In this piece, I want to extricate who and what a public administrator is within the context of public service and the governance process. This is a timely discourse given that it is the public service that humanizes the responsibilities of the state and complements the fundamental essence of democratic governance in ways that make it visible to the citizens. In other words, without an effective and efficient public service, we cannot make any sense of what we call the dividends of democracy. The way we see public administration therefore reveals who the public administrator is, and what we need to expect from the public service in the furtherance of productivity and democratic governance. The further point is that it is the public administrator and the public service she supervises that reveal the efficiency of a state as a developmental entity.
We all confront the public services daily in our routines: the police on the road, the nurses and doctors at the federal hospitals, the teachers in public schools, the local government workers, the internal revenue officials, the custom or immigration officers, the PHCN officials, and many more. More often than not, when we confront government, it is the politicians that we engage with on the pages of newspapers and on social media. It is the politician that we burden with the workings of the state and its governance objectives. It is the politicians that are saddled with articulating governance policies that are meant transform the lives of the citizens. However, it is from the backroom of policy implementation that politicians get their legitimacy, and it is the public servants that are responsible for this.
While politicians agitate over the policy decisions to be made—the who gets what and when—it is the public servants that are concerned with the nitty-gritty of the how. And in the backend and frontend, they get their hands dirty in the unenviable tasks of hammering out how the policies are to be implemented in ways that respond to the many challenges of making policies answer to the different constituents that make up a state. This is even more complicated in a state like Nigeria that is fragmented along ethnocultural, religious, regional and gender lines. This puts the public service directly in the forefront of the execution battle in terms of planning, coordinating, directing, organizing, and controlling the policy operations, and aligning them with the public interests. It is therefore the public administrators who actually do government businesses by managing scarce resources and delivering public good and services to the citizens.
At the very epicenter of these administrative operations is the figure of the public administrator whose responsibility is to coordinate and oversee the effective and efficient operations of the public services in delivering public good to the citizens. She is the one saddled with the responsibility of ensuring that the public service solidly backstops the developmental and governance objectives of the government. Within the Nigerian government context, the public administrator is at the core of the operations of the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) to facilitate the efficient operations that implement government policies and deliver the services to Nigerians. In this regard, the public administration oversees not just the policy implementation operation but also the human resources dynamics and budget management. The public administrator is expected to function in four major roles: (a) expert—advising the government on policy decisions, (b) regulator—oversight over outsourced and externalized functions of government, (c) engager—shaping the larger issue of the public good and how it affects the community, and (d) reticulist—identifying new skills and expertise and bringing them together to achieve good results and outcomes.
In this position, the public administrator is conceived traditionally to be responsible to the public. And she supervises a transactional framework that enable her to gauge and regulate the pulse of the public service. In other words, in this context, the public administrator acts as the thermostat for regulating the administrative temperature, especially when standards are not met. This bureaucratic leadership prides itself on its problem-solving capacity through rational planning processes. Its transactional dimension involves the exchange of valued things between leaders and subordinates that serves the interest of both without leading to an enduring relationship.
However, over the years, the role of the public servant and of the public administrator has been subjected to myriads of transformations that commence from the Weberian traditional frame. The two most significant factors that have instigated changes are the new public management (NPM) and the changing role of the state in governance and administrative matters. The NPM is the term for the managerial revolution that insists that we must begin to take stock of the efficiency and effectiveness of the public service, and the status of the public administrator and the public servant, from an entirely different perspective. This new perspective is dictated by the private sector. Unlike the public sector which operates according to the logic of publicness, the private sector possesses an organizational, structural and institutional logic that makes it conducive to performance and productivity. Again, to use a Nigerian example, the Nigerian public service, founded on the traditional Weberian management system, operates a business model that has been struggling to achieve a capability readiness that will power productivity and hence the Nigerian democratic governance. The failure has been due to the following: (i) input process-oriented business model; (ii) skills and competency gaps; (iii) lack of clarity on actions required to execute national plan; (iv) poor alignment between national plans, sectoral activities and departmental/unit programmes; (v) unclear accountabilities for execution; (vi) inadequate performance monitoring and reporting; (vii) organizational silos and culture blocking of execution; (viii) undefined rewards and sanctions.
The managerial revolution insists that the Nigerian public service, like every other public service across the globe, must bring the Weberian business model into conversation with the managerial paradigm. This conversation will enable public administrators rethink, for example, the input process-oriented model into another that is essentially output oriented. However, and more than the demand of the NPM, the public administrator must also reflect on how we can rethink the understanding of public administration and of the status of the public administrator herself, in line with the changing role of the state. The managerial revolution also coincides with the pressure that keeps mounting on the state to change its status and role in terms of the delivery of public services to the citizens. The state has always been configured by a rowing metaphor which implies that the government is involved in the business of directly delivering services to the citizens outside of the participation of the nonstate actors.
However, and since the 1990s, the state and its role have been reconsidered within a new boat metaphor of steering. This means that the role of the government is limited to that of a regulatory entity that is concerned with setting governance objectives and enacting regulatory mechanisms that will see to the proper behavior of the nonstate actors that have been allowed into the expanded governance space within which the government hitherto solely operated. Thus, from the perspective laid out by the NPM managerial paradigm, the state’s centralized planning that motivated the rowing metaphor is often cumbersome, wasteful and ultimately inefficient in service delivery. Switching to an enlarged governance space and a market-oriented customer service model demands also that the public administrator’s role must change with that of the state and its public service.
In other words, if the state has enlarged the governance space to allow nonstate actors participate in the governance and development process, and if the public service has opted for a managerial and market-oriented business model, then the public administrator’s role is no longer tenable. The public administrator must become transformational by becoming a public manager whose role is to articulate public choices into a market framework calculated on cost-benefit dynamics. This has tremendous implications for how the public service manages scarce resources and policy implementation on behalf of the government. A good example is provided by the public-private partnership framework within which the public manager must now operate. The state can now hold the public manager to account in terms of performance contracts which enable the public manager and public servants in the various MDAs to set goals and objectives, measure activities, manage projects and programmes and monitor achievements and outputs in ways that align the political will with the policies of government. Decision-making is circumscribed by accountability and transparency to achieve value addition. The public manager imbibes an entrepreneurial spirit that demands the capacity to continually, consistently and creatively create ad recreate public value to the general satisfaction of the citizens.
This is even more so in the twenty-first century, circumscribed by two fundamental circumstances. The first is that the public manager is operating within a knowledge society and the fourth industrial revolution that demand a knowledgeable familiarity with new and digital technologies and mechanisms that have become imperative for modernizing the public service and teasing out of it more performance and productivity. Given that the state must be developmental to be able to make any meaningful inroad into the knowledge society and the fourth industrial revolution, it implies that the state must depend on the public manager to be able to competently and creatively manage the public service in ways that backstop the development aspiration of the state. The second circumstance that pushes the boundary of the public manager beyond a mere administrative responsibility is that the twenty-first-century environment is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. To operate in such a VUCA environment, the public manager must necessarily transcend the traditional transactional mindset.
The twenty-first century is a technology and knowledge world that requires specific skills and competence sets, as well as attitude and mindset, which transforms the persona of the public manager as well as the capabilities of the workplace. The twenty-first century public manager needs, for example, critical literacies, skills and competences that enable her to operate within the knowledge and technology-modulated work environment of the public service. These literacies and competences include the following: (a) interpersonal skills: facilitation, empathy, political skills; (b) synthesising skills: sorting evidence, analysis, making judgements, offering critique and being creative; (c) organising skills: group work, collaboration and peer review; and (d) communication skills: better use of new media and multi-media resources. And furthermore, apart from the traditional role of being an expert, regulator, reticulist and engager, the public manager needs to, as a matter of urgency, do more. She must be a storyteller (with the capacity to keep recreating new visions of the future); a commissioner (who is able to bring together myriad resources from different sources); a resource-weaver (with the ability to devise different uses for resources regardless of their original goal); and a navigator (who consistently guides the citizens to the different range of possibilities the public service is able to bring about in service delivery).
To conclude: the public administrator has the responsibility to keep up the dynamics of institutionally reforming the nature of public administration and of the public service in tune with changing realities. The public service workplace and workforce that the public manager supervises are critical to the productivity that instigate democratic governance.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa
Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission & Professor of Public Administration, Abuja
