In this piece, I want to beam a critical light on the significance and role of the public/civil servant within the power dynamics of governance in the Nigerian government. My fundamental concern derives from the central imperative in public administration—the politics-administration dichotomy—that insists that the politicians and the administrators have distinct responsibilities that must be adhered to form a functional state. This is one foundational principle that is so useful for the attainment of good governance. However, its utility must be conditioned by contextual peculiarities in the governance and administrative reality of where the dichotomy is expected to work. I have been an ardent institutional reformer for many years, and from the perspective of my governance and administrative reform experience, the kind of model that defines the relationship between the politician and the administrator has a lot to do with how effective governance can be. I have the famous and most successful Awolowo-Adebo model of the old western region as good practice to reference in benchmarking the politics-administration partnership required for the fruition of a developmental democratic state.
What power dynamics constrain or enable the efficiency of the politicians and the administrators working together? I have been fascinated for a long time by the phrase “speaking truth to power.” And my fascination was triggered when I made the decision, many years back, to start my public commentaries in newspapers. That was a move that was contrary to my expectations of my status as a public servant. The origin of the phrase is often ascribed to Bayard Ruskin, the civil rights activist and Quaker. Indeed, it was his religious background that enabled him to construe that phrase as the most fundamental role of a religious group in its relationship to government. In 1955, the Quaker authored a pamphlet titled, Speaking Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence. The phrase is meant to serve as a framework of nonviolence for protesting and transforming government policies. It forms a crucial part of the struggle for justice that distinguishes the name and activism of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Wole Soyinka, Malala Yousafzai, etc.
How can a civil servant speak truth to power, especially in a dysfunctional public administration system that is expected to birth a world-class institution capable of delivering efficient productivity and infrastructural development? Or, even more precisely: how equipped are the civil servants, within such a system, to speak the truth that comes from what power? I have been too much of an insider not to be able to speak to the non-political capacity of the civil servants to wield enormous administrative power. This power consists of the ability of the civil servants to service the public interest through the immense and complex dynamics of administering the statutory function at the heart of the state’s administration: providing well-run services to the public, offering expert advice to ministers and government, implementing regulatory controls that are enabling for economic growth in a manner that protects the public and nation’s interest at all times.
Unfortunately, the capacity the civil servants should have had to offer fearless administrative and governance advice has been hollowed out, as far as the Nigerian public service is concerned, by a declining institutional and policy capacity, the lamentable loss of professional independence to stay aloof of partisan politics through the coherent and formal framework of legal-rationalism, and many more. The gross implication is not only that the public servants fail in their fundamental task of administering the Nigerian state, but they also become essentially inconsequential in the eyes of the political class. Either way, Nigerians lose. And the project of ensuring the well-being of the citizens keeps floundering. No incapacitated civil servants have the power to speak truth to power.To be fair, we can equally ask how complicit the public servants also are in the steady decline of the public service system, and their self-imposed incapacity to speak truth from a position of professional capacitation. For instance, are public servants drawn into the bureaucratic game by holding back in offering genuine and objective administrative advice in terms of the best policy options—no matter the consequences—for fear of falling out of favour with their bosses? Is loyalty or being respectful privileged over the best interest of the government that is served by speaking out boldly when the best options in policy choices are not taken? In what I have called the bureau pathology of the Nigerian civil service system, public servants often play the game that get them to the top of their careers mostly through acquiring the skills to dodge risks and courageous administrative discretion and being largely uncreative and non-innovative.
A very good example of this bureau-pathological deficiency can be found in public information management. Rather than communicating strategically to articulate the issues that the government is concerned about in terms of the governance policies that will make a difference in the lives of Nigerians, public officers throw strategic communication to the winds and adopt a propagandist framework that is more worried about how policies are received by the public. And this leaves the government worse off as soon as the citizens see through the ploy to pull the wool over their eyes, rather than fix the problems that are impoverishing them. And that is not to say that the government itself has not compromised the civil servants with its distortionary politics that not only undermine whatever safe places the public servants might have—like the Simeon Adebos and the Allison Ayidas of the 1960s and the 1970s—to engage in policy debates that might help in redeeming the government policy performance. The government has also consistently dipped its hand in bad politics or poorly conceived policies, that side-track the government from the fundamental objective of making life meaningful for Nigerians.
Speaking truth to power in this dysfunctional scenario becomes very difficult but not impossible. It should rather be seen as a horizon of possibility. The first condition for that courage to face down political power is to be in control of the flow of information, especially regarding contestable and non-contestable facts; articulating differing and competing policy perspectives that could aid the government’s policy decisions; as well as the logic that shapes the dynamics governing the contexts of the policy processes—the deep nuances and intelligences that are critical to the capacity of the government to make good policy decisions. This, in the best tradition of public service, constitutes the function of the public servant—creating the optimal policy environment where facts, information, intelligence, contexts, and perspectives are weighted to articulate nuanced policy scenarios that provide the government with the best policy choices.
Given this proof of administrative competence, the public service justifies its relevance and provides the government with no choice but to regard the civil service as the first point of call in terms of policy guidance and direction. Where policy options are not evidence-based and rooted in knowledge and intelligence, the government to be able to do well on behalf of the people has to look for it elsewhere. And this is where outsourcing policy guidance to consultants and external expertise becomes a terrible indictment of the civil service.
To speak truth to power in administrative terms is, therefore, to speak with the authority that insists that the government must follow a particular policy direction, rather than another, based on the aggregation of facts and evidence, the weighing of options, insights, and alternatives, and the consideration of scenarios with foresight thinking that anticipate current, emerging and potential policy issues and ideas with clarity and precision. For the civil servant to speak truth to power, the civil servant must speak ex-cathedra in the operation of the civil servant’s status as a seasoned professional who understands the demands and imperatives of the office and is fearless in carrying them out.
The demand of the office requires that civil servants are sufficiently creative and innovative in pre-empting administrative problems before they arise. This entails deploying resident institutional capacity to give early warnings even on issues that it sees, but which it cannot institutionally resolve on its own. This foresighted and creative anticipation is one of the significant professional capacities that stood the super-permanent secretaries out before, during, and after the turbulent period of the Nigerian Civil War. They were courageous, bold, and foresighted in dealing with the myriad issues that a war-time administration required to keep functioning and not dissolve into chaos.
This suggests that going forward, the civil service needs new skills that are significant for transforming the civil service institution into a new public service sufficiently capacitated to speak truth to power in fast-tracking the transformation of the system into a world-class institution that is capacity-ready to deliver effective and efficient performance and productivity. The civil servants must be able to think digital, understand systems, and dimension the big picture through the deployment of analytics, data, and the management of project complexities. They must also be guarded by administrative values, old and new. Apart from the enforcement of the old traditional values of efficiency, effectiveness, integrity, impartiality, neutrality, anonymity, responsiveness, representativeness, loyalty, equity, fairness, etc., there are also new public service values: innovation, quality, team work, empowerment, openness, and so on.
Olaopa is a Professor of Public Administration, and Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja
