Obadiah Mailafia
6 October 2008
opinion
The great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt once described the state as 'a work of art'. He was echoing a long line of statesmen from Petrarch to Asoka, Ibn Sina and Frederick the Great who had a passionate commitment to building elaborate state institutions.
During his recent Eid-el-Fitr message to the nation, President Umaru Musa Yar'adua echoed the same point when he revealed his determination to restructure the machinery of government for greater effectiveness.
That the central apparatus of state is in a shambolic state is no longer news. What may be news is that somebody wants to do something about it at last.
One recalls the memoirs of the distinguished Harvard economist, Wolfgang Stolper as a young economist working in our country in the early sixties (Inside Independent Nigeria, Ashgate 2003). Stolper poured encomiums on the Head of the Western Civil Service Chief Simeon Adebo as "one of the greatest human beings" he had ever met. He was also full of praise for his Northern Region counterpart, the late Ali Akilu.
Sadly, things have been downhill ever since. Today, ghost workers are rampant; merit has gone to the dogs; professionalism has been thrown out of the window, while venality has assumed Byzantine proportions. Without mincing words, our national bureaucracy has become our greatest nightmare.
The first coup in January 1966 marked the beginning of the destruction of our public service, as the regime of General Aguiyi-Ironsi was perceived, rightly or wrongly, as favouring the promotion of one section of the country against others. Whatever his faults, the young General Yakubu Gowon did his best to preserve whatever standards still remained of the public service. His de facto Prime Minister, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was without peer in ability. Their post-war achievements of Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction constitute our nation's finest hour. The period 1970-1974 coincided with my entire secondary school days. How glorious it was to be alive; and to be young was very heaven! They were, and remain, the nearest we have ever come to a Golden Age.
After all the dust has settled, it is evident that the mass civil service purges that came with the Murtala administration were a monumental catastrophe. The summary removal of the Chief Justice of the Federation Taslim Olawale Elias was an affront on the most sacred principles of civilized government. Murtala proved to be a man given to impulse rather than Reason. Not particularly successful as a field commander, in contrast to the likes of Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, Benjamin Adekunle and Mohammed Shuwa, his approach to civil service reforms was a catalogue of errors from which our nation has never fully recovered.
By the time of the Second Republic in 1979, the decay had become permanent. Shehu Shagari was himself a former career civil servant whom Gowon never regarded particularly highly. His years in office - if truth be told - were marked were completely lacklustre. When the NPN government was shoved aside in December 1983, the whole nation breathed a sigh of relief.
Politics apart, Buhari and Idiagbon had their hearts in the right place, symbolizing a new spirit of hope and restoration. Their greatest fault was to have mistaken society for a military cantonment; with a zeal that was untamed by philosophy or understanding. It was in such an atmosphere that General Ibrahim Babangida was ushered in during the summer of 1985. I have no doubt the man is a praeternatural leader - if we could but overlook the unfortunate adjective with which he himself had qualified his own genius. His greatest fault was to have rescinded the General Orders which had been the fundamental law underpinning all our public finances since the days of Lord Lugard. That one decision opened the floodgates of unprecedented corruption that has made ours a by-word among the nations.
No statesman can ever perform above the capacity of his bureaucracy. What we need today therefore is a completely re-engineered public service. We need to restore the principle of merit in recruitment and promotion. We should also pay them attractive salaries on the simple premise that if you pay peanuts you will get monkeys. Within the Presidency, we need a team of top policy analysts who can provide the Executive with rigorous analytics whilst overseeing policy coordination and implementation similar to the U.S. Policy Planning Staff. Beyond the anodyne preachments of Servicom, we need no less than a new culture anchored on the 'New Public Management'; a paradigm which applies the rigours of modern management to the operations of government. We may also borrow a leaf from the Ecole national d'administration (ENA), an elite institution that has trained the best of France's leaders in government and politics. The National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) was established to play a similar role. But I am afraid to say that NIPSS appears to have lost its way.
Evidently, government alone cannot reform itself. If that were the case, doctors would be free to operate on themselves. Government efforts need to be complimented by independent initiatives such as the new Centre for Policy and Economic Research (CEPER), a policy think tank recently established in Abuja. With a primary focus on applied macroeconomics, the centre aims to foster a new culture of excellence in key sectors of public policy such as energy, education, health, infrastructures and social development. The CEPER philosophy is inspired by 'the central mind of government' concept by the distinguished policy scientist Yehezkel Dror. It calls for a brains trust of creative minds to oxygenate the central nervous systems of government with innovative ideas. CEPER is committed to building the thought leaders that would drive the process of national rebirth and effective policy formulation and implementation; ensuring that our country fulfils her manifest destiny as a great nation and as one of the most advanced economies in the twenty-first century.
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