At a recently organized conference, the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM) again demonstrated its unique presence as the gatekeeper institution for human resource management in Nigeria. The conference theme, in its fundamental and graphic brevity, reveals the forward looking perspicacity of CIPM in extending the boundaries of HRM through a critical openness to global best practices. The theme of the conference was “Innovate, Empower and Engage.” And in its graphic beauty, it immediately enables us to concretely move from rhetoric in rethinking and transforming HR practice in the public sector in Nigeria by addressing the compelling need for CIPM and other professional bodies to raise the bar of engagement with the public service leadership. With this significant theme, CIPM is helping us raise the critical question: After many years of advocacy to modernize management practices in the public sector, what has changed and what remains to be done?

How can we move the dynamics of HRM and the way business of government is done forward as a leadership factor that is required to make the public service professional and capable institution in a democratic dispensation in Nigeria? This is what I intend in this piece. It is written against the background of the administrative conviction, foregrounded on twenty seven years of my reform advocacy in the public service that if public administration reform fails to orient the development process in Nigeria, then all else has failed.

Within the context of the reform of the public service and the public sector in Nigeria, the central challenge remains the emergence of a new generation of public managers with the requisite competences, skills and professional acumen to supervise the transition of the Nigerian public service into a 21st century democratic institution that is capacitated efficiently and effectively to deliver the goods and services Nigerians need for empowering their lives. Whether we like it or not, and whether we are ready or not, the world is metamorphosing into a technology and knowledge age right before our eyes, and the implication of that momentous transformation is affecting every dimension of our existence, not least public administration and the public service in any democracy. All over the world, governments are rethinking and reinventing their governance models to facilitate an administrative efficiency that makes good governance possible. Joining this administrative reform wagon will entail deploying policy intelligence at strategic level to erect truly functional and legitimate governance model that would transform government business model from the traditional to the strategic.

To get to this level, critical stakeholders led by professional bodies will need to commence another level of conversation with the public sector leadership on why and how existing HR and other practices are competency deficient and dysfunctional. The HRM for example is a professional function founded on, and motivated by a systematic body of knowledge acquired through prescribed academic tutelage, professional practice, experience and continuous learning. But its functional relevance as the topmost administrative dynamics in the efficient and optimal operational functioning of the public service in Nigeria has been lost. What went wrong? The answer to that question derives from a singular fact—that the public sector in Nigeria is the single largest employer of labour. But the bureaucratic crisis in Nigeria’s administrative sector is such that this HR policy architecture does not in any way address the huge infrastructural deficit which has grounded democratic governance. This is because the public sector itself is structurally incapacitated to attract, hire and retain the caliber of talents and competences it require to support the governance and policy space in a strategic manner that transforms Nigeria into a truly developmental state. A more graphic way to put the problem is that the Nigerian development machine requires a jet engine for propulsion but is having to manage a worn-out Beetle car engine that has been wobbling along since the late 70s.

The unfortunate result of this capacity deficit in the public sector is manifold. Let me outline just two of the structural challenges that prevents the appointment and retention of talents and competences. The first is the challenge of an ageing workforce consisting of public servants between 45 and 54 age bracket. This has many implications. The first is the implication of the preservation of institutional memory and how it could be successfully transferred to a younger generation. But such a successful transference becomes difficult because the public sector has no capacity to attract and retain new talents because of an outdated talent management system that is grossly out of tune with global best practices in a knowledge age. This deficient talent management system is still transactional rather than transformational.

The new change management strategy that will mediate the transformation of the HRM process, dynamics and framework must be given birth to within the context of an antecedent understanding of what we want to achieve with the reform of our public sector. Hence, it becomes necessary to ask fundamental questions: (a) What kind of public service is appropriate for Nigeria at this level of development? (b) How can we get MDAs operations restructured to deliver results and outcomes within a framework of performance management and accountability to stakeholders as a democratic imperative? (c) How can we get MDAs’ skills deficit corrected in a manner that would ensure a mix of reskilling, guided injection of new skills from other sectors and some measure of rightsizing and redundancy management that labour unions will sign on to? (d) What would be contingent changes to policies, pay structure and operational cost ratios that is most cost effective and consistent with the optimal productivity level of the national economy? It is within the parameters suggested by these questions that a new HRM strategic reform can even commence.

Olaopa continues

It appears appropriate and cogent to me that the required HRM reform that will transform the competence and skill repository of the public service must commence with the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM) as the umbrella gatekeeper of HR function in Nigeria. The CIPM provides the convenient forum and framework that could enable us rethink and reinvent HR functions in order to be able to properly “innovate, empower and engage”! As the gatekeeping body, the overarching objective of the organization is already captured by the World Economic Forum 2011 document titled The Future of Government. According to the document, “What is needed today is a flatter, agile, streamlined and tech-enabled (FAST) government.” It goes without saying that government cannot be FAST and indeed developmental if it lacks a public service guided and guarded by a new generation of FAST public managers.

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The HR reform imperative must therefore be structured around modernization and professionalization that will make the HRM of the public sector not only more professional, efficient and citizen-friendly, but also facilitate the rethinking the operational base of the skills-set of the managerial corps from being generalist to being “serial masters”’ with in-depth knowledge and competences in a number of administrative domains. In this modernizing context, for example, the recruitment and selection processes and strategies must support and complement training and development strategies while the reward function must equally reinforce and be reinforced by performance management. Thus, one of the policy requirements in the new HRM is the urgent need for line managers to be allowed to exercise staff management authority rather than just limiting HR management in the hands of HR specialists or in central personnel agencies.

This will require a host of modernizing imperatives that must be infused into the HR function of the public sector. As the first order of business, there is an urgent need to undertake periodic functional reviews of MDAs to determine tasks and responsibility dynamics, transfer redundant functions, effect required structural changes and processes and exit redundant staff on an on-going basis and within framework to which labour unions are enlisted. This is a must since the needed reform must commence at the level of the MDAs with an HR assessment of what is on ground. The necessary second stage of modernizing reform is to undertake job study and job evaluation to address internal relative job worth. This becomes imperative as the only scientific means of establishing an optimum staffing level in the MDAs.  Reform initiatives can then be put in place for a selective opening up of the public service to talents from other sectors, especially the private sector. One of the major obstacles to the public service operational and efficient functioning is the negative dynamics of inbreeding that constrains administrative creativity. Opening up the public service therefore effectively facilitates a process of cross-fertilization of managerial and organizational cultures.

The public service, in a technology dispensation, must not fail to speed up digital penetration and technology adoption that will essentially ensure not only citizen participation in the business of government through survey, consultations and deliberations, but will also facilitate productivity through performance assessment, transparency check and accountability. It seems practically impossible in today’s democracy to imagine citizen engagement outside of, say, a functional website and social media visibility. An open data policy is central to any attempt at facilitating democratic service delivery with citizens’ inputs, suggestions and criticisms. This must also go hand in hand with an elaborate attempt at deepening public-private partnership dynamics that will enable the public service to further handle and resolve service delivery complexities, manage serious challenges relating to economies of scale and scope in order to better be able to leverage innovative ideas and best practices from the private sector and other non-state sectors. One significant consequence of this PPP initiative will be the effect it has on the public service pay and incentive structure. This remains a critical issue that has constrained performance, productivity, administrative behavior and the capacity to attract scarce skills and competences. The public service therefore, as a matter of urgency, needs to design and implement a rational and sustainable model of pay adjustment sustained through constant pay research and wage monitoring mechanisms.

In the final analysis, the public service cannot be sidelined from a general national productivity shift that must be founded on three fundamental administrative elements: (a) Institutional rationalization; (b) Benchmarking of capital-overhead-personnel budget; and (c) a national waste reduction strategy that is linked to a new national maintenance management policy and a new asset efficiency management scheme. This places a huge burden on the CIPM and the reform architecture of the public service to facilitate the architecture of a new career management system which demands a review of the position of the government as the highest employer of labour, and the character, education and adaptability of the workforce. The new strategic human resource management that must evolve from the existing personnel management framework will then be circumscribed sufficiently by specific performance-enhancing metrics—a strategic needs metrics required for assessing future needs related to the institution’s vision and mission; mission effectiveness metrics which involves having a critical mass of capability experts who can generate ways of assessing the health and viability of future missions and objectives for meeting future challenges; and an operational efficiency metrics that demands the use of benchmarking, customer survey and other standardized metrics for identifying the quality of operational frameworks, processes and dynamics by which required institutional missions can be accomplished with minimum cost.

The CIPM has provided the context within which these reform thoughts could be prevented. But that cannot be the end of the story given the stasis which has attended most reform ideas in Nigeria. As a significant organization in the HRM business, it behooves the CIPM to also facilitate the context within which these ideas can be successfully deployed for transforming the public service in Nigeria.