WRITERS are often considered literary prophets. Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People preceded the first Nigerian military coup by seven months. William Shakespeare is no less prophetic. In Achebe’s case, we could say it was easy to diagnose the Nigerian predicament and forecast possible consequences.
Shakespeare wasn’t a Nigerian, yet in Hamlet, probably his most popular tragedy, I see a deep analogy in Hamlet’s famous speech to the characterization of Nigeria as a ‘hesitant’ reformer in the comity of reforming nations in Africa. ‘To be, or not to be,’ says Hamlet, while contemplating whether or not to commit murder. That is also the question for the Nigerian civil service (NCS) in the 60th year of its existence.
When more than four hundred years ago, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Prince Hamlet’s question was a literary metaphor for deep hesitation; today, it connotes a deeper and more philosophical framework that surrounds conception and reality of what we want the Nigerian civil service to be.
To be, or not to be, that is the question—Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them?
The Nigerian civil service, since its inauguration in 1954, has been wading through its own ‘sea of troubles’ that has constrained it from rising up to the zenith of its historical mandate of mediating the social contract between the Nigerian government and the Nigerian citizens through the efficient and effectively delivery of the dividends of democratic governance.
Service evolution and progress have been characterised by series of disruptions, false starts, hiccups, misinterpretations, administrative misses and fortuitous breakthrough that make it very difficult for the system to achieve a critical rethinking and reconsideration of its base fundamentals.
Prof. Ladipo Adamolekun gave an empirical backing to this historical demonstration of our reform profile since independence. In a 2005 survey of the reform profiles of 29 African countries divided into four categories, Nigeria qualified as a ‘hesitant’ reforming nation behind advanced reformers like Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, and committed reformers like Ghana, Cameroon and so on.
When I completed my doctorate in 2005, I equally got a corroborating insight into one critical reason for the hesitant steps Nigeria has been taking in its reform efforts. That doctoral dissertation titled The Nigerian Civil Service: A Framework for Reform, revealed a lot, basically the recognition of the dynamics that articulate the structural specifics underlying the needed reconstruction.
Essentially, at the institutional level, I discover a real structural predicament which, with the benefit of my research practice, beginning with the doctoral dissertation, has continue to be the bane of the institutional reformation of the Nigerian civil service system since 1975 when systemic decay set in. My thesis revealed that there are too many people doing nothing, too many doing too little and too few people doing too much.
The fact that my dissertation, later published as Public Administration and Civil Service Reforms in Nigeria, has entered into its third edition attests to the significance of this protracted structural predicament. In my new book, The Nigerian Civil Service of the Future (2014), I analysed this research finding into two significant imperatives which the NCS must address if its future as a world class institution is to be assured. The first imperative is the urgent task of professionalism. The second urgent imperative concerns an urgent reassessment of HR functions as the fundamental basis on which a professional civil service can orient its capability readiness.
The NCS doesn’t need experts. According to Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think? He is an expert.’ What we need are professionals managers; administrative leaders who are constantly motivated by the specifically local administrative predicament of Nigeria and the global knowledge framework to think, learn and rethink in other to evolve a world class institution that can deliver service as efficiently and effectively as any of its counterpart elsewhere.
Modernising imperative
The challenge that the NCS confronts is therefore that of how it can metamorphose into a new public service supervised by those we have called the ‘new professionals’ who are aware of the modernising imperative the NCS must fulfil. In other words, how can the NCS calibrate a refreshing and globally compliant HRM architecture around which the reform of the institution can be facilitated?
A new HRM architecture requires a strong, professional and adequately incentivised administrative cadre that will deploy creative and ingenious means to resolve the challenge of effective service delivery to the populace. Thus, reforming the civil service essentially involves rethinking our idea of who the civil servant is as well as a renegotiation of what constitutes his/her essential professional brief.
This reforming framework was already pre-empted by the 1999 White Paper on Modernising Government by the UK Government. This sets out six key themes as the locus of the modernisation programme aimed at promoting a performance-oriented civil service: (a) stronger leadership with a clear sense of purpose (‘vision and values’ for departments; stronger central control of senior appointments, ‘360-degree feedback’ on staff performance); (b) better business planning from top to bottom (with all departments to have business plans with peer or outside review ‘cascaded down to personal responsibility plans’); (c) sharper performance management (with relative appraisal systems to identify poor performers).; (d) a dramatic improvement in diversity (with targets to have more women and ethnic minorities at senior levels); (e) a Service more open to people and ideas, which brings on talent (more interchange and outside recruitment); and (f) a better deal for staff (‘good conditions of service, meeting or exceeding best employment practice in the UK’ – a concession to tradition).
It is definitely not a mere conceptual coincidence that the modernising imperative is hinged, first and last, on the image of leadership—a civil servant that understands the direction of effectiveness and efficiency, and s/he takes it!
What then is a Nigerian civil servant? This question is not meant to refer to the ‘person’ of the civil servant who isn’t more human than the average Nigerian. Rather, it is supposed to address the ‘persona’—the role and responsibility—which the civil servant is supposed to be known for. And this has been the subject of many of the reforms which have attended the refurbishing of the NCS since 1954.
Apart from the Foot Commission and the Gorsuch Commission that laid the foundations for the present Federal Civil Service Commission and the Establishment Branch respectively, the Nigerianisation Policy accelerated to fast track the national shape and dynamics of the newly minted Nigerian civil service. Its basic objective was the creation of a specifically Nigerian professional core of civil servants that would be saddled with the onerous task of nation building and national development. This Policy was however undermined by many factors, one of the most significant of which is its subordination of merit to representativeness in appointment into the NCS, and the consequent fall in professional standards.
By the time the terrible purge of 1975 happened, it was clear that the NCS was at the peak of its performance in the efficient prosecution of the civil war while it also has taken some wrong turns. The most significant of these turns, for me, were the neglect of the momentous administrative insights and reforms advocated by the Adebo Commission of 1971 and the Udoji Report of 1974. ‘To make knowledge productive,’ Peter Drucker says, ‘requires the systematic exploitation of opportunities for change.’
With the Udoji Commission Report, Nigeria lost a significant opportunity to exploit the managerial revolution and install a performance management system that would have impacted significantly on the question of what a Nigerian civil servant ought to be.
The gradual but steady breakdown in manpower utilisation as well as vague job design and performance appraisal inevitably led to a general inability to recruit, retain and motivate adequate numbers of technical and professional staff as well as a gradual loss of professional and technical personnel from the civil service to other sectors as well as outside the country. If government fails to recruit and retain the best in the labour market, then how can it achieve the objective of building an HRM structure that will backstop its vision of a world class public service institution?
Back to Shakespeare: To be or not to be? For sixty years now since the inauguration of the NCS, we have suffered the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ Isn’t it time now to ‘take arm against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, to end them?’ it took a while for Hamlet to resolve his indecision, and that came by chance. On the contrary, the Nigerian Civil Service cannot leave anything to fortune. From what point can we begin to undermine our hesitancy?
To be or not to be? That is the essential question that the Nigerian Civil Service (NCS) must necessarily answer if it must indeed earn the epithet of a functional democratic state that is committed to an efficient and effective service delivery to its citizens. In the first part, we saw how that since its inauguration, the evolution of the NCS constitutes the sum total of outstanding starts; evolving, immature and weak structures; ambivalent decisions; bold steps; compromised reforms and fortuitous breakthroughs.
This evolution simply implies that the organisational growth of the NCS has failed to reach a point of maturity from which it could commence a reformulation of its original objectives. Thus, most of the reform efforts since its inauguration have been mere attempts at damage control. Hence, when Prof. Adamolekun categorised Nigeria as a hesitant reformer, it is not difficult to see the analogy with Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
It is often said that when a person or an institution is through changing, then it is through. It doesn’t really appear that the NCS is through changing despite its compromised institutional growth trajectory. When the wave of democratisation began in the early 90s, Nigeria had to decide whether it still wanted to be a hesitant reformer or make the urgent push for advancement in reform management.
From 1985 to date, we have had five specific reform attempts aimed at refurbishing the professional status of the Nigerian civil servant—the 1985/1988 Phillips Commission, the Ayida Reform of 1995, the Obasanjo Renewal Programme, Yar’Adua Civil Service Reform Programme and the present Jonathan Transformation Agenda. Put together, all these reforms had a very simple objective: Reconstructing the persona of the Nigerian civil servant through professionalising the NCS and its HRM architecture.
Some of the essential steps taken in this direction include: (a) To re-professionalise as a means of creating a new generation of officers and technocrats with sufficient skills, knowledge and motivation for institutional innovation; (b) the conduct of vigorous and systematic evaluation and reporting of professional performance to make policy-makers accountable for resources used and for results; (c) modernizing core operations and systems of the NCS using ICT; (d) creation of a number of more specialized cadres; (e) putting in place a system of capacity utilization wherein core skills are better matched with jobs; (f) injection of high skills and competencies available in other sectors of the economy into the public service, using a range of incentives; and (g) strengthening policy and research synergies through enhanced collaborative projects, including public-private partnerships.
Yet, reconstructing the modus operandi of the NCS requires more than just token attention to the imperative of reform. It requires, essentially, a paradigm shift. The simple reason is that we can never hope to continue at this hesitant rate and hope to achieve a world class status with the same indecisive level of administrative functionality.
Transforming into a ‘new public service’ involves answering two simple but basic questions: How do we want to be seen as an administrative institution? What must we do to achieve this new perception? The National Strategy for Public Service Reform (NSPSR) provides a straightforward answer to the first question: The Nigerian civil service ought to be perceived and to function as ‘A world-class public service delivering government policies and programmes with professionalism, excellence and passion.’
And its mission statement is also simple: To efficiently and effectively implement the policies and programmes of government, operating collaboratively and transparently with other stakeholders to ensure quality delivery of public services.
The answer to the second question follows automatically: To achieve this large vision of a world class and democratic public service, we need to urgently get the basics of reform execution and management right. Getting the basics right implies the need to build the fundamental strengths of our public service institution before deploying best practices to ignite the changes we desire.
Consequently, reform must create the government context for agency-level systemic changes to take root. In a 2008 essay titled ‘The Public Service of 2025,’ Jocelyne Bourgon outlines five fundamental trends around which the vision of the NSPSR can coalesce if its mission statement is to become a reality for Nigerians. These paradigmatic trends include: Trend One—Hybridisation of Public Human Resource Models.
This would involve a civil service system exploring the possibility of a mixed regime that combined the career-based and position-based models of recruitment into the civil service. Trend Two—A Reduction of Protection, Immunity and Privilege. In this regard, there has been a serious encroachment on the traditional permanent tenure of the civil servants in favour of flexible and fixed-term contract appointments. Trend Three—Emphasis on Individual Performance. Such a future civil service would also be concerned with how its HRM framework can been capacitated enough with pay, compensation and incentives to build individual and unit performance that would result in organisational progress.
Trend Four—Decentralisation of HRM Policies. This involves achieving flexibility and freedom in HRM policy implementation through devolving powers to implement to MDAs. Such a decentralisation would be done within several frameworks that could have no central agency, a single agency or multiple agencies facilitating the implementation. Trend Five—Cultivation of a Senior Civil Servant System. This would be an attempt to separate a top echelon of intelligent and competent administrative officers that would focus the leadership of the civil service and direct its policy formulation and implementation capacity.
If the NSPSR provides the vision and the mission statement, and Bourgon gives us a framework within which the vision and mission can be calibrated into a dynamic future-defining new public service anchored on a functional HRM architecture, then McGregor identifies a further underlining component that motivates the paradigm shift. This involves challenging existing bureaucratic behaviour.
Since we are basically concerned with the persona of the Nigerian civil servant, it becomes inevitable that we transit from an administrative behavioural framework that Douglas McGregor calls Theory X to another he calls Theory Y. Theory X, for McGregor, derives from a very strict administrative regimen and gloomy picture of human nature at three levels: first, management involves the deployment of people, material and money as means towards the achievement of particular economic objectives; second, that organisational objectives require the control and motivation of people; and, third, that without a strict organisational regimen, humans are usually unproductive and resistant to organisational needs.
On the other hand, Theory Y has at its base a picture of a transformational leadership and a philosophical insight which insists that that humans are motivated by the need to satisfy the higher-order needs like social relationship, the search for esteem and dignity as well as the need to exercise their creative genius especially with regards to organisational performance. The responsibility of a Theory Y leader is therefore to provide the atmosphere that unleashes these potentials of his already motivated employees.
The paradigm shift in HRM framework therefore demands an ingenious mix of components of Theory X and Theory Y to achieve a dynamic framework for creating a new generation of neo-Weberian professionals sufficiently capacitated and incentivised to function differently and outside of all existing bureaucratic pathologies afflicting the Nigerian civil service.
These new professionals will be dedicated to the demands of a new productivity paradigm undergirding the performance-oriented dynamics of the NCS. And they will be backstopped by the evolution of management competencies, values and ethics necessary for the successful management of the reform processes in the public services. This takes issue with the HRM policy and framework of the NCS.
A dynamics HR framework isn’t just personnel management or even HRM. It involves a strategic framework that goes beyond mere people management to coordinating HR practices and policies with the need and requirements of the organisation itself. The strategic human resource manager therefore becomes essentially an architect who confronts the pathology of HR practices in the NCS.
This pathology manifests in three regards: One is the centrally determined statutory employment conditions. This system requires strict compliance with rules and regulations with minimum discretion delegation to line managers. The second impediment arises from central governance using the instrument of circulars that promotes the tendency to push a ‘one-model-fits-all’ administrative tradition. The third is the general tendency to regard personnel administration function as a mechanical task requiring low-skills generalist competencies.
Several suggestions follow the imperative of strategic HRM in the NCS. First: managers will grow to depend more on HR professionals who in turn will be concerned with recruiting competent staff and dealing with the incompetent as well as instituting multidisciplinary consulting. Second: Job design will involve a dynamic linkage between value of job, compensation and productivity. Three: Workforce development orientation will include training and re-professionalization schemes.
This will provide the opportunity to shift from a resource- to a knowledge-based framework for the workforce. Four: Newly professionalised HRM departments’ remit must be expanded from current largely administrative and clerical support to MDAs to become special expert hubs and advisory units for developing and maintaining HR policies and for integrating development strategy and government business with praxis and long-term vision and plans. Finally: to improve productivity and performance, there would have to be the injection of market conditions to staffing and remuneration in a manner that facilitates healthy competition, retention of the best staff and enable better talent management.
Strategic HRM constitutes the turning point at which we either step into the future or we stay in the present. It is certain however that we cannot remain hesitant forever. The Nigerian Civil Service of the Future need to overcome its tentativeness; it cannot remain within the Hamlet trap if it must transit to that future.
To be or not to be? That is the essential question that the Nigerian Civil Service (NCS) must necessarily answer if it must indeed earn the epithet of a functional democratic state that is committed to an efficient and effective service delivery to its citizens. In the first part, we saw how that since its inauguration, the evolution of the NCS constitutes the sum total of outstanding starts; evolving, immature and weak structures; ambivalent decisions; bold steps; compromised reforms and fortuitous breakthroughs.
This evolution simply implies that the organisational growth of the NCS has failed to reach a point of maturity from which it could commence a reformulation of its original objectives. Thus, most of the reform efforts since its inauguration have been mere attempts at damage control. Hence, when Prof. Adamolekun categorised Nigeria as a hesitant reformer, it is not difficult to see the analogy with Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
It is often said that when a person or an institution is through changing, then it is through. It doesn’t really appear that the NCS is through changing despite its compromised institutional growth trajectory. When the wave of democratisation began in the early 90s, Nigeria had to decide whether it still wanted to be a hesitant reformer or make the urgent push for advancement in reform management.
From 1985 to date, we have had five specific reform attempts aimed at refurbishing the professional status of the Nigerian civil servant—the 1985/1988 Phillips Commission, the Ayida Reform of 1995, the Obasanjo Renewal Programme, Yar’Adua Civil Service Reform Programme and the present Jonathan Transformation Agenda. Put together, all these reforms had a very simple objective: Reconstructing the persona of the Nigerian civil servant through professionalising the NCS and its HRM architecture. Some of the essential steps taken in this direction include:
(a) To re-professionalise as a means of creating a new generation of officers and technocrats with sufficient skills, knowledge and motivation for institutional innovation; (b) the conduct of vigorous and systematic evaluation and reporting of professional performance to make policy-makers accountable for resources used and for results;
(c) modernizing core operations and systems of the NCS using ICT;
(d) creation of a number of more specialized cadres;
(e) putting in place a system of capacity utilization wherein core skills are better matched with jobs;
(f) injection of high skills and competencies available in other sectors of the economy into the public service, using a range of incentives; and
(g) strengthening policy and research synergies through enhanced collaborative projects, including public-private partnerships.
Yet, reconstructing the modus operandi of the NCS requires more than just token attention to the imperative of reform. It requires, essentially, a paradigm shift. The simple reason is that we can never hope to continue at this hesitant rate and hope to achieve a world class status with the same indecisive level of administrative functionality. Transforming into a ‘new public service’ involves answering two simple but basic questions: How do we want to be seen as an administrative institution?
What must we do to achieve this new perception? The National Strategy for Public Service Reform (NSPSR) provides a straightforward answer to the first question: The Nigerian civil service ought to be perceived and to function as ‘A world-class public service delivering government policies and programmes with professionalism, excellence and passion.’ And its mission statement is also simple: To efficiently and effectively implement the policies and programmes of government, operating collaboratively and transparently with other stakeholders to ensure quality delivery of public services.
The answer to the second question follows automatically: To achieve this large vision of a world class and democratic public service, we need to urgently get the basics of reform execution and management right. Getting the basics right implies the need to build the fundamental strengths of our public service institution before deploying best practices to ignite the changes we desire. Consequently, reform must create the government context for agency-level systemic changes to take root.
In a 2008 essay titled ‘The Public Service of 2025,’ Jocelyne Bourgon outlines five fundamental trends around which the vision of the NSPSR can coalesce if its mission statement is to become a reality for Nigerians. These paradigmatic trends include: Trend One—Hybridisation of Public Human Resource Models. This would involve a civil service system exploring the possibility of a mixed regime that combined the career-based and position-based models of recruitment into the civil service.
Trend Two—A Reduction of Protection, Immunity and Privilege. In this regard, there has been a serious encroachment on the traditional permanent tenure of the civil servants in favour of flexible and fixed-term contract appointments. Trend Three—Emphasis on Individual Performance. Such a future civil service would also be concerned with how its HRM framework can been capacitated enough with pay, compensation and incentives to build individual and unit performance that would result in organisational progress.
Trend Four—Decentralisation of HRM Policies. This involves achieving flexibility and freedom in HRM policy implementation through devolving powers to implement to MDAs. Such a decentralisation would be done within several frameworks that could have no central agency, a single agency or multiple agencies facilitating the implementation. Trend Five—Cultivation of a Senior Civil Servant System. This would be an attempt to separate a top echelon of intelligent and competent administrative officers that would focus the leadership of the civil service and direct its policy formulation and implementation capacity.
If the NSPSR provides the vision and the mission statement, and Bourgon gives us a framework within which the vision and mission can be calibrated into a dynamic future-defining new public service anchored on a functional HRM architecture, then McGregor identifies a further underlining component that motivates the paradigm shift. This involves challenging existing bureaucratic behaviour.
Since we are basically concerned with the persona of the Nigerian civil servant, it becomes inevitable that we transit from an administrative behavioural framework that Douglas McGregor calls Theory X to another he calls Theory Y. Theory X, for McGregor, derives from a very strict administrative regimen and gloomy picture of human nature at three levels: first, management involves the deployment of people, material and money as means towards the achievement of particular economic objectives; second, that organisational objectives require the control and motivation of people; and, third, that without a strict organisational regimen, humans are usually unproductive and resistant to organisational needs.
On the other hand, Theory Y has at its base a picture of a transformational leadership and a philosophical insight which insists that that humans are motivated by the need to satisfy the higher-order needs like social relationship, the search for esteem and dignity as well as the need to exercise their creative genius especially with regards to organisational performance. The responsibility of a Theory Y leader is therefore to provide the atmosphere that unleashes these potentials of his already motivated employees.
The paradigm shift in HRM framework therefore demands an ingenious mix of components of Theory X and Theory Y to achieve a dynamic framework for creating a new generation of neo-Weberian professionals sufficiently capacitated and incentivised to function differently and outside of all existing bureaucratic pathologies afflicting the Nigerian civil service.
These new professionals will be dedicated to the demands of a new productivity paradigm undergirding the performance-oriented dynamics of the NCS. And they will be backstopped by the evolution of management competencies, values and ethics necessary for the successful management of the reform processes in the public services. This takes issue with the HRM policy and framework of the NCS.
A dynamics HR framework isn’t just personnel management or even HRM. It involves a strategic framework that goes beyond mere people management to coordinating HR practices and policies with the need and requirements of the organisation itself. The strategic human resource manager therefore becomes essentially an architect who confronts the pathology of HR practices in the NCS. This pathology manifests in three regards: One is the centrally determined statutory employment conditions.
This system requires strict compliance with rules and regulations with minimum discretion delegation to line managers. The second impediment arises from central governance using the instrument of circulars that promotes the tendency to push a ‘one-model-fits-all’ administrative tradition. The third is the general tendency to regard personnel administration function as a mechanical task requiring low-skills generalist competencies.
Several suggestions follow the imperative of strategic HRM in the NCS. First: managers will grow to depend more on HR professionals who in turn will be concerned with recruiting competent staff and dealing with the incompetent as well as instituting multidisciplinary consulting. Second: Job design will involve a dynamic linkage between value of job, compensation and productivity. Three: Workforce development orientation will include training and re-professionalization schemes.
This will provide the opportunity to shift from a resource- to a knowledge-based framework for the workforce. Four: Newly professionalised HRM departments’ remit must be expanded from current largely administrative and clerical support to MDAs to become special expert hubs and advisory units for developing and maintaining HR policies and for integrating development strategy and government business with praxis and long-term vision and plans.
Finally: to improve productivity and performance, there would have to be the injection of market conditions to staffing and remuneration in a manner that facilitates healthy competition, retention of the best staff and enable better talent management.
Strategic HRM constitutes the turning point at which we either step into the future or we stay in the present. It is certain however that we cannot remain hesitant forever. The Nigerian Civil Service of the Future need to overcome its tentativeness; it cannot remain within the Hamlet trap if it must transit to that future.
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