By Tunji Olaopa

This piece is one of the technical notes that I used in some seminal conversations before now, one of many others that I consider should be shared, despite its seminal tone, for the benefit of public managers-learners who are spread all over the nooks and crannies of Nigeria and beyond, and for public education. In penning this contribution, I am interested in a sort of agenda-setting that can generate discourse around public cum civil service institutional reformulation and its framework of relevance, especially in a postcolonial context like Nigeria.

Globally, public administration outlines and concretises the administrative agenda that allows the state to intervene positively in the lives of the citizenry. This, therefore, places a huge responsibility on the public service—and the public administration scholarship and communities of service and practice—to get up to speed in outlining a pathway that will transform the professional endeavour into a sturdy representative of state activities and responsibilities to the people. Like every other endeavour, public administration must necessarily respond to the multiplicity of events, circumstances and occurrences that have come to define the world in the 21st century.

Public administration has come a long way since its first documented formation, with the rudimentary but fundamental beginning in ancient pharaonic Egypt through to the high political intrigues and engineering feats of Roman society to the exigencies of the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. In the 21st century, and worldwide, public administration is even more challenged by current circumstances shaping not only national administrative imagination but also international and global relations.

In the first place, public administration is today immersed in what has been called a VUCA environment. This implies that public administration and its processes, procedures and institutional operations must be factored into an environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. The VUCA world implies the myriad degrees of shocks, threats, cynicism, turbulence and challenges that governments globally must have to respond to design and formulate policies that will resonate with the yearnings of an increasingly politically sophisticated citizenry. The VUCA environment is aggravated by what has come to be called

a polycrisis, a fundamentally complex situation as a result of many crises, conflicts and complex issues reinforcing and complicating one another in sequences that aggravate any existing circumstances that humans and states find themselves. In such a situation as a polycrisis, the overall consequences and impacts of the complex crisis are greater than the sum of all the variables making it up. For example, poverty in the world today is now a function of climate change, economic recession, natural disasters, bad governance and political instability.

Within a VUCA environment, policies and their trajectories and dynamics cannot be considered as simplistic and linear endeavours. This is compounded by the fact that the status and role of the public manager, as the administrative and policy craftsman, has kept changing: (a) the ‘I am directed’ rule-oriented bureaucrat (public manager 1.0), (b) business-oriented and performance-focused manager (2.0), and (c) networking and relations-focused collaborator (3.0). This transition reflects the transformation of thinking about public administration and the public service from Max Weber to Woodrow Wilson and from the new public management to the idea of new governance.

The VUCA environment within which the 21st century public manager is expected to effectively and efficiently function is further complicated when it is considered from the perspective of a postcolonial context like Nigeria. Africa is often considered the most difficult administrative context in the world. That is essentially because the organic maturation of public administration had been disrupted not only by colonial rule but also by postcolonial consequences of a logic of extraction. This, therefore, implies that public administration and the public manager in Africa must not only anticipate and preempt current and recurrent challenges that ail governance on the continent but must also be conversant with emerging trends and paradigm shifts that are determining the trajectory and possible directions that public administration is taking in the evolving fourth revolution and knowledge society mediated by digital and destructive technologies, from the blockchain and robotics to enterprise resource planning and big data.

Trend analysis, therefore, becomes a necessary and inevitable tool for prospecting for patterns, scenarios and variances to determine prospects and achieve strategic decision-making. Trend analysis relies essentially on empirical and historical data and evidence to determine, monitor and forecast short- or long-term institutional changes that could constitute downtrends or uptrends for any particular endeavour. In public administration, it involves gathering historical and current data on emerging trends that could get the public managers to make decisive and evidence-based strategic decisions that would get the public service to perform more effectively and efficiently for better service delivery. This serves the purpose of empowering public managers and public administration scholars and experts to gather valuable insights on how far public administration practices have come, the emerging developments that are shaping the practices, and the prospects in the profession. It also enables public managers to generate a crucial understanding of performance metrics that could keep pushing the boundaries of the operational functionality of the public service for optimal performance and productivity.

The most recent source of polycrisis all over the world was the COVID-19 pandemic that decimated millions of lives globally and facilitated in its wake what is now called the “new normal” in terms of human social relations, societal dynamics and structural cum institutional realignments. Humans have been forced to reassess normal patterns of doing things at some professional levels. We now work from home, adapted to a blended educational schedule, attend conferences and symposia virtually, and so on. In economic, social, political and even spiritual terms, there are now dramatic transformations that were instigated by the precarious developments of the COVID-19 pandemic. The new normal is enabled by digital and other new technologies and the new information dispensation to disrupt the usual dynamics of social, cultural and professional lives. The pandemic triggered a deluge of challenging situations for public administration and the public service to deal with. This can be likened in a sense to the administrative challenges that the Nigerian Civil War posed to Nigeria’s public service and those we now call the “super permanent secretaries”.

The COVID-19 pandemic struck most governments and their public administration dynamics at this critical service delivery point. And the tragedy of the pandemic is that it caught the entire world at varying administrative stages and phases of the normal. This is even worse for the third world countries, and Africa especially. Before the COVID-19 lockdown, the Nigerian public service system had been afflicted by a bureau-pathological protocol defined by a collusion between what we all know as the “Nigerian factor” and some damaging systemic debilities. The tragedy of the pandemic and Nigeria’s unpreparedness for it has presented the public service system with a unique opportunity to reflect on and rethink its governance and administrative policies.

And so, with the sudden transformation of the way we look at work and workplace dynamics, the public service had to forcefully embrace what used to be the staple of administrative conferences and forecasting.

The transformation of the workplace, as part of the key reform for preparing public administration to manage the fourth industrial revolution, especially in Africa, demands the deployment of human resource management to achieve performance and productivity. The transformation of the workplace and work ethics gives the public service the capacity to recruit a global workforce and create incentives that increase employee loyalty and commitment, and collaborations that generate productivity. This gives room for the achievement of a better work-life balance deriving from freer time and flexibility to work. It also crucially facilitates the acquisition of “21st century literacies”: (a) interpersonal skills: facilitation, empathy, political skills; (b) synthesising skills: sorting evidence, analysis, making judgements, offering critique and being creative; (c) organising skills: group work, collaboration and peer review; and (d) communication skills: better use of new media and multimedia resources. The smart public manager must also factor into the mix the unique cultural and sociological demands that the emergence of Gen Z, Gen Alpha and Gen Beta are bringing or will bring into the constitution of the workplace as a technology-enables space with its peculiar generational dynamics. No conscious public manager will ignore the demands of diversity, equity and inclusion in making the workplace more broad-based and strategic.

Apart from the immediate need for flexible and remote work protocols that transformed the workplace and its dynamics, the imperative of open government suddenly got a new lease on life. Since the emergence of the new public management and the managerial revolution that drove it, the objective has been to achieve a government that is FAST—flatter, agile, streamlined and technology-enabled. One way to do this is not only to install a performance management system but to also facilitate an open government framework that allows for the co-creation of values through citizen engagement. For instance, a flat government demands that the distance between the government and the citizens be decreased through the deployment of digital technologies, social media and mobile technologies that increase the participation of citizens in administrative and decision-making processes. Open government, therefore, increase transparency and accountability in government decision-making, remove red tape and hierarchies, and enable cross-sectoral collaborations.

The open government initiative also makes possible an open data platform that governments globally are deploying to further facilitate citizens’ engagement and interactions with the policies of government. Through emerging communication and information technologies, governments make available data and information that the citizens can use. Tracking and mapping systems also help the citizens to interrogate the government’s expenditures and decision dynamics. Open government and open data initiatives are made possible by the right-to-information legislation that makes it imperative for the government, through its MDAs, to share critical information about its processes and procedures with its citizens. The open government partnership plays a crucial role in grounding the significance of the public-private partnership. This is achieved through a networked dynamic that open government and its deployment of communication and digital technologies make possible. The government can now draw the private sector into a governance space for tackling challenging administrative and governance issues that the government or the private sector could never tackle on its own.

The idea of open government and its potential for making public administration more effective inevitably raises the spectre of cybersecurity concerning the value of big data, data sovereignty and how this could be compromised. For example, data sovereignty gives the government control over sensitive information and data that its public administrative institutions and processes required to function effectively. It also prevents these data and information from unauthorised access or information mining and misuse that could compromise the significance and values of these data and information. Hence, governments need to manage the circumferences of their data sovereignty by monitoring and anticipating data breaches and vulnerabilities. Public managers will, therefore, be tasked with the imperative of thinking more strategically about the critical relationship between open government, open access to big data, administrative efficiency and the threat of data breach through cyber-attacks. This inevitably demands the significant role of cybersecurity professionals who can anticipate and deal with cyber threats as they emerge.

The reforms that will shape public administration of the future will be determined significantly by the capacity of public services globally to leverage digital, communication and information technologies to both create strategies and be strategic. Creating a strategy, on the one hand, is a process of translating a plan into a set of results. On the other hand, however, being strategic is a competence that involves critical thinking. The two points at the urgent need for the public service to generate strategic thinking required for the change management that will move the institution forward into more optimal functionality and productivity. Both must be channelled institutionally to the most central process of strategic decision-making. Creating strategies and being strategic in administrative decision-making demands the deployment of new thinking and developments in decision science.

Decision science has become a critical field that has integrated cognate developments from artificial intelligence, organisational psychology, systems thinking, machine learning, probabilistic modelling, scenario analysis, big data analytics, and many more to become a key area that the public service must buy into to push forward its policy intelligence that strengthens decision-making. Modern policymaking that has taken cognisance of decision science will most likely possess nine fundamental features: (i) forward-looking; (ii) outward-looking; (iii) innovative, flexible and creative; (iv) evidence-based; (v) evaluation; (vi) review; (vii) joined-up; (viii) inclusive; and (ix) learned lessons.

Artificial intelligence plays a critical role in decision science and strategic decision-making for the public administration of the future. AI possesses a huge significance for the objective of making the public service an efficient institution for democratic service delivery that optimises democratic governance. AI not only makes possible the digitisation of crucial data and information, it simplifies routine and tedious tasks and fast-tracks data analysis. It is also inevitable to facilitate open government and open data aspiration that transform public administration. However, in deploying AI in public administration, the public manager must factor in the multiple ethical and legal concerns, especially in terms of human rights issues that link AI to labour issues and industrial relations.

The last fundamental trend that public administration must factor into its reform is the emergence of a flexible, updated and up-to-date curriculum that benefits from the contemporary discourses on public administration, and current administrative practices, and feeds administrative education and training. The curriculum will feature syllabi on artificial intelligence and its critical significance, the role of new technologies in public service efficiency, human resource management and the new workplace, the imperatives of open government, etc. The curriculum, for example, will explore the relationship between the public service and commercial/market tools, analysis, techniques and models for gathering commercial data that will enhance the effectiveness of the public service in terms of project management, asset and facility management, outsourcing, contract awards, and so on.

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