In coming to terms with the dominant narrative around the nation’s development challenge, the diagnostics contained in the development literature in Nigeria seem to have somewhat settled, in my view, with the conclusion that Nigeria’s development problem cannot be the function of the absence of leadership visions; well-researched development ideas, frameworks, paradigms, blueprints or strategies; policy design sophistication; or even a well-honed change management theories and strategies. On the contrary, the problem stems from the devils in the details of policy execution, to some knotty binding constraints, and finally to the enigmatic Nigerian factor that undermines most of the spirited and well-intentioned efforts poured into the development cauldron of the Nigerian state. This general diagnosis of the problems of development planning and management in Nigeria is not enlightening if it is limited to the execution failure or the impediments that undermine policy implementation. There is the need for some specific unraveling of the critical landmines that have consistently made policy implementations in Nigeria hit the roadblock. This is what my research efforts into the Nigerian policy, governance, development, and administrative dynamics have unearthed.
The implementation failures that Nigeria has witnessed since independence is first the result of the bad politics that succeeding Nigerian leadership has played with the Nigerian patrimony organized around development management. In other words, bad politics intrudes and destabilizes the evidence-based, technically rational, and scientific approach to the decision-making process that ought to underlie sound policy processes. This bad politics inevitably instigate a cascade of administrative, policy and governance implications that manifest in terms of poor resource allocation with significant elements of a culture of selective budgeting targeting little or no development objectives; poor policy design and program and implementation planning; subsisting evidence of policy, program and project discontinuity; MDAs’ low policy and program implementation readiness and organizational intelligence quotient; poor data culture; and these are complicated by an unstable macroeconomic climate not marched with sufficient policy intelligence. All these are aggravated by the factor of budgeting constraints and legislative oversight, which facilitate a series of misalignments between appropriation, distortional envelope prioritization system, timing of budget releases, gaps between appropriation and fund releases, as well as insufficient time to ensure the MDAs achieve budget performance.
Permit me to clarify some of these problems in detail. This is crucial to pinpoint the key resolution frameworks that would chart the path of policy intelligence to transform the decision-making quotient of the civil service system in Nigeria. In the first place, no one familiar with Nigeria’s policy and development architecture would fail to see the disconnect between policy design—which is often outsourced to development partners, experts and consultants—and policy implementation—that is supposed to unravel as shared responsibility that brings together task forces, agencies rich in technocratic expertise or specialized agencies, and the MDAs. This often complicates the design dynamics with the challenges of an over-expanded scope of policy, programs, and projects; underestimated timelines, costs, and risks; and overstated expected outcomes and benefits. This then is the basis of the many unnecessary duplications and multiplicity of unaligned and uncoordinated projects and operations that spread scarce resources too thin for policy effectiveness.
In the second place, this disconnect is complicated by human resource frameworks and practices that are less than competency-based, strategic, and efficient, especially in the allocation of responsibilities and tasks. This makes it easy to assign misfits to core tasks that define the civil service. In other words, the malfunctioning HR practice prevents the deployment of the right management competencies that would enable an administrative and governance environment which would instigate a truly effective change space, one badly required for achieving an irreducible results-based dynamics and orientations.
Once we agree that policy implementation and development management are core to the transformation of Nigeria’s policy and governance architecture, it becomes straightforward which institutional reforms need to focus on to deepen policy intelligence. Within the institutional reform framework of the Nigerian civil service system, I have argued that a fundamental structural juncture to commence is the policy-capacity-process-resourcing-performance quadrants. These constitute the critical gaps that have undermined the performance-productivity capacity of the system. It is sufficient for our purposes here to highlight only the capacity factor. This constitutes the low-hanging fruit for addressing the fundamental significance of policy intelligence as the key to overcoming the execution failures successive Nigerian governments have battled with.
Specifically, the capacity gap has historically manifested in two complementary ways within the civil service system. The first concerns the largely generalist orientation of the civil service workforce’s career management. This workforce orientation has constrained the significance of the need for specialization and problem-solving praxis that signals the readiness of the Nigerian civil service to take charge of the administrative and governance needs of the Nigerian state in the knowledge age. The second manifestation of the crippling capacity gap is the presence of a poor skill mix within the MDAs. This inadequate skill mix is further compounded by a non-evidence-based training investment dynamics and practices; dysfunctional staff utilization; faulty competency-based human resource management; and training institutions with poor faculty skills and competences arising from a staffing policy that limits real skills transfer and capacity development impact.
To overcome these limitations, some key structural and institutional reforms need to be implemented not only with urgency but also with the right dose of political will. The most fundamental to the realization of the level of policy intelligence that will backstop the tasks of development planning and development management for the Nigerian state is surely the professionalization of the planning, research, and statistics function in the civil service. We can never underestimate the significance of this reform imperative. This is because the Department of Planning, Research, and Statistics in the MDA is the bedrock of policy work and development management, as it is saddled with the urgency of generating policy intelligence for aligning policies with the success of democratic governance. This professionalization becomes urgent given the generalist administrative orientation that fails to make room for critical specialization, which would serve as the basis for skills and competences aligned with a strategic intellectual space, where an in-service think tank with significant in-house action and policy-engaged research capabilities is enabled to drive evidence-based policy and decision-making in government.
The professionalization imperative will need to be complemented by the need to build a culture and framework of internal sharing and learning that provides a constant space for the interrogation of smart, good, and best practices, and the adaptation, domestication, and mainstreaming of these into the system. Professionalism, reprofessionalization, and evidence-based policy management assume that the DPRS have internal capacities to undertake reviews of the existing body of knowledge and research reports that are impacting current policies; it also implies that they have budgets to commission new action research, while leveraging professional expert networks for sustained conversations and exchanges with relevant specialists, experts, and knowledge networks. The essence of the internal framework of seminal brainstorming, therefore, enables the DPSR to meet these assumptions by becoming conversant with trend analysis and environmental scanning, and by achieving full awareness of global, regional, national, and local influences. This also comes with an intellectual capacity and latitude to question existing knowledge and their assumptions in the service of putting the system on a firm footing for its entry into the knowledge age.
The reform requirement to transform the DPRS will be two-fold. On the one hand, there is the urgent imperative of critical and functional and mandate reviews to professionalize the DPRS departments and divisions into more specialized functional units like: (i) strategy, planning and budgeting division; (ii) research and policy analysis; (iii) statistics and data management; (iv) monitoring and evaluation; and (v) technical support services. On the other hand, the structural and institutional effectiveness that such a professionalization would realize would become even more solid with the need for the DPRSs to calibrate collaborations and partnerships to further reinforce their performance and productivity. The critical objective of a functional reinvention of the planning, research, and statistics cadres would benefit significantly from a realigned partnership with, say, the Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, as well as with seasoned planners, researchers, and professional statisticians stationed at the National Bureau of Statistics, NISER, among others. These partnerships achieve two key objectives of functional alignment and the cross-fertilization of skills, ideas, strategies, knowledge, and techniques. And they become even more cogent when universities, research institutes, and think tanks are also brought into the partnership space.
The objective will be to leverage such partnerships to build national economic management skills and competences involving a combination of high-level analytical capabilities, technical knowledge in economics, and the ability to manage the complex interplay between short, medium and long term policy decisions; modeling skills to simulate required policy outcomes; ability to collect and scrutinize large datasets through the use of statistical software for econometrics and other requirements; the need to apply advanced data analytics; ability to assess the socioeconomic impacts of policy initiatives; ability to channel limited financial and human resources toward government initiatives with highest potential for impact; identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks associated with economic shifts in policy reforms and program initiatives, including external pressures.
The next steps in the reform coordination are correlated. In addition to the DPRS’s role in managing large statistical and econometric datasets, it is imperative to pay close attention to the national data management system. There is no doubt any longer that Nigeria is confronted with a fragmented national data ecosystem that involves many critical institutions functioning at cross purposes; with different data formats and reporting schedules that ensure that information flow is not properly harmonized: the M&E units in DPRS across MDAs, the Office of the Accountant-General and Office of the Auditor-General, the Budget Office Monitoring Department, the Management Services Office of the OHCSF, PIMCO within the OSGF, and the oversight committees of the National Assembly, among others. Given this fragmented structure, we are confronted with the absence of a coordinated data architecture, which undermines the crucial need of policymakers and decision-makers for coherent and complete information. Institutional reform must therefore be targeted at achieving a more coordinated national M&E system that has clearer reporting protocols, harmonized indicators, and integrated data flows.
The last, but related, reform move demands that the limited integration between the federal and state M&E systems be energetically undermined in the interest of Nigeria’s fiscal federalism. In other words, the federal structure must reflect the stark reality that the state governments more often than not play a fundamental and central role in the implementation of critical public services, including education, healthcare, agriculture, and local infrastructure. However, when the states’ M&E systems operate through different tools, indicators, and timelines, it becomes very difficult to coordinate their efforts with the national framework for development performance. Strengthening the national M&E system, therefore, requires structured federal–state cooperation, grounded in common standards, shared dashboards, and consistent reporting frameworks.
There is no gainsaying the critical conclusion that the future of Nigeria’s democratic governance and development management lies squarely within the context of reforming its policy architecture, to bring it up to speed with the commensurate quality ts policy intelligence it requires to be able to make cogent and informed policy decisions that matter to and impact Nigerians.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa
Chairman
Federal Civil Service Commission
& Professor of Public Administration
Abuja.
