, inventory tracking, and to connect isolated departments/field offices, etc. into shared platforms, across the entire MDAs. At the general level, this is meant to enlarge and expand the ongoing digitisation reform of the workforce and workspace to improve bureaucratic efficiency usually undermined by manual delays and red tape. The digitisation reform is also meant to strengthen existing centralised digital frameworks to deepen digital literacy and institutional learning. This will also specifically upgrade data security and firm up communication networks while filling data and statistical gaps in the MDAs.

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These initial investment interventions have a deeper bearing on human resource management, planning, research and statistics functions and dynamics in the MDAs. This manifests most distinctly in the need to professionalise and incentivise the job roles involved in this professionalisation. This can also be backstopped by continuous structured training and capacity development that expand the opportunities for continuous learning through specialised leadership modules and digital platforms. This is already contained in such initiatives like the Structured Mandatory Assessment-Based Training Programme (SMAT-P) and the Leadership Enhancement and Development Programme (LEAD-P) flagship capacity-building programme for mid-level civil servants. This automatically affects the need to also upgrade the several manpower development institutes and the government training institutions that are charged with manpower and infrastructural development objectives.

Critical intervention funds must also be invested in launching a solid merit-based recruitment platform that must benefit from both the digitisation of the federal secretariat as well as the strengthening of the manpower requirements and the need for a reevaluated and upgraded job roles. This reevaluation implies focusing on both the reform of the competitive wage and remuneration packages, a serious investment in staff welfare schemes (including housing loans, healthcare and medical provisions, pension and retirement security), as well as the work-life balance that involves revitalising the senior and junior staff clubs, for instance. The civil service reform measures will not be complete and robust enough without investment in social assistance packages designed to backstop any rightsizing and downsizing measures that might arise within the context of re-professionalising, redundancy sorting and the dynamic of change management.

The federal government cannot but apply funds to systems remodelling that institutionalise performance management systems. This, being the single most fundamental component of the civil service reform that attends to modernised appraisal methods, one that transcends the annual performance evaluation report (APER) in connecting performance to career management, mobility and productivity. The foundation for this performance transformation lies in the implementation of a robust culture and attitudinal change programme, especially through the institutionalisation of a mentoring programme as well as a performance and consequence management project. Last, but not the least, investment funds must also intervene in the resuscitation of civil service professional bodies, and especially the National Association for Public Administration and Management (NAPAM). This goes a long way in not only strengthening but also deepening the collaborative synergies among the communities of service and of practice.

The larger and even more fundamental argument I will dedicate the rest of the piece to is that investing large doses of funds in civil service reform is not just urgent and fundamental in itself; it is a cogent and foundational investment in economic growth and development. And this investment drives not just economic growth but grounds democratic governance through a crucial engagement with improving public sector efficiency and effectiveness, mitigating bureaucratic corruption and building investors’ confidence. Public sector efficiency is driven by key and foundational reforms at several levels with clear-cut economic and developmental benefits. Merit-based recruitment, for example, will undercut the bloated budget that goes into hiring too many staff who will not be as effective as hiring key competent and skilled public servants that can adequately man critical economic and development agencies.

Better and efficient service delivery is required to facilitate and speed up the ease of doing business that involves business registration, licensing, trade processes, and many more. Achieving efficiency in this context also demands cutting down on administrative bottlenecks and undermining the culture of waste and redundancy. This also, most fundamentally as a reform imperative, requires that accountability measures must be strengthened within the ambit of, say, public procurement, automated tax systems, and performance tracking. Applying critical components in digital and digitisation reforms will go a long way to strengthen anti-corruption practices that plug systemic leaks through enhanced transparency and streamlined regulatory frameworks. All these are very important for fast-tracking economic growth while also restoring foreign and domestic private sector investors’ confidence in the economic and business environment of the Nigerian state.

It should already be obvious what returns on investment the Nigerian government can expect on deploying foreign low-interest loans to facilitate civil service institutional reform. The most immediate return on investment, as I hinted earlier, is the transformation of the capacity readiness of the public service system to keep backstopping the government’s commitment to Nigerians through efficient service delivery of the dividends of democratic governance. And this public service institutional reform contributes a bulk of other benefits that indirectly manifest as governance and fiscal improvements to the Nigerian economy. A key possibility is how the ability to streamline administrative operations can enable the government to free up revenues that could, for instance, be deployed towards the servicing of low-cost external debts.

If public sector institutional reform can be sufficiently achieved, we cannot begin to underestimate the rolling effects on economic, governance and productivity returns, especially in terms of optimising the MDAs, eliminating ghost workers, reducing the monthly wage bill, automating the payroll and the legion of HRM processes, and more. These have solid implications for the attempt to lower recurrent costs of the government and free up revenues for more governance and development projects.

I hope this piece will instigate a new dimension of political and bureaucratic reflection on how urgent we want the civil service institutional reform to happen, and the tantalising possibilities that the efficiency of the public service can yield for governance and economic progress.

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