Reform in Nigeria’s hard environment (II), By M.J. Balogun

In an earlier article, attention focused on the antecedents to public service reform in Nigeria. As argued in the article, a number of factors accounted for the increasing interest in reform. Among these are the atrophy of public service institutions and processes, widening performance deficits, impaired access to essential services, the rising cost of governance, and the demonstration effect of reforms undertaken in other countries, particularly, Great Britain.

As a follow up to the previous article, the latest one shifts attention to a major disabler of reform, what is termed the ‘hard’ environment. We shall return to this later.

While any public service is obliged to get its internal organisation and management equations right most of the time, it needs more than that to succeed or to be deemed truly successful. To surmount ongoing, and anticipate, as well as respond to, unfolding challenges, reforms need to sidestep political minefields and aspire towards the enhancement or, as the case may be, fortification, of the ethical, professional, service-delivery, and above all, cultural realignment capacities of the public service. The changes must take a holistic view of current and future challenges and proffer short-, through medium-, to long-term solutions. Since opinions most often diverge regarding the practices to be reformed and how to proceed, reform has of necessity to start with the founding of a coalition of hitherto unlike minds, followed by the coalition’s gradual movement toward unanimity on contending issues.

The reform coalitions must start with the hard environment. The hard environment’s defining attribute is the capacity to shape its soft counterpart while successfully rebuffing attempts at being shaped/remolded by the latter. This succinctly captures Nigeria’s experience since independence, or, at least, since the return to civilian rule in 1999. The soft environment (formal government and the public service) cannot move unless at the pleasure of, and at the pace dictated by, the informal networks operating in the hard environment.

For some curious reasons, diversity of the sectarian and ethnic type is the constant in Nigeria’s environmental equation. Both serve as a cover for the advancement of personal and sectional agenda and for the perpetration of wrongful deeds. They virtually enable public officials and their civil society cohorts to get away with murder.

Cultural heterogeneity in fact underscores the enormity of the challenge facing Nigeria as it embarks on the tasks of state formation and reform. On the one hand is the Federal Republic of Nigeria, a supposedly united and indivisible state, with its own constitution, its anthem, its flag, and its laws, along with the enforcement mechanisms. On the other are myriad private realms and informal networks the allegiance to each of which most frequently clashes with loyalty to Nigeria.

In short, and due to the hard environment’s uncommon attributes and overbearing influence, what starts as a dyarchy (that is, as a cohabitation of the modern with the traditional) soon mutates into a collection of fiefdoms. Allegiance to a fiefdom may be based on ethnic affinity, shared religious belief, harmony of political and economic interest, or a combination of various identity markers.

Diversity is a fact of life in contemporary societies. If properly managed, it can promote healthy competition and advance the cause of pluralism and democracy. Unfortunately, things have not turned out this way in Nigeria. Instead of promoting unity, the clash (of faiths, tongues, cultures, and economic interests) has become an instrument for magnifying social divisions and, from there, projecting fictive thinking and plain falsehood as self-validating ‘truth’. It is a weapon of choice to be deployed against advocates of merit, equity, fair play, and virtuous conduct. It is a shield that an individual can hide behind when facing misconduct and other grave charges. A case in point is a public official accused of embezzling public funds. Instead of defending himself, he is apt to blame his woes on ethnic rivals, his religion’s antagonists, and/or the ubiquitous but invisible Devil.

It would not have mattered if fictive thinking had been confined to the private enclave, that is, to the traditional, hard, environment. However, when it creeps into the public realm, it quickly distorts and corrupts the soft environment’s dominant concepts and values, including the concepts of ‘public office’, and ‘service’, as well as the values of universalism, ‘rationality’, objectivity, integrity, professionalism, impartiality, and excellence. Where diversity is not properly managed, rival wills will compete with, and eventually supplant, the commonweal. In other words, multiple fiefdoms will exist side by side with, and may sometimes, countermand the instructions of, the one, indisputable, sovereign, in this case, the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The widespread ethical violations and rampant indiscipline in today’s Nigeria cannot be explained without reference to the hard environment.

Can social change halt the drift to decay and Armageddon? The answer, unfortunately, is no. By promoting materialistic instincts, social change is apt to hasten the corruption of values and to accelerate the drive towards the apocalypse.

Strange as it may sound, many countries have been in situations similar to, or worse than, Nigeria’s. Examples include Mao Zedong’s China of the 1960s, Gorbachev’s USSR of the 1980s, and nearer home, Paul Kagame’s immediate post-genocide Rwanda. Yet, China had its ‘Cultural Revolution’ moment, just as the former Soviet Union had its own Glasnost and Perestroika epoch. Rwanda emerged from the traumas of genocide determined to do things differently. Nigeria needs its own governance revolution moment.

The question is who wants to be on record as spearheading this long overdue revolution, and, by so doing, lead his/her people to the proverbial promised land? No matter who keeps the appointment with history, and regardless of how the revolution is labelled, the visionary and transformational leaders (along with their entourage) should aim at nothing less than total recalibration of government and the public service for performance and results. They should set their sights on the reform and subordination of the hard environment, all in an attempt at meeting immediate, medium-, and long-term challenges.

The soft environment for one must be fenced off or delinked from the unsavory influences of its hard counterpart. This requires that political and civic leaders forge a consensus on a new Governance Doctrine, one founded on justice, integrity and genuine inclusiveness. It further requires radical rewriting of the rules.

For this to happen, a new mechanism, the Annual Governance Summit, should be established. Convened at least once a year, the Summit should be presided over by the President, Commander-in-Chief. Other participants are the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Chief Justice of the Federation, the chairpersons of the mainstream (ruling and opposition) parties, the Executive Secretary, Nigeria Governors’ Forum, representatives of youth associations, as well as civic and corporate leaders. The Summit will serve as a clearing house for the ratification of the Justice, Integrity and Inclusiveness Doctrine, the resolution of thorny governance and public administration issues (such as corruption, nepotism, widening service delivery deficits, and rising governance cost). The transfer of reform lessons across alternating regimes will also be part of the Summit’s deliberations.

Above all, political parties and their flag bearers need to make their positions clear on this important subject, public service reform. This entails inserting it in their manifestos.

M.J. Balogun was Special Adviser to the President of the 74^th Session of the United Nations General Assembly.