By Tunji Olaopa
One next-level governance reform that the political leadership in Nigeria must take on board, necessarily and as a national imperative before or after the 2027 election, is the reform of the party system, especially in the face of growing and glowing image and respectability of our dear country on the global stage.
The core objective of every political party across the world is, of course, to win an electoral victory. However, these parties and the political leadership know that constituting the government confronts them with the larger challenge of articulating a governance model that is win-win, developmental and capable of managing the transition from electoral victory to governance to performance.
The ultimate objective of every government, to which the goal of capturing political power is oriented, is to direct this power, through the legitimate authority won at the polls, to achieving good governance that will not only better the lives of the citizens but also accrue more legitimacy and political capital for the government. But this is an ideal trajectory that is far from the reality of politics, especially in postcolonial Nigeria.
The practice of politics often flies in the face of the use of political power for good governance. This explains why some states across the world are prospering and so many others are poor, struggling and impoverished. This is the central argument of Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.
According to them, what differentiates a flourishing state from a poor one is a function of a decisional quotient that enables the political leadership and policy makers to initiate and implement decisions that lead to the establishment of capable, inclusive and participatory political and economic institutions, while some others are only satisfied with weak extractive rent-seeking institutions. When many political parties win electoral victories, they are motivated, and rightly so, by the logic of the victory to assemble the delivery team within the framework of a spoils and patronage system.
When Andrew Jackson, for example, won the U.S. presidential election in 1828, he replaced government officials and top-level bureaucratic functionaries with loyalists, constituents and supporters with scant concession to technocrats and experts. He would later sideline the official cabinet, preferring unofficial channels for policy advice.
In Africa, the capacity of the political class to transition from governance to performance, given disenabling and weak state institutions, requires significant out-of-the-box strategic thinking, institution building, leadership intuition and sophistication. Government everywhere is indeed known by its policy formulation and management function—the duty to formulate, design, implement and manage the policy processes in ways that will translate into governance and development dividends for the citizens. And this function demands more than some quick fixes that neglect the style of leadership, strategic partnerships and change management.
The policy function, in other words, demands, as a matter of necessity and urgency, the realisation that the good governance objective can only succeed when governments commit to the challenge of building a cohort of expertise, competencies, and skills that second its willingness to translate policy into development tangibles. Suffice it to add that, given many variables and factors that shape partisan politics and political behaviour in our clime, participation by core professionals and development experts in politics through party membership and contesting in elections for political offices is still unattractive, unthinkable for many, and far between.
The government must therefore recognise the necessity of situating itself within a broad context of change space that is defined by a distributed framework of multi-level leadership. The change space turns the idea of government, rather than governance, on its head in terms of undermining the metaphor of rowing, which characterises government as the sole actor in the governance space.
On the contrary, the change space insists that the government must take over the steering role, see the task of governance in an expanded sense, and enable nonstate and nongovernmental trusted and tested strategic partners to take critical roles in managing the policy objectives, goals, programs and projects of government on behalf of the citizens. Leadership is then distributed from the government to others who often work in the backend of making government efficient, capable and therefore effective.
Within this framework, the government is involved in a strategic partnership with teams, networks and partners that constitute the institutional and technocratic backend the government needs to make results happen. This backend support system is made up of think tanks, conceptual workers, consulting firms, a network of policy experts, development partners, policy entrepreneurs and evangelists, schools of thought, etc.
More critical in this change space and strategic partnership are the technocratic and technical operatives—bureaucrats, experts, subject specialists, technocrats and skilled personnel. This relationship, at first glance, seems unproblematic. On the one hand, the politicians who form the government and are responsible for the policy process are essentially the democratically elected representatives of the people and party chieftains. These representatives are imbued with legitimate authority to formulate and shape the policy direction of governance decisions.
On the other hand, the source of authority of the technocrats and bureaucrats is not the electoral process or popularity; rather, it is a meritocratic recognition, endorsement and therefore appointment that is founded on proven evidence of a deep specialised knowledge, authoritative insights, and practical problem-solving skills, ones that ensure that policies canvassed by government are evidence-based, technically accurate, and operational, in real time.
However, the relationship between the politicians and the bureaucrats/technocrats is not as smooth and seamless as it appears on paper (as I have enunciated in perspective in many op-ed pieces). Despite the theoretical dichotomy that insists on a separate sphere of objectives and scope of authority, administrative history and experiences demonstrate varied types of possible interactions that could exist between the politicians and the technocrats.
The relationship could be conflictual, as it most often is, in terms of the different ways both actors perceive each other. Politicians can perceive technocrats as impediments, while the bureaucrats/technocrats can see the politicians as short-sighted. In another model, technocrats could be trapped by the politicians’ desperation for political capital. In another sense, technocrats can also trap politicians within their technocratic desire to advance ideology-padded ostensible political agendas.
But what is required to get the job of governance done within a balanced dynamic is a symbiotic relationship that ensures that the politicians provide the policy vision and mission while the technocrats and bureaucrats define the ‘how’ of getting the policy directions implemented as efficiently as possible, within a framework that is mutually-reinforcing and symbiotic.
This symbiosis is grounded in an ideological consciousness that grounds the policy and governance processes. In other words, the technocratic support that the government derives from the backend of the governance space is more than the technical assistance that comes from the civil service or official advisers. Indeed, the expanded civil service technocracy ought to be rolled into larger conceptual schemes, and policy cum institutional networks that throw up fundamental ideas, insights and lessons that the government can deploy as policy intelligence that feeds the policy and governance processes for national development.
During the immediate post-independence period, the Nigerian state was experimenting with a developmental state model that was supposed to tackle governance challenges. The model was what gave the Asian Tigers their global economic stature and many celebrated ‘thirds to firsts’ in a manner of speaking.
The first, second and third up unto the SAP development planning and praxis were grounded by a vibrant conceptual space occupied by policy conversations and development management discourses handled by seasoned technocrats, experts and administrators—Nobel Laureate Prof. W. Arthur Lewis, Prof. Wolfgang Stolper, Chief Simeon Adebo, Dr Pius Okigbo, Profs. Ojetunji Aboyade, Akinlawon Mabogunje, Sam Aluko, Adebola Onitiri, Adebayo Adedeji, Emmanuel Edozien, Clement Isong, Abdul Aziz Attah, Ibrahim Dasuki, Adedotun Phillips, Drs Kalu Idika Kalu, Chu Okongwu, Jibril Aminu, HRM Olu Falae, Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji – Triple A – and many others.
Unfortunately, Africa moved beyond that golden age of policy significance into one of state failure that invited the imported intervention of the Bretton Woods institutions and the structural adjustment programmes, which further weakened Africa’s institutional capacity to attend to its own challenges from the perspective of its own conceptual and ideological moorings.
This situation is different from Western societies and states. Britain provides a very good example of how an institutionalised technocratic experts-enabled backend can become the platform for ideological responses and policy alternatives around which the state can make policy formulations that advance the lives of the citizens. In the early 1950s, Britain was just coming out of the Second World War, and the British state demanded a redoubled policy architecture around which its economy and civil institutions could function on behalf of the citizens.
The beautiful conceptual advantage that technocracy brought to the British state was the ideological juggling between Keynesianism and Monetarism as two theories and development economic models that articulate the kind of relationship that ought to exist between government policy actions and economic performances. John Maynard Keynes was the key technocrat cum theorist who articulated what is today known as Keynesian macroeconomics.
This theory, adopted by the Labour government in the UK, advocates key government intervention that insists on state spending geared towards full employment as the fundamental plank in the establishment of a welfare state. In this economic framework, government intervention is meant to serve as the mechanism for fixing the failures of the market and prioritising aggregate demand-side fiscal policy. This is because, for the Keynesian economists and technocrats, recessions are the result of inadequate or insufficient demand.
However, by the late 1970s and the ‘80s, the “Keynesian Consensus” had been terribly punctured by the severe economic crisis of the time and the failure of the state relative to the market, leading to an erupting stagflation, which undermined the Keynesian approach. This was further aggravated by the contributions of Milton Friedman, a severe critic of Keynesian economics. Friedman’s alternative, adopted by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party, is the monetarist economics perspective, which focuses on the money and supply dimension as the proper mechanism for controlling inflation.
The monetarists argue that inflation demands controlling excessive interest rates and money supply through a self-correcting market mechanism that demands minimal government intervention, contrary to the state intervention advocated by the Keynesians. Thatcher successfully deployed the monetarist economic policy to manage inflation by 1983, even though the policy came with unbridled unemployment.
The public administration scholarship and the contributions of public choice theorists, agency theorists, institutional economists, et al., that created the theoretical undercurrent for the new public management were, in some sense, an offshoot of this movement.
The key argument derived from this theoretical excursus is that the state cannot handle the realities of economic, policy and governance complexities without being grounded in ideological frameworks that are brought by technocrats working together with the state within the governance space to articulate policies that can mould good governance. When Ronald Reagan started leading the Republican Party in the 1980s, during the period Thatcher was also struggling with her economic policies, the government was dependent on a string of think tanks that assisted in coordinating the government’s ideological requirements—the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc. The Democratic Party, on its own, had the backing of the strategic and technocratic expertise of the Brookings Institution, the Centre for American Progress, Progressive Policy Institute, among others.
This strategic relationship allows for a bidirectional flow of ideas and expertise from the government to the think tank and technocracy, and right back. Apart from the generation of ideas, insights and initiatives that the government find useful in regulating its policy intelligence, there is also the exchange of members. Members of the parties often leave office to join institutes, universities and think tanks to reorient their ideas and discourse. On the other hand, research fellows and members of think tanks and research institutes are also often called upon to become government officials and functionaries, given their technocratic capacities and expertise. China calls upon this technocratic expertise and competencies to frame its “Chinese Solutions” to governance, development and international relations policies.
To recapitulate: political parties must reflect on what should be the ultimate objective of winning an electoral victory. This prepares them, in time and space, to adequately strategise on the fundamental partnership that will make the governance responsibility a clear and poignant one from an ideological perspective. The tragic alternative would be for the government to keep up a trial-and-error approach to stumble from one policy to another while immense suffering is visited on the populace.
Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration.
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