Reform options for Nigeria, By Tunji Olaopa

On this piece, I need to pay essential consideration to the reform significance of the connection between what has been referred to as the “cult of the generalists,” on the one hand, and the need for extra of a cadre of specialists or professionals, given the crucial and demand of the information age, on the opposite. This discourse would possibly seem educational at first look. Nonetheless, we instantly grasp its significance after we perceive {that a} civil service system that should anticipate the challenges of the long run must adequately articulate a governance, strategic and operational managerial framework that has the aptitude of making ready the civil service for such a future. How does this distinction have an effect on the way in which we take into consideration growth on the continent? It does as a result of it’s intimately related with the evolving nature of labor, and the way work mediates the importance and urgency of nationwide productiveness. The character of labor within the twenty-first century has modified drastically. Work is not place-based and a full-time/lifetime vocation. It’s now extra remote-based, and attended by all kinds of dynamics.

This, subsequently, brings to the fore the crucial of connecting this altering office with the normal understanding of the general public service in public administration research. How a public service performs, subsequently, has lots to do with how the enterprise mannequin of the general public service is organised and related with the developmental framework of the state. When the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 was submitted, as a part of the reform effort to rework the operational foundation of the British Civil Service, it was based on considered one of 4 important premises:

Entrants shouldn’t be recruited for all times into a selected division however would enter a Residence Civil Service that might facilitate inter-departmental employees transfers. Civil servants, subsequently, would wish to have had a normal schooling and to be generalist quite than specialist of their information and expertise.

One essential implication of this growth was the emergence of the cadre system which served as the idea for the institution of a generalist class — administrative, government and clerical — as the highest administrative echelon of the civil service system in a descending hierarchical order of obligations and {qualifications}. This elite administrative echelon was solely accountable for coverage initiation and implementation.

In its Nigerian incarnation, the Administrative Employees Faculty of Nigeria (ASCON) provides three streams of normal administration programs, for professionals and directors, that appeals to the decrease, center and high administration cadres. These programs are “normal” within the sense that they don’t have anything to do with the specialised coaching that individuals and officers have as professionals earlier than attending. The belief behind the final administration programs is that whereas an officer may stay a specialist till she will get to GL 14, advancing to the highest administration place requires taking up extra normal administration obligations that calls for extra multidimensional monetary, human and managerial imperatives. Thus, whether or not a generalist-administrator or core skilled, changing into a high administration officer is a standing that leans extra to normal administration, and is preparatory to changing into a everlasting secretary — a place that makes the officer concurrently a chief administrative officer, chief coverage adviser and chief accounting officer.

The connection between the cult of generalists that the Nigerian civil service system inherited from the British and the need of specialized {and professional} competence is one important rigidity that the system has to take care of by way of institutional reform. The colonial construction of the civil service was first addressed by the Gorsuch Fee of 1956 which beneficial the creation of a cadre division of civil service personnel equivalent to normal schooling normal of the interval. The 4 divisions had been: sub-clerical and sub-technical; clerical and technical; government and better technical; and administrative {and professional}. Every of those divisions was additional divided into cadres. The skilled class contained cadres like engineering, schooling, legislation, accountants, medical, and so on. However, the contribution of the 1959 Newns Fee was the introduction of a Westminster organisational mannequin which is extra appropriate with a ministerial framework. The Newns Fee beneficial the grafting of the ministerial buildings on the colonial departmental construction. This new association, as an illustration, created the place of the everlasting secretary on whom the Minister may rely on all decisional and administrative issues, particularly these bothering on particular technical wants that require liaising with the skilled heads of division.

Sadly, nonetheless, this wholesale transplantation of the Westminster mannequin — probably the most important underlying structural association of the Nigerian civil service system until date — has always annoyed nearly all reform intentions and implementation as a result of it didn’t take the peculiarity of the Nigerian context into consideration. The cadre system created a subsisting battle between the generalists and the specialists, and this inevitably led to the strain that subverted service supply effectivity within the departments. Inside this method, key operational duties are undertaken by generalist officers who don’t have any experience within the space. And this leaves the system weakened by way of the pressing want for a specialist part with requisite skilled qualification that matches competence with particular job and activity. To quote a quite essential instance, a really giant proportion of the workforce on the Federal Civil Service Fee is made up of pool of generalist-officers who’re with out ample information and experience that would allow them deploy basic ideas and fashions within the subject of HRM and public administration to convey professionalism to bear on their job. And this leaves a big hole by way of professionally skilled and licensed HR practitioners which can be skilled to tackle specialised features and duties. Working below the affect of the Fulton Report of 1968, the Udoji Fee report made a valiant effort to dislodge the cult of generalists by recommending — below the burden of efficiency administration, central to the managerial revolution sweeping public administration — the infusion of the general public service with new professionals and specialists whose competences could be contracted to particular efficiency activity inside a result-oriented administration system. The elemental dimensions of the Udoji Report coping with managerial dynamics weren’t carried out, sadly.

The generalist-specialist controversy just isn’t distinctive to public administration. It pervades the whole thing of the managerial construction of each the private and non-private administration, in addition to government authorities. And it is because it impinges on office effectivity and efficiency administration. Inside public administration, authorities organisations possess a powerful desire for recruiting public officers with broad-based and multidisciplinary information over these public officers — the specialists — with skilled experience and competences in particular fields and areas. This “cult of generalists” derives from a normal perception in administration and administration {that a} generalist strategy is superior for managing complicated coverage points and navigating numerous authorities features, even when extremely technical information could be required. Within the non-public sector, the priority just isn’t totally different. The office of the twenty-first century is leaning extra within the course of multidimensional experience — a type of Jack-of-all-trade. Certainly, there may be the argument that generalists present “marginal worth” — the additional worth that persons are keen to pay, far above the worth that specialist create. And it is because generalist attraction extra to the final inhabitants, and particularly the final managerial requirement of any establishment or organisation. In each the general public and the non-public sectors, the final supervisor is denoted by six basic duties: (a) shaping and reshaping the office and its many environments, like dictating the efficiency normal, enterprise ideas and personnel values; (b) designing strategic imaginative and prescient and mission; (c) strategically placing the accessible sources collectively; (d) attracting and harnessing the excessive performing managers and employees; (e) coping with structural, institutional and organisational dynamics, choices, and issues that anticipate future challenges; (f) supervising day-to-day operations and implementation of organisational choices.

I believe, nonetheless, that regardless of the acclamation for a generalist orientation in the private and non-private sectors, and even the argument for the specialists in authorities, arguing for both of them is in dangerous style. Each group or establishment requires each. It is so simple as that. The fact of efficient managerial presence within the public service requires that the generalist and the specialist possess a little bit of competences required within the different’s area, and this contain a spread of subsidiary expertise, as an illustration in coverage evaluation and challenge administration. For example, there isn’t any generalist that might have any justifiable excuse to not have some important and specialist experience apart the final administration expertise. That is the core motive why core bureaucratic expertise that had been the competences of generalist directors are actually actively being professionalised. These embrace economists, planners, procurement, information administration, monetary administration and accounting techniques, Human Sources, organisation, operations and administration analysis and administration analysis, information and expertise administration, coaching administration, HR data system, ICT, coverage analysis and evaluation, statistics and knowledge administration, resolution science, funding planning and promotion, challenge administration, negotiation, disaster and battle decision, strategic planning, pension administration, PPPs, and so forth.

And then again, to be an environment friendly skilled public supervisor and administrator calls for some important generalist competences not solely in individuals administration but in addition some core institution points, particularly within the administration of the coverage course of and strategic planning. Such a specialist public administrator should have important expertise and experience within the administration of the 5 Ms of administration: males (HR), cash (finance), strategies (administration strategies), machine (know-how), and supplies (stock, shares and procurement).

To offset the low effectivity and efficiency quotient of the system in addition to the diminished managerial creativity of public officers, we have to insist, as a matter of regulatory gatekeeping, that each officer aspiring to high management positions within the civil service should purchase core specialist and generalist competency, and the system should see to it that officers are sufficiently rounded in these expertise as a part of skilled growth and management pipelining to high administrative degree positions. It is a recognition of the truth that on the one hand, the civil service isn’t just an educational/mental area the place candidates dazzle with erudition and breathe of mental quite than getting issues performed which is the core of bureaucratic professionalism. And then again, working the enterprise of presidency calls for a complete multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary cocktail menu of a mixture of strategic, tactical and operational expertise.

⁠The reform program and technique that should undermine the basic structural bases of administrative and managerial operation within the Nigerian civil service system should issue this understanding of the generalist-specialist dynamics and relationship into consideration. Taking them as adversarial opposites won’t work for reform.

Tunji Olaopa is chairman, Federal Civil Service Fee, Abuja; E-mail: tolaopa2003@gmail.com