CIPM and the unfinished business of reform in public service

It is always a very deep and special pleasure for me whenever I have the opportunity to attend the CIPM or to be invited to any of her programmes. CIPM is one organisation that I have a significant relationship with, a relationship that spans many years. It is one organisation I count as a partner in the struggle for transforming the public service system in Nigeria.

This is why I am more than delighted to be witnessing, and chairing, this investiture of the new President and Chairman of the CIPM Governing Council. CIPM is strategic as the key umbrella body — the community of practice — for administering HR practice in Nigeria. Since its founding in 1968, it has consistently continued to push the frontiers and boundaries of the HR profession as well as being in the vanguard of HR management praxis in ways that have consolidated the status of its members, and its own status as a global organisational brand.

In this context, I have no doubt that Mallam Ahmed Ladan Gobir already has his works — and objectives — cut out for him. His status as a distinguished Nigerian, a formidable HR thought leader, astute corporate lawyer and a management professional par excellence already situates him within the challenges that CIPM is currently facing, and how the organisation could be positioned as a significant stakeholder in the overall task of institutional reform in Nigeria.

In this regard, one must applaud the existing achievement and experiential framework of the preceding presidents, and especially the administrative and visionary efforts of Mr. Olusegun Mojeed, the immediate past president of CIPM, for a most remarkable tenure filled with spirited strides, innovations and commendable achievements and legacies.

No avid watcher of Nigeria’s public administration, and CIPM’s role, can be in any doubt as to the depth of clarity amongst CIPM’s thought-leaders regarding what is the next level for CIPM, especially at this momentous time in the profession’s annals. A time when the world of work is witnessing profound rethinking and reformulation to institutionalise the post-COVID-19 new normal, and, at that, as we navigate the unfolding Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions.

I am going to use this chairman’s speech as an occasion to spotlight these challenges, and what CIPM is expected to contribute to making it a success; a success that CIPM itself can count on as part of its organisational milestone in Nigeria’s public administration trajectory. Specifically, I want to locate the public service system in Nigeria within the unfolding dynamics of HR developments and practices.

This becomes auspicious because it immediately signals to the chairman the crosscutting dimension of the partnership and collaboration that are demanded of the community of service and community of practice — the Nigerian civil service leadership, the CIPM, and the larger public administration community — in institutionally reforming the Nigerian bureaucracy, and inserting its strategic and operational dynamics and processes into the current global trends in HR thinking.

My reform philosophy and advocacy have been hinged on an administrative axiom: if public administration fails in Nigeria, then all else — in terms of building a strong administrative and bureaucratic institutions that will carry the burden of good governance — has failed. This immediately underscores the fact that, given the still challenged state of the performance and productivity capacity of the public service, there is an unfinished business of institutional reform in the public service system to which all hands, including CIPM’s, must be on deck.

This administrative axiom is complemented by the observation that it is practically impossible to identify any high-performing economies in the world today without simultaneously discovering that their performance and productivity are founded on the three key elements of knowledge, governance and human capital. This makes it imperative that the “people factor” plays a significant role in governance calculations and in human capital development that translates into the HR framework necessary for national productivity. This implies the transition from personnel management to strategic human resource management.

In linking the President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda to the urgency of public service institutional renewal and reform, therefore, it becomes fundamental to conclude that the quality of democratic governance can only be directly proportional to the degree to which policy and managerial intelligence can be matched by dogged political will to commit to a radical transformation of the political service system through a rehabilitation of HR functions and processes in the workplace of the MDAs.

The initial move in this direction was signaled by President Tinubu’s determination to constitute a government of national competence that would deploy expertise, technocracy and knowledge to energise intelligent policymaking. However, and beyond this, there is the need for the articulation of critical variables — public administration expertise, leadership sophistication, competent change management strategies and a reprofiled national value system — that would serve as the success factors for undermining the structural constraints that have hindered past and present reform efforts.

To be continued tomorrow

Olaopa, a Professor of Public Administration, and the  Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja, gave this  address as the Chairman of the Investiture Ceremony of the President and Chairman of the Governing Council of CIPM in  Lagos recently.