You worked in the public sector as a senior member of staff for many years before your retirement. How would you describe the country’s public sector?
As a postcolonial state, Nigeria’s major problem is that of how to harness its ethnic energies as a means of achieving development. This development can be construed in terms of either economic growth or infrastructural development. And the public service system is a fundamental variable, if not the most fundamental, in this development equation. The implication of my analysis therefore is that the public service requires sufficient capacity, in terms of institutional reform, to be able to adequately face the challenge of development in Nigeria. Unfortunately, however, the carriage on the ground possesses the engine of a small car. So, the challenge of carrying the Nigerian project as a development predicament is too cumbersome for the public service in Nigeria. Another way to put this challenge is to say that Nigeria cannot become a developmental state if its public service system is not capacity-ready to take on the challenge of development.
And this is not the civil service creation; it is just that what we have in terms of structural system and model are still almost 85 per cent what the British left for us. When the British left, they left behind an administrative tradition that was a combination of operational efficiency and value orientation. There is a way the public servant is expected to behave. They must not only be neutral and anonymous and professional, they must also be ethical in the handling of administrative matters. This was the tradition that was inherited by administrative pioneers like Simeon Adebo, Alilu Akilu, Jerome Udoji and Joseph Imoukhuede. Indeed, it was on the basis of this strict professionalism and public spiritedness that these pioneers were able to achieve immense administrative successes in their various regions. We are mostly familiar with what Adebo and Chief Obafemi Awolowo did in the old Western Region. Furthermore, it was this same professional discipline, intellectual competence and administrative acumen that the super permanent secretaries deployed in their herculean attempt to administer Nigeria during the war period. However, in the immediate post-independence period, this professionalism attached to the understanding of the public service became warped and distorted. This was mostly the case during the military era when the command structure of the military fractured the administrative dynamics. The top-down control mechanism of military structure undermined the very essence of democratic accountability that the public service was founded on.
Between 1968 and the early 80s, most public services that have made significant administrative progress—in Singapore, Canada, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and even in Britain—have all taken steps to modernise and transform their public service systems through two to three generations of reforms. But unfortunately, the public service we have in Nigeria is still the inherited civil service struggling to come to terms with Nigeria’s postcolonial and democratic realities. So, no matter what the most diligent of civil servants do, it will not translate into any tangible administrative consequences for Nigeria. There is simply no way a colonial administrative edifice could be utilised for the purpose of developmental and democratic transformation.
I challenge anyone to prove me wrong: the public service system in Nigeria today was not designed to operate administratively beyond input and processes. This is what I spent 27 years interrogating and attempting to reform in my own little ways. What it means to see the public service as a system of inputs and processes is that you can manage budget, you can manage resources, you can manage human resources and all of that through a process guided by rules and regulations; circulars, memos and all of that. But this is just one side of any public service system. There is also the output and outcome side. Output and outcome constitute the evidence that input and process have achieved the intended objectives. They are what we measure in terms of infrastructural impacts on the lives of the people. The fundamental trouble is that we have often dedicated attention to managing the input-process side while neglecting the output-outcome side. Ask me about the many reforms that Nigeria has initiated, and I will tell you that we have unfortunately never followed through with any reform in terms of implementation.
You have served in various positions in government. What will you say is the major denominator in all the places you have worked all through your 27 years that you think has kept us behind other countries?
Good question! Before and after I became permanent secretary, I had the opportunity of going round the MDAs, from the Office of the Head of Service of the Federation to the Bureau of Public Service Reform, and from the Career Management Office to the State House, Federal Ministries of Labour and Productivity, Youth Development and Communication Technology.
You see, if institutions are not working in sync with their first principle, there will be discordance. So, there are some structural elements, embedded in policy making that are not making policies to translate to a worthy direction. Apart from the implementation problem we have identified, we must also necessarily take notice of the capacity gap. My doctoral dissertation was focused on this under-capacity utilisation problem. My thesis was that there are too many people doing nothing, too many doing too little, and too few people doing too much. The last category of people has those who are reliable, trusted or capable. And it is on this set of people that the system depends to achieve its huge objective. Yet, these people hardly benefit from training programmes and refresher courses required to bring their knowledge and competence up to date. Here, we link inevitably to the resource gap that is undermining the public service and its capacity to link with the knowledge and technological society. I can say that the level of Information Technology penetration in the public service will continue to keep Nigeria in digital deficit forever. This is because Nigeria is not keeping up with the rapid evolution of technological resources required for administrative progress. Unfortunately, we even lack the capacity to utilise the ones we have purchased. We have concentrated more on procurement rather than building capacities that modernise and transform the system. If you do a workforce study, you will discover that over 30 per cent of the certificate claims of most of the officers are false. This is because that is the only system you can enter through nepotism. This is the human resource gap I am talking about.
Many observers have identified the relationship between competence and corruption in the public service. In other words, corruption is not only endemic in the public sector, public servants are also grossly incompetent. What is your view on this?
Like I said already, the effectiveness of the civil service is grounded on structural matters. Let me give you an illustration. I’ve helped a lot of my cousins or my wards, classmates, children and all, to enter the banking industry. The way the bank operates is that it overlooks whatever deficiencies you have and ensures that you are armed with whatever competence and skills it requires for you to function optimally. If you have never operated a computer system before, it becomes imperative for you to acquire that skill, and so many others that will enable you to function. Unfortunately for the typical public servant in Nigeria, they are working within a system that has not standardised administrative and technical operations in order to determine whether or not the public servant is capable. So, it becomes extremely difficult to track administrative effectiveness. If as a reporter, you file a news report or a feature article and your sub-editor is not able to relate with it, you are in trouble. Within the public service, you do not get that kind of institutional control. The system still operates according to the logic of a centrally determined HR system. This in itself is not a bad thing. What is bad is in taking the control totally out of the hands of those who get to work with those that have been recruited by the civil service commission. The system must also provide measurable and achievable targets that I must work on. However, if a system is saddled with a director that travels all the time, always asks for another person to act for them, and gets promoted for doing nothing, then you have a system that cannot work. This simply tells us that there is no system of tracking productivity undergirded by a performance management dynamics.
But why, in your opinion, is the system not effective?
There is a simple answer to this, derivable from all we have been saying: the public service in Nigeria has been undergoing a systemic problem that ensures that it has not been able to achieve optimal efficiency. This issue of the ineffectiveness and inefficiency boils down to the reluctance of the political and bureaucratic leadership to face up to the problem of capacitating the public service with the right skills and competency sets that would accelerate the modernisation of the service and make it a player in the emerging knowledge society. This is the issue of determining the appropriate workforce and human resource management framework that will allow knowledgeable and professional public servants to man the machinery of government business, and to perform efficiently. However, this is an issue that has created enormous problems in terms of labour relations and industrial actions that have crippled performance and productivity. While government must rethink the public service in terms of an efficient workforce, labour is reluctant to dump people in the labour market (and especially those who have only known the public service all their working lives). Both must however consider the crippling effect of wastages and the cost of governance. Both sides must look at how many aides and personal assistants a typical governor has; both must face the problem of structural redundancies. Within the ambit of performance management, public servants must be efficient or leave the system. But vis-à-vis the imperatives of performance management must also be a humane post-retirement framework that enable the downsized public servants to face up to retirement without loss of dignity.
Thus, efficiency is not something that will emerge as a result of strategies. On the contrary, what the system requires is an institutional restructuring or re-engineering. And this is needed at many layers of the system. It is by re-engineering the system that corruption can be kept at bay. The problem of corruption, at least at the bureaucratic level, cannot be resolved by selectively arresting and jailing people. What you end up doing is motivating new breeds of smart criminals who learn to master the loopholes in the system. Why not just aim for those loopholes in the first place through creative and innovative reform management? Imagine travelling above the required speed limit in a typical city in the United States. No police will pursue you. But there are systems in place—installed speed cameras and a vast database system, for instance. Your number immediately goes into the system which in turn generates a fine that is posted to your address. If you refuse to pay, your name enters the system as a defaulter. The system therefore makes it expensive for you to travel above speed limit. We can also create a system that not only criminalises taking bribes but also makes it actionable. Such a system must be founded on an integrity system whose effectiveness commences from a civic curriculum in the educational system as well as a good incentive and compensation structure.
If the integrity system is weak or totally absent, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission will not be effective, and same for bureaucracy. The smartest thief will never be caught, no matter what you do. What do you want to do to a civil servant who is paid little salary? It’s a deep systemic thing, and for me, these are not difficult to address. At some points, somebody must sit down and ask how we should go about these things. The changes we desire will not just occur overnight. There must be continuous assessments. Institutional rebuilding is almost like you’re rehabilitating a drug addict; you must keep at it until it becomes reformed.
On the issue of salary, so will it be better to have something like a bimonthly salary structure for workers, just as it is done in some developed countries of the world?
That’s actually not the issue. I laugh about this whole issue of minimum wage. What has been happening in Nigeria is that both the trade unions and government have all been looking at the expenditure side without looking at the capacity to pay. As we speak, Nigeria is about the only country in the world that spends about 70 per cent of its budget on recurrent expenditure. This is why most projects cannot be funded. So, the basic issue about pay is tackled first by redesigning the system. The best option on wages will come through operating a rational accounting model that attaches wage to performance. We cannot eat our cake and have it; we cannot want an increase in wages while keeping the number.
The Ernest Shonekan-led Committee attempted this minimum wage matter by trying to look at what the salary of an average worker should be, but they discovered that it would wipe out the entire revenue of the state. The next thing the committee did was to plan to increase salaries by 50 per cent, which might not change the picture, but at least would be significant. The 50 per cent calculation was sent to the budget office, and it was rejected because of the challenge of affordability. If you desire to pay professional wage, you need to ask the fundamental question: who are you paying it to? Am I paying this wage to someone who can deliver on targets or somebody who has fake certificate, somebody that cannot write one page that is not atrocious, or somebody who is more of a contractor, or a politician that just found himself in the public service? So, the system must do a self-assessment. There are so many fundamental things that need to change. One of the things that must change is the fundamental nature of the skills set and competence for running the business of government. Most of the skills that we are even trying to embed are either not properly structured or not rooted in a strong intellectual foundation that aligns with the requirement of the tasks to be done.
Nigerian public service has the reputation of having many corrupt elements. Is it possible to rid it of that, and how?
For me, the public service is not any more corrupt than the society in which it finds itself. I, therefore, see corruption as more of a cultural issue. In fact, corruption got into the public service through the business sector. That was when civil servants were being told that they could have blind trust, and own all manner of things. So, personal interest was going into how the process of privatisation of some of those foreign-owned things was administered. Then the oil boom happened, and everything sort of scattered. But the greatest undoing of the public service, in terms of corruption, is the fact that a bad culture came into the service in 1975.
You see, the era of the Udoji down to Philip Asiodu was not really corrupt because when you were in the public service, your tenure was guaranteed. So, you have no distraction that somebody would wake up one day and say you are purged out of the system without doing anything wrong or in accordance with the law. But the government suddenly woke up in 1975 and started retrenching civil servants. And that culture continued till today. So, this in turn created a culture of self-interested consciousness: most civil servants, even the clerics among them, now started living in the awareness that after working their entire lives, their future was not assured by any government policy. In those days, civil servants were trained in the values of deferred gratification. The deferred gratification is what we call investing for eternity. You know some of us grew up within a religious orientation that believes that it is what God will reward you with that matters, and not what the world gives you. And it’s almost automatic that if you serve well, you will be celebrated. But the day you know that human beings can manipulate your future, then you will be compelled to become self-serving rather than system-serving. It is from this consciousness that bureaucratic corruption comes from. So, even as we speak, no matter how much you are paying a public servant, if you cannot create a measure of security, a measure of appreciation and reward, it is all a wasted effort.
Public servants always feel as if they slave in the hands of the politicians. With such a perception, all you feel you owe yourself is to cut corners for a rainy day.
Incriminating people in the public service and jailing them will therefore not remove corruption. What we need is a national value reorientation. This is what I call a cultural adjustment chain. This has to be pursued systematically for a long period, and it’s going to be based in love, the kind of thing we do in churches. There has to be a balance in the way you are pursuing anti-corruption. The way we are pursuing it is that in the end, you need the individual there to continue; when he leaves, no decisive change would have happened. The only thing now is that people are more careful, you create a nation of more hypocrites who would steal when they know it’s safe, but the stealing has not been purged from them.
What kind of reforms do you think the public service needs at this point in time?
We need to re-strategise and rethink the entire system and its basis. This comes from my administrative experience, having been part of virtually all reforms since 1988 till date. The first thing is that we need to really create a shift from the bureaucratic to a more performance-oriented system. It’s about making things happen, and not just operational strategies. Such a system will not tolerate much of nepotism because it is rooted more in merit and performance. The second thing is that we need a new generation of public managers. We are recruiting people without standardising our process of recruitment. So, the first fundamental issue to note is that not everybody can be a public servant. It is only in Nigeria that you have everyone in everything, without purpose. It’s not everybody that is called to serve in public service. The public service has a value orientation, and that orientation is selflessness. This orientation is not about what you gain; it’s about what you can give. This is so much like working in the Boy Scout or the Red Cross. The other thing is that there are lots of innovations that have made public service to work better—like the public-private partnership model for efficiency. However, the way we are practising our public-private partnership would still make us go down in records as one of the nations in the world that bastardised that approach because we are not doing it the right way. In other words, we are not building the required skills for public managers to manage the interface between the public and the private sectors.
Another innovation is profiling. Who is a public manager? What does he need to have? And that must be included from the level of recruitment to induction, to the kind of exposure we give them through posting in the system, the training we give them, even the confirmation in that system that they are fit have to conform with the system. This is what professionalism entails, and it is imperative in the public service if we must get the right kind of managers.
Nigeria has largely failed as regards public education, primary to tertiary. Where did the country get it wrong?
Well, the problem with the public education is one of the problems that came with the oil boom. This has to do with the level of expenditure that we were incurring when the nation had a lot of resources. Let’s just summarise with a biblical allusion that Nigeria embraced plenty resources like a prodigal child, but when the resources are no longer there, it does not have the strength and value to adjust. So, for example, we created so many universities. We keep creating universities, even after the oil boom. We are a nation that does not sit down to count the cost before setting up institutions. The first problem of education system is that education is used to pursue political objectives. It is not set up to fabricate a national philosophy. The second thing is that we treat public schools as facilities; we build schools before we think of how to maintain them. Nigeria fundamentally lacks a maintenance culture. South Africa has far more resources going into education than we do, yet they are rationalising their universities through mergers and alignments. But we keep creating universities and we’re infecting the private university system with the same cancer. We didn’t ask ourselves how we are doing with the ones we have already given licences.
The other thing about education is that I think most of the governments, both military and civilian, got it wrong with their concept of free education. Taking over schools was the worst thing that has happened to the nation. You see, the only nation that can take over all the schools and manage it centrally, is a disciplined nation, a nation that is very strong in its planning and disciplined in the execution of its education policies. But the only thing Nigeria manages well is to award contracts to build structures. And after building the structures, it does not know how to manage them. What we have now is that in the South-West, for example, where the United Party of Nigeria was, they took over everything, whereas, in other nations, the missionaries can still be doing what they are doing while you inject your resources, and achieve the same objective. One of the problems is that at every point in time, government is running schools like a polygamous father who knows that his income can only cope with five children, but has the indulgence of having 40 children, and thinks that he can brag his way through. There is no match between the resources and the schools you’re creating, whereas those who went to the government colleges in those days had toilets, materials and everything was up to standard. A school that is run by old students can never survive. Self-help can only cater for small gaps and not a major gap. If government knows it can run only 40 universities well, it should manage the 40 well.
What do you have to say about the number of out-of-school children and the warning from government to jail their parents?
You can jail, if that is the appropriate solution. But there are contradictions in such a recommendation. The same government says that through TraderMoni, there are some people who with N10,000 would change their businesses. Is there any child that you can send to school in a month with an income of N10,000? You will buy uniform, he will eat breakfast and dinner. The issue is to compare the government’s empowerment programme with the recommendation to jail parents who are not sufficiently empowered to send their children to school. To start jailing would be to jail very incapable and even incapacitated people. We must alleviate the level of poverty that prevents willing parents from educating their children. I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues who retired and have not found it easy to pay the tuition of their children on account of irregular pension. We should not just wake up and come up with policies that will not work.
How can we begin to redirect our path?
You see, the basic problem we’ve had is that we have not been able to plan and implement, with strong attention to the factors that are key to success. This is largely so because as a nation that is really endowed, we have not been able to muster the political and technical sophistication that is required to convert what we have into economic growth and national development. There is always that gap between what we want to achieve and actually achieving it. There are so many factors that are called the Nigerian factors. For instance, we have not been able to manage ethnicity and religion very well; we have not been able to manage indiscipline and corruption very well. The most difficult thing for us is values. Over the years, we have leaderships who should understand their nation well, and provide direction. Every Nigerian believes that their children must go to the university. If they go to polytechnics or colleges of education, they are seen to have failed. The implication is that as a nation, we imagine that all our educated people should do white-collar jobs. Nigerians believe that blue-collar jobs are substandard to white-collar jobs. The governments support this belief by the wage structure that discriminates for years against those with polytechnic certificates, for example. So, that is a mentality that government should have realised and managed very early. We are not a nation that has done sufficient thinking in terms of where we want to go with regards to development. Unfortunately, each government comes into office with the ambition of reinventing the wheel of governance rather than continuing the good governance policies of the preceding government.