ByTunji Olaopa
When the politics-administration dichotomy inaugurated the practice of public administration, what was intended was a critical need to bifurcate the logic of the two in ways that will extend the relationship between the politicians and the administrator and make it more efficient. The politician is then, within the logic of the dichotomy, restricted to policy formulation while the administrator is confined to the realm of policy implementation. Reality however defeats the neat boundary between the two. Politics and administration, in practical reality, are almost inseparable. And one would expect that the relationship between political science and public administration discourse will reflect this inseparability. Unfortunately, it does not. The separation undermines the fundamental urgency of addressing the political foundation of administrative research and practices, especially as they relate with the issues of power, governance, politics and democracy.
Political science descriptively and critically studies political phenomena and how they contribute to our understanding of the political community. Significantly, political science analyzes the fundamental role that power plays in the articulation of politics especially in the attempt to unravel the dynamics of the political community and its social and political circumferences and trajectories. Public administration is the very embodiment of the state as the most critical embodiment of politics. The state is made most visible within the frameworks and institutional workings of public administration, especially through the public sector and the public services. The straightforward argument is that the political and administrative reality of any state cannot be studied in isolation of each other. This seems obvious enough given that each of political science and public administration reinforces each other in terms of shedding light on the complex and intricate workings of the state and its response to the citizens and the commonwealth. In other words, there is no way the concepts of power and governance, for example, would not intersect political and administrative questions, and complicate them. The issues of democratic governance and innovation, and collaborative governance demand thinking of the interplay between politics science and administration.
In my many years as a deep insider career bureaucrat in the public service, I have been aware not only of the role that politics play in administrative matters, and vice versa. I have also been apprised of how political acts of commission and omission actively promote or undermine the public service. Indeed, my theoretical and practical researches into the dynamics of government business and institutional reforms highlights how political and administrative factors interact. My deep worry however is that political science and public administration discourses in Nigeria carry on as if these interactions and interrelations are at best trivial or at worst non-existence. For instance, in institutional terms, there is nothing to write home about in the existence and possible cross-fertilizing relationship between the Nigerian Political Science Association (NPSA) and the National Association for Public Administration and Management (NAPAM). Indeed, there cannot be such a cross-fertilization because while NPSA is active, NAPAM has remained comatose. And the vision and mission statement of NPSA is not broad enough to take in administrative matters and concerns, or the interplay of politics and administration.
The most fundamental observation that my status as a scholar-bureaucrat in the federal civil service afforded me is a practical understanding of the nature of the fundamental disconnections in public administration practices and the consequences on the state’s responsibility to her citizens, all due to crucial assumptions and principles that have been left lying fallow and unattended to in an interdisciplinary discourse and cross fertilization between political science scholarship and public administration theories and practice. A few examples suffice. In 1966, Nigeria shifted away from the parliamentary system of government and, after the long interregnum of military administrations, resumed with the presidential system, enshrined in the 1979 Constitution. This move was preceded by the Dotun Phillips studies report of 1985, and the Civil Service Reorganization Decree of 1988, which aligned the civil service with the presidential system of government. However, even with the reversal of the reform frameworks by the Ayida reform of 1995, it is still clear that many of Nigeria’s administrative practices still retain aspects of parliamentary elements that could be one source of unresolved structural troubles necessitating performance inefficiency.
This has some other implications for the practice of federalism and the stabilization of Nigeria’s governance structure. Since the intervention of the military in 1966 and the subsequent militarization of Nigeria’s political and governance structure of the Nigerian state, the federal arrangement that ought to have been the natural remedy for the unruly ethnonational diversity became compromised. For instance, inter-governmental relations and the critical need for fiscal federalism became caught in the cracks of constitutional and institutional dysfunction. The Babangida administration, through the recommendation of the IBB’s Presidential Advisory Committee, established the National Council for Inter-Governmental Relations (NCIS) as one in a series of government’s efforts—like the Centre for Democratic Studies (CDS), National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies, Michael Imoudu National Institute for Labour Studies, etc.—to rehabilitate Nigeria’s governance and administrative structures.
All this goes to demonstrate a cogent reason why the political and the administrative in Nigeria’s governance context cannot be separated, even in terms of theoretical argumentation. Political science scholarship, in longing for an interdisciplinary relationship with public administration, must recognize how the latter has evolved first as a sub-discipline of political science, and later as a multidisciplinary endeavor that encompasses insights drawn from management science, organizational psychology, sociology, statistics, industrial engineering, computer science, etc. from which it draws to invigorate its curriculum and pedagogy. This point is still not demonstrated in the disciplinary silos that define the existence of political science on the one hand and public administration on the other in Nigerian universities. In some universities, public administration functions in a different faculty, or is its own faculty, as different from the faculty of the social sciences. And so, scholars carry out their scholarly discourses in different contexts, oblivious of the grave challenges that the Nigerian administrative and governance predicament pose to their theoretical and practical separation. In what follows, I will point attention at a few contentious institutional matters to which I have gestured in many of my works, but which I contend require the critical interrogation of political scientists.
First, there is the recurrent issue of the need to keep clarifying the nature and the role of the state in terms of administrative efficiency. While the state is central to the analysis of power, and constitutes one of the central thematic focus of political science scholarship, the fundamental need to redefine the role of the state has often not been taken up in terms of its significance for the restructuring of the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) that are the critical engine room for measuring the developmental successes of the state. Aligning the role of the state to the understanding of the MDA becomes crucial as it facilitates the reform of the MDAs in terms of the need to remodel and strengthen their core vis-à-vis their non-core functions as both relate to the service delivery function of government. This could also instigate the urgency of conducting institutional audit that is crucial not only to determining the performance status of many state agencies, but to also jumpstart organizational development dynamics that are meant to motivate the movement of structures to institutions. It is institutions, rather than mere structures that government requires to undermine governance failure.
Second, political science scholarship in Nigeria is necessarily confronted by the need to clarify and explicate the thorny issue of the relationship between the administrative operational dynamics of the executive arm of government in terms of its apparatuses—like the Federal Executive Council—and the working of the American-styled presidential system of government. This is a key concern given that Nigeria’s adoption of many institutional dynamics has remained problematic in terms of relating them to her political and administrative realities. For instance, acute and critical attention need to be paid also to the political economy involved in the executive-legislature relations, and the implications deriving from the planning and budgeting processes from legislative oversight to appropriation and budget implementation. Peter Ekeh’s analysis of migrated structures alert us to the danger of adopting these structures without paying critical attention to their value orientation and the political realities of where they are coming from.
Democratic governance and all its ancillary structural and administrative apparatuses encompass a host of issues that require critical analyses. Since the notion of the public good and the commonwealth, in the idea of good democratic governance, constitute the formidable core of the relationship between politics, public management and public administration, then the discourse around stakeholder management, participatory governance, performance management and accountability become key and critical core issues that interact with the way we see politics, administration and citizenship. The recent discourse on the resuscitation of local governance, through the landmark decision of the Supreme Court to legally reinvigorate the constitutional strength of local government in Nigeria, points at the significance of connecting community development structures and traditional institutions to the state systems and democratic enablement through the principle of social capital and subsidiarity.
To reiterate, the predicament of the postcolonial Nigerian state demands that political science scholarship must necessarily and urgently signal an interdisciplinary collaboration that will instigate a ferment of theoretical, practical and institutional discourses from which both can expect not only to refresh their internal discursive vibrancy, but also collectively contribute to the understanding of the working of the Nigerian state and her capacity to induce participatory democratic governance.
*Olaopa is a Professor of Public Administration and Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja [email protected]
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