Opinion
Ahmed Joda: Super-Permanent Secretary And Elder Statesman Indeed
Published
2 years agoon

By
Tunji Olaopa
Ahmed Joda—husband, father, friend, journalist, super permanent secretary, patriot and statesman—has just transited to the great beyond. At 91, we can consider him to be old enough to go the ways of the elders. But Ahmed Joda was not just another Nigerian. And not just another civil servant of the glorious era of public service in Nigeria. And this is the more reason why his sudden transition generates a deep grief that goes beyond losing a father and a mentor. Ahmed Joda was an embodiment of all that being a public servant entails. And this lesson is all the more needed at this time when those who are the exemplars of the best in Nigerian public service system are unrelentingly transiting: Mr. Allison Ayida, Alhaji Sule Katagum, Mrs. Francesca Emanuel, Chief Theophilus Akinyele, Alhaji Abdulahi Ma’aji, Alhaji M. Lele Muhtar, Chief A. O. Okafor, Mr. S. B. Ajulo, Alhaji Moibi Shitu, and the much younger, Mr. Tunde Lawal, and so on. All these were old bosses, friends and colleagues, and the leading lights of the public service in Nigeria. I am honored to have delivered a lecture at Mrs. Francesca Emanuel 80th birthday, and her last public event. And significantly, I was also the guest lecturer at the colloquium organized by the Oyo State government in honor of Pa Akinyele.
Joda lived a life of patriotic service to Nigeria. This in itself speaks volume about the kind of public servant he was. This was a distinguished personality of whom we can say, like all the others in that even more distinguished cadre, that he was a dedicated public servant all his life. Again, like Adebo, Udoji, Asiodu, Mrs. Ighodalo, Aziz Attah, Erediauwa, and others, he came to the civil service from journalism. I like to recall one insight from one of our many seminal engagements on the unfinished business of civil service reform. He went back memory lane to recount his formative years in Qur’anic school. He then described how Islamic instructions, the rigor and associated discipline, prepared and helped him to excel when he transited to formal western education and, much later, in his career as a bureaucrat. The lesson there for me was one of how wrong people could be when they will equate speaking English with literacy when, indeed, English language is not the only medium of education. And when he eventually got into the civil service vocation, he embraced it while rising from the rank and file, and learning all that he could about what the “public” and the “service” in public service entailed. It was as if he was getting prepared for the most critical assignment that will later involve the administrative destiny of the Nigerian state. And then, when the Nigerian civil war happened, Ahmed Joda and others like him, patriots all, were ready. And they did not fail. Though he retired from active service in 1978, a true public servant never retires since the love of the public and its wellbeing is a lifelong calling. In 1999, he was the head of the committee to advise the Presidency on poverty alleviation. In 2015, he became the head of Muhammadu Buhari presidential transition committee. In-between, he would provide leadership in crystallizing the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) that is standing hugely tall today as a foremost nation’s think tank. And he never stopped attempting to intervene critically and functionally on behalf of the Nigerian state and its reform trajectory.
READ ALSO: A Courageous And Fearless Administrator: Tribute To Ahmed Joda
One of his final attempts included a partnership with the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library that commenced a technical process involving a team of technical experts and reform specialists that worked to unravel the missing pieces in Nigeria’s administrative reform efforts. This is to the end that the conclusion of the technical process could serve as the basis by which he will add value to the Buhari administration’s “Next Level” change agenda so it could be taken truly to the next level. I was humbled when he invited me to be the technical lead to the team.
With the unfortunate demise of Ahmed Joda, and in the spirit of the reform technical process that he initiated, I consider it appropriate to, as a tribute to the great administrative icon, ventilate about the fundamental essence of his life and service, for the sake of the institutional reform mission that his time as a public servant encapsulates. What are the significant issues about reforming the public service that Joda’s exemplary service points at? In this piece, my tribute to this great public servant and patriot is to see how we can go from thoughts about his term as a super permanent secretary to insights about the role of the permanent secretary in the institutional reform of the public service system in Nigeria.
The generation of Ahmed Joda was a very lucky one. And the luck derived from the fact that the set of public servants that laid the foundation of the Nigerian civil service system—from Adebo through to Joda—got the best in the professional grounding facilitated by the legacy of Victorian values-based administrative tradition left by the British after colonialism. The British civil service had gone through a series of reforms that were meant to transform the British bureaucracy from a great rock in the tideline into an efficient administrative system. From the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 to the Fulton Report of 1968, the British system nailed the significance of the public service as a vocation. This was a lesson well learnt by the pioneering corps of Nigerian public servants. And this is a lesson that stands at the core of the institutional reform of the civil service system in Nigeria. It is one insight that the demise of Joda brings to mind with absolute cogency. Being a public servant is being public spirited. The virtue of being pubic spirited brings home the values of the “public” and of “service” in ways that go beyond being a careerist. It makes of public servants modern-day priests of the Levitical order who owe a patriotic loyalty to the state.
READ ALSO: Ex-Chair Of Buhari’s Transition Panel Ahmed Joda Dies
The collective body of the super permanent secretaries, of which Ahmed Joda was a prominent and functional member, was called upon to administratively rehabilitate the Nigerian state in the throes of a civil war. And within the context of anarchy and a framework of scarce resources made scarcer by war, these patriotic administrators were tasked to keep the Nigerian state within a boundary made sane for developmental progress. However, fifty-one years after the end of the civil war, the Nigerian state is not just struggling to achieve just the basics in the status of a developmental state, but has regressed to become a failing and seemingly failed state. And all its pioneer and public-spirited public servants are all almost demised. How then, out of the legion of systemic and structural changes that are urgent, do we recreate the office of the permanent secretary in their image?
The post of the permanent secretary came into effect with independence and the implementation of the Nigerianisation Policy that was meant to fill the supernumerary posts with Nigerians. The office of the permanent secretary, historically speaking, since it was inaugurated by PM Lord Grey in 1830 to replace the post of Under Secretary in Britain with Sir John Burrow as the first to bear the title of perm sec, is meant to assist the ministers of a government in ways that obey the restriction imposed by the politics-administration dichotomy. This is why the permanent secretary has been characterized as “the permanent custodian of permanent problems”—in her capacity as chief policy adviser, chief administrative or operations officer and the accounting officer. It is the permanence of the office that facilitates the continuity of succeeding governments. Indeed, it is the functional optimality of the permanent secretary that ensures that the public service serves as the backbone of a developmental state. This is why the office of the permanent secretary becomes the number one candidate for an institutional reform.
Reforming the office of the permanent secretary, following the imperatives of managerialism, is transforming it into a CEO, a technology-savvy, efficient, accountable, effective, and entrepreneurial manager and change agent with the capacities and competences to superintend a public service in a knowledge age and postcolonial administrative context. The reform agenda is to make the performing PS answer the objectives of optimal productivity for a country like Nigeria that has been bedeviled by low productivity. In reforming the permanent secretary into a transformational manager responsible for a ministry’s performance profile, the reform is also meant to set up the office of the PS into a hub around which a new breed of public-spirited public servants will be recruited, trained and deployed. To therefore become an efficient change agent, the permanent secretary must not only be an institutional memory, but a product of a professionalized recruitment, retention, talent pipelining, and incentivization process, while she must also be circumscribed by an individual performance agreement or contract that is part of a larger performance management strategies meant to boost the productivity of a developmental state. The recruitment process, with a larger objective of constituting a senior executive service (SES), will be subordinated to human resource management dynamics that recruit based on the administrative philosophy undergirding the developmental state.
READ ALSO: My First Encounter With Ibrahim Mantu
Given that the twenty-first century permanent secretary must operate within a VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—administrative environment made more complex by COVID-19, there is the need for both technical, administrative and cultural reorientations that insinuate the training of the public servant within the new ambit of public values, action-molding administrative imperatives (ethical values, i.e. integrity, honesty, respect; democratic values, i.e. responsiveness, representativeness, rule of law; and professional values, i.e. excellence, innovation), and what has been called “twenty-first century literacies” (interpersonal skills: facilitation, empathy, political skills; synthesizing skills: sorting evidence, analysis, making judgements, offering critique and being creative; organizing skills: group work, collaboration and peer review; and communication skills: better use of new media and multi-media resources). And in straddling the generalist and professional roles, the new permanent secretary is required to function as an expert (to advise the government on policy design), regulator (providing oversight on the non-core responsibilities of government), an engager (mediating between government and the citizens on what constitutes the public good), and a reticulist (who identifies new competences required for performance).
In administrative and institutional terms, the new understanding of the permanent secretary as a change agent makes her a transformational leader that is more collaborative than heroic. With strategic intelligence and collaborative competences, she is saddled with the responsibilities of overseeing the transformation of an institution of which she must manage to generate policy intelligence that will stimulate performance and eventually enhance productivity. This is what Ahmed Joda and the band of super permanent secretaries exemplify. This is the legacy we should perpetuate in their honor.
Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary & Professor of Public Administration, National Institute
for Policy and Strategic Studies
(NIPSS), Kuru, Jos
tolaopa2003@gmail.com
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By Promise Adiele
Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot avails itself of multiple interpretative tools with a compelling grip on the moral imagination of the audience. As a timeless drama, it thrives on the hopelessness of the human condition dramatized by two vagabonds, Estragon and Vladimir who waited for a mysterious, titular Godot that never came. One of the features of the absurdist literary tradition portrayed in the play is the failure of language in the verbal context as a means of communication. The verbal exchange between the two vagabonds is evident of misinterpretation. One says one thing, the other interprets it differently. Thus, it calls to question the potency of language in the verbal medium as a means of communication. The preceding analogy reminds me of Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu and his purported insult to the good people of the Yoruba ethnic group. Perhaps, misinterpretation currently manifests as an inexorable content of Nigeria’s absurd credentials.
Last week, Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, philanthropist, accomplished businessman, the Balogun Babaguwan of Yorubaland, Ahaejiejemba of Igboland and elder-statesman, while reacting to events that happened in Lagos during the last election when many Igbo people were bloodied and harassed, assured the world that “the Igbo and Yoruba are not at war”. On the heels of that statement came another one “they are Yoruba political rascals”. A syntactic analysis of the two sentences affirms that the Chief never meant to insult the entire Yoruba ethnic group. Rather, he was referring to rascals in Lagos who maimed, killed, and vanquished Igbos, non-Yorubas, and even some Yorubas with Igbo semblance, stopping them from exercising their voting rights during the election. He also said “we know them and we will deal with them”. Language scholars know that Chief Iwuanyanwu did not mean to insult the Yoruba. Sadly, some social nitwits, victims of acute cognitive impairment, went on a rampage to misinterpret and manipulate his statement to suit their treacherous, mischievous purposes. It is absurd.
Anyone who knows Chief Iwuaynanwu’s antecedent will never ascribe offensive rhetoric to him. He is soft-spoken, conciliatory and peace-loving. Like every sensible person around the world, not just the Igbo, he was aghast with lurid photos and video evidence of harm against the Igbo in Lagos during the last election. Unfortunately, people who ordinarily frolic in the whirlwind of ethnic hate have seized the opportunity to insult the Igbo ethnic group while using acerbic words on the revered Chief. These people, in their degenerate and diseased mentality, are trying to install a wall of hate between the Igbo and Yoruba. Let me state categorically that the Yorubas are wonderful people whose spirit of brotherliness, conviviality, and tolerance speaks volumes across the world. I have maintained over time that the Igbo and Yoruba share a cordial, interwoven relationship in marriage, business, friendship, association and neighbourliness. The two ethnic groups can never be involved in a conflict. Many Yoruba people have helped many Igbo people to their destinies and many Igbo people have helped many Yoruba people to their destinies too. An attempt for one ethnic group to harm the other will result in serious harm for the two. It is as implicating as that.
Since the presidential elections, keenly contested by different candidates from different ethnic groups in Nigeria, some people have desperately sought to reduce the entire development to an ethnic affair. It is myopic and at once condescending. Does Peter Obi represent the Igbo? Does Bola Tinubu represent the Yoruba? Does Atiku Abubakar represent the Hausa/Fulani? These candidates all have supporters across the country. Of course, they will have a preponderance of support from their ethnic base. That is the way of politics. Unfortunately, ethnic jingoists have, in the inerrancy of their bleak convictions, reduced the entire political discourse to an ethnic affair especially Yoruba vs Igbo. These people, stranded in the realm of ethnic hate and communal intolerance, have done everything within their powers to inflame ethnic tension to crucible dimensions. It is wrong for anyone to insult a whole ethnic group in whatever guise. In Chief Iwuanyanwu’s case, he has put the records straight by clarifying what he meant, insisting that he was quoted out of context. But the morbid and decadent will not hear of it. They insist that Iwuanyanwu and all Igbo should be roasted alive. As far as these simpletons are concerned, the Chief spoke the mind of all Igbos. How idiotic and harebrained can anybody be?
Recently, some people have also indulged in ethnic slurs. Unlike Chief Iwuanyanwu that clarified himself, Bayo Onanuga offered no apology and insisted on standing by his words. Onanuga spoke for himself and couldn’t have insulted the Igbo on behalf of the Yoruba. MC Oluomo, while registering his socio-political disorientation, spoke for himself when he threatened the Igbo on an election day and went on to make good his threat which the police shamelessly called a joke. FFK has also made inflammatory remarks which were his personal opinion and not the opinion of Yoruba. It is therefore, a function of disabled, primitive awareness for anyone to insult an ethnic group based on the comment of one person. Such insults and abuses expose the quiddity of phenomenal foolishness which, hitherto, was concealed in some people by the façade of education. No, these hate mongers belong to the stone age. Nobody should be deceived by their pretentious liberalism.
The question is, are there political rascals in Nigeria? Definitely yes! These are the particular people Chief Iwuanyanwu referred to concerning what happened in Lagos during the last elections. Of course, all parts of the country have their share of political rascals. It is not peculiar to one ethnicity. Political rascals are those who walk the streets, snatch ballot boxes, stab people due to their ethnic origin and prevent them from exercising their civic rights. They are not educated. They are thugs, street urchins and never-do-wells employed by politicians to advance nefarious objectives. There are also some educated political rascals. They don’t walk the streets, but demonstrate humane deficiency of unimaginable proportions using social media and sundry news outlets. They spread hate, provoke enmity and fan the embers of war. They incite the uneducated, urging them to bay for the blood of ordinary citizens. Their social media handles are replete with expletives and insults. Abusive engagement allows them to flourish. Another category of political rascals populate government establishments like INEC, the Police and different security agencies. These people compromise the electoral process in exchange for financial inducement and material gains. They are unconscionable, desperate and invidious. Are these people from another planet? No, they are among us. We know them.
The ethnic hate narrative is a device enunciated by the political class to keep the people divided, breaking their rank and file to unite and fight a common enemy. The opposition LP and PDP are convinced that the election was marred by sharp, underhand practices and therefore have gone to court. Is going to court to challenge the outcome of an election a legitimate practice? If it is, why can’t detractors of equitable process allow the law to run smoothly? The call by some decidedly frustrated fellows in search of relevance and pecuniary patronage for the arrest of the opposition presidential candidates is from the pit of purgatory. The propaganda that there is a plan to disrupt the handover ceremony is a bundle of falsehood from the depths of Hades. Although many Nigerians regard the judiciary with a pinch of salt, people of goodwill should advocate for a peaceful resolution of Nigeria’s political challenges. Ethnic rhetoric should stop immediately. People should sheath their swords. Let us all close the road to Rwanda.
Adiele, PhD, writes from Mountain Top University.
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Opinion
Olaopa: The Self As A Patriotic Reformer – The Tales Of A Memoirist
Published
3 days agoon
March 27, 2023
By Adeshina Afolayan
Autobiographies and memoirs are very difficult to write. One of the reasons is that they place the autobiographers and the memoirist in a very difficult position that draws the attention, and even the ire, of the public. Once the volume is written and presented before the public, the writer can no longer control its reception. And some or even all of her certainties and verities are shredded by those who must approach the book from different perceptions. But there is an even more daunting challenge. Writing an autobiography or a memoir dances at the very edge of hubris and vanity. This is what Michel de Montaigne thinks. His understanding of the human self is dark and gloomy. According to him, “If others were to look attentively into themselves as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of emptiness and tomfoolery…. Our self is an object full of dissatisfaction: we can see nothing there but wretchedness and vanity.”Now, imagine an act of self-portrait emerging from such a dark view of the self.
In The Essays, Montaigne pens a paradoxical opening statement addressed to the readers of the volume who are not supposed to read it because it is a work of vanity: “Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore, Farewell.” If the self is locus of emptiness and wretchedness, then any attempt at a self-portrait is doomed already; the autobiographer or memoirist thinks more highly of herself than she should. And yet, Montaigne subtly invites the reader to peruse the volume through a strategy of dissuasion.
In The Unending Quest for Reform, Tunji Olaopa faces the charge of hubris head-on , and persuades us to plunge into a narrative that connects the self with a larger space of meaning, struggle and fulfilment. This is an even more difficult endeavor since it goes beyond the self-portrait that embroils the self in its own dynamics of maturation. On the contrary, a memoir like the The Unending Quest for Reform, like Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died, connects the self to nonself, or to its Other. The autobiographer or the memoirist then invites the reader to weigh the significance of the self in relation to its other. Only those who have a strong sense of inner worth and significance can ever achieve such a courageous level of self-ascription.
I think a reformer deserves his memoir or autobiography. I have read the late Professor Akinlawon Mabogunje’s autobiography — A Measure of Grace. It details not only birth, historical trajectories and intellectual maturation, but also the agonies of a public servant eager to see some of his best ideas and insights inserted into the policy architecture of the Nigerian state. He met brick walls at every turn. In The Unending Quest for Reform, Olaopa typifies a more enduring courage to serve and confront the dysfunction of a system that had been rigged to be inefficient since independence.
The public service is not just another vocation. It embodies a double imperative. First, it is a service that transcends any consideration of self-interest. Within the service and its accountability dynamics, the self cannot be placed in contradistinction to what is required of it. The service is therefore a
selfless one that demands that the servant serves. Second public service is a service to public, the public. It therefore requires a different kind of spirit—public-spiritedness—that insists that the public servant must bow to certain logic of service that bend the will of the public servant to the will of the citizens. The task of a public servant therefore becomes a very arduous one: she must bend the self to serve the others. However, serving others becomes very onerous when the system that enables the service is inefficient and dysfunctional. When Olaopa first confronted this dysfunctional system, his first human instinct was to flee. But he did not. This was where his scholarly instinct—to learn, to reflect, to research, to rethink, to reorganize—kicked in. And he had a background in Plato and a mentoring acquaintance in Professor Ojetunji Aboyade to trim his fears and fuel his reform thinking.
The Unending Quest for Reform details the long trajectory that took an Aáwé boy to the Presidency and then the very height of public service status as a permanent secretary. But in each of the fifteen chapters that make up the memoir, you are compelled to encounter and reflect on how ideas and insights emerged from Olaopa’s interaction and engagement with intellectual and administrative forebears, and how both
the forebears and the ideas molded his own original philosophy of reform—with a huge dose of providential intervention.
While Plato’s Republic maps the boundaries of the ancient Athenian city-state and its utopic possibilities, Olaopa’s
The Unending Quest for Reform delineates the circumferences of a
dysfunctional public service, and how it could be rehabilitated within a comprehensive institutional and governance reform blueprint that took years to design, and even many more years to attempt mounting for the benefit of making Nigeria work better. This is where he joins the community of suffering that Mabogunje, and many others, once belonged. At every turn, the system itself frustrated all his well-being intentions and yearning.
Olaopa carries the burden of a man driven by God’s purpose. Or how else does one understand the passion that
drove and still drives him to dedicate his research and professional life to a system that seems too dense to allow self-examination? As an expert-insider, he had to face the fundamental significance of whether the public service can reform itself. That query, for Olaopa, could not have been just an academic exercise; he must have had to face the suspicions and stubborn resistance of those who could have considered him “too know” and obnoxious. There are ways by which a
debilitated system punishes those who would claim diagnostic knowledge. There are several means by which those who benefit from the status quo impede the progress of a reformer. And yet, Olaopa kept at this onerous task, even after retirement,with a single-mindedness that belies any logical understanding.
It was not just Plato and philosophy that gave him inspiration. All through The Unending Quest for Reform, one sees him holding onto a deep understanding of the place and role of the divine in human understanding and trajectories. If God could save him from blindness, as he narrated, then he would dedicate his life to service, spiritual and institutional;
he would commit his expertise to Nigeria and her quest for a world class public service that will be able to transform the quality of life of Nigerians. He has not faltered in that commitment.
But we need to highlight the role of philosophy in Olaopa’s professional and intellectual maturation. Right from discovering Plato and the capacity of philosophy to reconstruct, Olaopa had
remained fixated on the potential of philosophy to both enlighten and enable. He had taken Plato’s Republic far more seriously than I have seen anywhere. The Republic gave him the basis
from which to reenact the possibility of reflecting on dysfunction and reconstructing the parameters for
utopia. While Plato’s Republic was entirely a thought experiment about what could have been, Olaopa’s philosophical, intellectual and administrative exertions were right within the context of an actually existing Nigerian state that combines what he calls “bureau-pathologies” and possibilities for greatness.
The Unending Quest for Reform is therefore not only a paean to the existential exertions and Sisyphean achievements of the self, but also a testament to what reform can make possible for the transformation of the
Nigerian administrative entity. With the memoir, Olaopa is reaching out to
Nigerians, and especially fellow public servants and aspiring institutional and governance reformers,with a manual for technocratic action. The memoir bristles with pain and optimism about the ascent of a self from the obscurity of a small town in Oyo State to the convoluted
bureaucratic spaces of the Presidency, from a struggle to master political science and political theory at the University of Ibadan to the urgency of deploying a range of ideas and ideologies to the understanding and operational optimality of the public service system. In The Unending Quest for Reform, the self and the nation merge in a struggle for realization. And the denouement of that titanic struggle is a finale that is yet to happen. And we will know it when
it happens because that would be the end the reformer has been waiting for. With the new administration, may we not arrive at a tragedy to the high drama of hope and possibilities Olaopa’s memoir has treated us to.
Prof. Afolayan is the Head of Department of Philosophy, University of Ibadan
Related
Opinion
Reflection on The Unending Quest for Reform, Tunji Olaopa’s Memoir
Published
3 days agoon
March 27, 2023
By Eghosa E. Osaghae
Intellectual autobiographies come as absorbing and engaging as other profound academic works tend to be. Professor Tunji Olaopa’s intellectual memoir is not different and certainly ranks as one of the more profoundly intellectual autobiographies to come out of Nigeria. The reflections on the nexuses among public policy, public administration, civil service and governance on the one hand, and how these can be transformed along the paths of the reforms that seek to address the pathologies of bureaucracy – or bureau-pathology as Professor Olaopa calls them – are done in the best traditions of rigorous scientific analysis, normative and empirical. And given the relative leanness of analytical and theoretical scholarship in the field of public administration in Nigeria and Africa, it is obvious that this book, even as an autobiography, has all that is required to be a major contribution to the discipline, especially on the subject of reforms, which is a central theme of the memoir.
From the story of his progression through life as told in the memoir – from being a scholar-in-the-making since the
age of five, to earning the alias, Azikiwe, at the highest level of ‘-isms’ in secondary school, to finally becoming an expert-insider in the federal civil service and professor at Lead City University, only a knowledgeable, visionary, and activist-reformer like Olaopa, with the zest of patriotism and nationalism has the qualifications and credibility to say the kinds of things he has said in this book. His premature and unexpected retirement from the federal civil service in 2015 seemed to have halted the leading roles Olaopa played in the complex arena of reforms; these were roles that his academic pursuits and engagements with The Commonwealth , The World Bank, the UN system, and reforms institutions and processes in Australia and South Africa,continental and global professional institutions, amongst others, prepared him for; but this book documents the hows and whats of those roles and sets a well-reasoned rationale and template for continued reforms. The concluding chapters of the book, which are addressed to the reforms the leadership expected of the Office of the Head of Service of the Federal Civil Service in particular, fill the gap of what might have been. That is, if the unexpected retirement – another
painful reminder of the insecurity of tenure that has plunged the civil service in Nigeria deeper into the recesses of instability, demotivation and corruption, did not happen.
Olaopa engages the more substantial and critical issues elicited by public servicee reforms including those that constitute formidable obstacles in highly perceptive ways. “The public service”, he writes, “was not a place where mere ideas are sufficient to achieve significant transformation. Those ideas have to be immersed in the deep and dirty crevices of bureaucratic dead weights. As a public servant, it increasingly became clear to me that reading was not enough for the reformation of the public service. Ideas and knowledge had to be consciously adopted, creatively adapted, and deliberately owned and domesticated to achieve optimal results”. This was the lynchpin of reforms and transformations buoyed by Olaopa’s continuous research and development opportunities offered by the strategic positions he held especially in the Ministry of Education and the Office of the Head of Service. But the high expectations and ideals are easily brought down by the limits of realistic possibilities: “As an expert-insider”, he also writes, “I was equally confronted by a limitation: Can the civil service supervise its own reform? Can civil servants supervise the reform of their own institution?” Which all goes back to perhaps the greatest puzzle faced by reforms and their drivers: “In a situation where administrative dynamics have already congealed, can we expect the publice servantsto oversee the reform of their institution? How can reforms be jumpstarted by the very people who have vested interests in operating the bureaucratic culture? The obvious answere seems negative. And experience has revealed that most reforms failed because they were undermined by vested interests”. This is the essence of ‘bureau-pathology’ – “a state of stagnancy in which the civil servants protect themselves against any attempt to reform the very system with in which they operate. In this terrible situation, reform becomes the exception rather than the rule”. The pathology also leads to “too many people doing nothing, too many doing too little, and too few people doing too much”.
But these obstacles – and frustrations – which Olaopa experienced firsthand in hugeo tons thanks to the complexities, intrigues, treacheries and politics that climaxed with his premature retirement, do not diminish Olaopa’s conviction, enthusiasm and unending quest for reforms .The decision to set up the Ibadan School of Governance and Public Policy (ISGPP),take up the professorship at Lead City University, become a directing staff member at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, and this memoir (just in case the other platforms are necessary but not sufficient to actualise his vision) represent important milestones in this quest. Olaopa’s analysis also shows that the journey of reforms requires a lot more thanh the individual motivation; that motivation emanates from several other reinforcing anchors: expository reading, such as is found in his reading of Plato’s The Republic and other texts; the benefit of sound education and good peers, such as he encountered in Aawe, Olivet, and UI; the sheer boldness, such as is demonstrated in his forays into radical student unionism; the strategic opportunities that come through postings such as those to MAMSER, Ministry of Education, Office of the Secretary of Government of the Federation and Head of Service; and, perhaps, most importantly, the mentoring, reassurances and confidence-building such as he had from Professors Ojetunji Aboyade and Akin Mabogunje (these two had the OPTICOM modelt that provided a foundation for participatory reforms), Professor Tunde Adeniran and many more.
Although Olaopa engages public service reforms in an intellectually robust and engaging manner, there are issues that he has either left out or not engaged sufficiently. One of these is the cultural and historical specificities of particular reform situations. Surely, reforms have not grown to the level of a science of universals. Is there a need to decolonise the civile service for example? Another is the omission of the age-long debate between generalists and specialists in public service. Is it possible that the decision to bring specialists into the core of the civil service in Nigeria – that led to the appointment of engineers, medical doctors andc accountants for example, as permanent secretaries – has created problems of a different kindf for the civil service? Thirdly, for all the points raised about a purpose-driven public service with substantial federal restructuring, it is a little curious that very little consideration, if any,was given to the subnational spheres of the public service. Would the public service be trulyr reformed if the state and local government domains are not reformed? Should the federal public civil service be the federalist empire/colonial service?
Knowing Professor Olaopa as well as I do, I am sure that these issues will be taken up in his next volume on public servicee reforms– after all, the present volume is strictly a memoir and should not be read as an academic treatise, irrespective of all that I have tried to say.
Although the scholarly insights of Olaopa’s Unending Quest for Reform have the upper hand in this foreword, the memoir is far more extensive and encompassing. It covers his historical progression and, in the process, the several lessons to be learnt from his interesting experiences and discussions on familyhood, marital relations, religion, the role of God in humanl lives, mysticism and human relations in their adversarial and friendly forms. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this memoir and digesting its deeper and very reflective lines. They show that Olaopa’s initial and continuous love for philosophy has crystallised into a way of life.
Professor Osaghae is the Director-General, Nigerian Institute of
International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos.
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