The public servant as counselor possesses the professional competence to direct the course of policy conception, implementation and evaluation. This is where Confucianism as a philosophy of personal and governmental responsibility or righteousness comes in. Confucian ethics is founded on a conception of morality that links individual character to proper social relationship and a correct working of government. In other words, becoming a good public official—a good mandarin—requires individual character which is the basis of personal accountability and righteousness. These are the two significant bases for achieving a proper counseling responsibility for Imperial China.

In Confucius’ ethical framework, public office demands an individual who has first achieved an understanding of who he or she is before arriving at a proper conception of what public service demands. Government service, for Confucius, is serious business that can only achieve public accountability from the perspective of personal accountability. Confucianism is founded on proper conduct, as an individual and as a government official. To do things right, you must have the capacity to behave and think right. As a scholar-official, and counselor to several governments, Confucius himself was faced with the responsibility of living according to his teachings.

The third important basis for becoming a good counselor for an Imperial Chinese public official is that becoming such a scholar-official demanded achieving merit through rigorous qualifying administrative examinations. Becoming a public official cannot be a function of an arbitrary selection. It must be founded on some specific administrative entry point that serves to gate-keep the profession if it must remain a noble profession. Imperial China was therefore current with other administrative tradition across the world—the ancient pharaonic Egypt, the ancient Roman Empire, feudal Europe, modern Germany and contemporary Britain—on the professional status of the public servants as the guardians of administrative values and ethos that benefit the public.

In fact, the rigorous examinations ensured that Imperil China benefitted from a highly knowledgeable, highly professionalized and highly morally conscious bureaucracy that is a sine qua non for a legitimate and development-minded government.

What then does the Imperial Chinese mandarin civil service system say to Nigeria’s administrative reform process? Nigeria’s administrative challenge of the twenty first century is that of installing a performance management system that will transform Nigeria’s productivity profile in a way that will make democratic governance empowering for Nigerians. However, between a performance management system and an improved productivity profile, there stands an urgent imperative of creating a new crop of dedicated, knowledgeable and transformational public managers with the requisite professional credentials to manage the Nigerian public service as a world class institution with the efficient capacity for democratic service delivery to all Nigerians. Put in other words, Nigeria urgently needs the service of a new body of professional mandarins who can recalibrate the meaning of “public service” and professionalism. This is important because the perception of what a public service is, or who a public servant is, is important in the transformation of what such a public servant can achieve in transforming administrative services in a state.

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Yet, evolving a new crop of public managers faces serious challenges at the conceptual and administrative levels. The Nigerian state at independence inherited the British Weberian administrative founded on strict compliance with administrative rules and regulations. This system created an input business model that failed to produce any significant result in terms of performance and productivity. Like her British counterpart, the Nigerian public service, under the weight of bureaucratic rules and compliance dynamics, became a “great rock in the tide line,” resisting change and transformation that will enable it complement democratic governance. To transform the public servants into a mandarin corps, and the essence of public service, implies walking the tightrope between professional dedication to administrative rules and regulations on the one hand, and on the other, vocational discretion—the moral conviction of what is right beyond the rules and the regulations.

In moral philosophy, deontology recognizes the moral responsibility one has to do one’s duties, whatever may come out of it as consequences. Thus, one has a moral responsibility not to steal, even if one starves and dies in the upholding of that moral obligation. However, if the moral obligation to uphold administrative rules and compliance with one’s professional responsibilities had led the Nigerian administrative system to an inefficient juncture, does that decree the rejection of administrative deontology? No. what is required to create a mandarin administrative system is to outline a new dynamics of administrative responsibility that find a balance between duty and discretion.

A proper framework of professional ethics therefore becomes an indispensable reform ingredient in facilitating the emergence of the Nigerian public service as a world class administrative institution. Professional ethics, supervised by the federal and state civil service commissions, and codified in the code of administrative conduct and code of ethics, becomes an actionable document that not only hold the public manager responsible to his or her professional duties and responsibilities, but equally provide a matrix that enable the public servant to interject the idea of what is right or proper in professional conduct. This becomes crucial because in managing public trust, a public servant especially in a country like Nigeria will be called upon to make decisions on a variety of conflicting public values that can direct policy this way or that way. Discretion combines personal character with moral focus and public integrity to enable a mandarin public official determine what would be in the best interest of the public. Discretionary judgment is however not just something one taps from the air; it grows out of persistent training and other re-professionalization schemes that assist the public servant to properly differentiate the significance of important policies. Discretion imposes ethical judgment on rules, regulations, legislations and their applications to policies and their implementation.

We therefore have the core reform challenge of fashioning a mandarin corps of public manager in Nigeria. It is easy to recognize the success of the public officials of old in the new China. What Nigeria has to do to achieve the developmental state that create economic development and political stability is to generate the will for reform aimed at administrative efficiency. Yet, administrative efficiency comes with creating mandarin officials who can maneuver between rules and the discretion to apply them ethically.