IMHOTEP: Reform not tinkering

As far as recent policy developments go, federal permanent secretaries are soon going to become more secretary than permanent. The Head of Service, Steve Orosanye, recently announced the government’s plan to expunge the time-tested tradition of tenure from the higher civil service. According to the new policy, all permanent secretaries are to serve for a maximum of eight years while directors are to serve for no more than four.

I have known Mr. Oronsanye over the years as a highly respected and competent technocrat; a man of cool-headed discretion and good counsel. I therefore felt not a little disquiet when some sections of the media took him to the cleaners on the grounds that he was waging an under-handed campaign against ‘northern civil servants’, most of who would allegedly be affected when the new policy takes effect. In our clime, tribe very much remains the refuge of scoundrels.

My case against the new policy is not on account of its alleged differential impact on ethno-regional balances in the public service. I just think it is a misguided tinkering with the system, when what we need is serious reform.

One of the architects of our first national development plan, the late American economist Wolfgang Stolper described the head of the Western Region civil service, Chief Simeon Adebo, as ‘one of the greatest human beings’ he had ever met. Ali Akilu, Head of the Northern Region Service, he described as a man of sterling qualities. Stolper had nothing but encomiums for technocrats such as Jerome Udoji, Hezekiah Oluwasanmi and Ojetunji Aboyade, the Cambridge economist.

During some of our darkest years of upheaval, military coups and political assassinations and eventual civil war, this country was kept together largely by modest, self-effacing civil servants.

I have recently been reading the biographical works of Oba Erediauwa II of Benin and Allison Ayida, a former Secretary to the Federal Government. Both belong in the best traditions of the higher civil service. Before ascending the throne of his ancestors, Solomon Igbinoghodua Aisiokuoba Akenzua studied law at Cambridge, subsequently joining the colonial administrative cadre and rising to the exalted position of permanent secretary.

His memoirs provide an unforgettable account of the triumphs and tragedies of our great country and the role civil service mandarinate played in holding us together when the hubris of soldiers and politicians threatened to bring down the very temple of our republic.

In the case of Mr. Ayida, a precocious Kings College boy who joined the civil service straight from reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Oxford and Banking and Finance from the London School of Economics, we encounter the ‘super-permanent secretaries’ whose controversial role in Gowon’s administration has been the subject of envy, calumny and adulation in equal proportion. In both cases, you get the unmistakable impression that these were men of ability -- genuine Nigerian patriots.

It has been suggested that the destruction of the civil service began with the Murtala/Obasanjo purges, which, ironically, served to enhance the culture of corruption. If tenure was no longer guaranteed, so the reasoning went, it made sense to make hay while it is summer. By the 1980s, with the rescinding of the General Orders which underpinned public financial management, the floodgates of corruption were let loose with impunity. Our civil service had become, as the American scholar Richard Joseph tells us, akin to medieval European prebends.

In an effort to redress the situation in the early nineties, the commission headed by Adedotun Phillips introduced new reforms that turned permanent secretaries into directors-general. Tenure was removed and the higher civil servants had become, ipso facto, political appointees who were obliged to go with their political masters.

Without being disrespectful to my former boss and mentor at the National Institute for Policy Strategic Studies, I have to say that Mr. Phillips was a neo-Keynesian economist who did not quite grasp the constitutional spirit of public administration. There was added impetus from the new political macroeconomics popularised by such economists as Kenneth Arrow and James Buchanan and imbibed by the Bretton Woods Institutions, which saw national bureaucracies in developing economies as rent-seeking and ‘self-satisficing’ behemoths that ought to be treated as such.

The German sociologist Max Weber long ago made the case for a politically neutral and professionalised technocracy as a bulwark of stability in the topsy-turvy world of politics. One of the elements of this stabilising role is tenure. There is no gainsaying that the pathologies in our bureaucracy call for urgent surgery. However, what is needed is not amputation but rehabilitation and rebirth. In the abolition of tenure, we are merely tinkering with a system that cries for wide-ranging rejuvenation, a development that may further aggravate the ills we are trying to cure.