21st Century Public Administrator in a Democratic Context

By Tunji Olaopa

The fundamental significance of the public administrator in the overall architecture of government is measured by her capacity to enhance the three functions of government—the policy management, regulatory and service delivery. The policy management function refers to the means by which the government manages the available resources through a process of policy choices that allow the government to achieve its set goals. Once a specific policy choice has been made, the government—in the recognition that the governance space must be expanded to allow for the participation of nonstate actors—needs to regulate the space through regulatory parameters to facilitate effective and efficient intervention by those who will assist in turning the policies into effective outcomes. With the service delivery function, the government concretize the policy management and the regulatory functions by delivering on its promises to the citizens. In other words, it is the service delivery function that culminates the dynamics of delivering public value, and how that leads to the transformation of infrastructural development.

The public administrator or manager plays a very crucial role in the execution of the three functions of government. Indeed, the civil and public services stand in between the government and the citizens as the facilitator of infrastructural development and the dividends of democracy that is emblematic of the social contract the government has with the governed. And so, the status and the capacities wielded by the public administrator becomes very critical in the determination of the capacity readiness of the civil service as the key arm of government that makes policies work.

From time immemorial, the public servant has been key in the determination of the qualitative success of the government of the day. And this is what has accounted for the changing roles of the public administrator over time. From ancient Pharaonic Egypt to modern Prussia, the task of the public administrator has become increasingly complicated given the increasing complex nature of the world, the policy environment and the world of work. By the time Max Weber would be theorizing the nature of public administration, Prussia was already laying the political context for Weber’s theoretical formulation of the grounding of modern public administration and the understanding of the vocation of the public servants. The course of Germany’s political future in the nineteenth century was to be determined by the clash of personalities between Wilhelm II (the young and ambitious German Kaiser) and Otto von Bismarck, his more experienced chancellor. Their personalities intervened in their understanding of social policy and foreign policy, with both favoring incompatible approaches to the objectives of governments. In March 1890, the Kaiser asked for the resignation of Bismarck after series of political clashes.

This significant confrontation between a king and his seasoned senior public servant was a key ingredient in the foundation of the dichotomies that have functioned in the moderation of the relationship between politicians and public administrators since the dawn of the nineteenth century. From Max Weber to Woodrow Wilson, the politics-administration dichotomy construes politics and administration as two different and separate endeavors that should not be allowed to interfere with each other. Indeed, both are diametrically opposed to each other. For Weber, “In terms of what he is really called upon to do (Beruf), the true official…should not engage in politics but should ‘administer’, and above all he should do so impartially.” On his own, Wilson insists: “The field of administration is a field of business. It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics… Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions. Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered to manipulate its offices.”

However, by the time we arrived France under Napoleon I, the administrative dynamics has become so hierarchical and complex that we inherited the concept of the bureaucracy from the French “bureau.” And the bureaucracy created a very strong and political administrative elite that exerted a significant influence on the political system. Administrative history across the globe therefore provides the trajectory by which we have made the transition from the apolitical, impartial and neutral public administrator to the politically aware, citizens-centered and democratically accountable one. The fundamental question I hope this piece will attend to is simple: what kind of public administrator is needed to man the civil and public service required to make democratic governance functional for the citizens in the twenty-first century? To clarify that question: how is the cherished values of public-spiritedness and professionalism to be guided against political conflicts?

There is the tendency to assume that a democratic context requires a more politically visible, active and accountable public administrator who is citizen-centered and dissolves the politics-administration dichotomy. However, the reality of governance and administration, especially in a complex context like postcolonial Nigeria, insists we reject such a quick and superficial answer. This tells us, first, that the politics-administration dichotomy cannot be taken as a universal axiom. This means that we need to give attention to the significance of administrative contexts in the mediation of the understanding of what the dichotomy should mean for the governance of any political regime. Second, the interpretation of the dichotomy also enables us to understand the dynamics of state-ness and its relationship to the civil service. State-ness here is not just a reference to state power, but also a set of institutions, structures, and institutional procedures and norms that represent a specific policy architecture the civil and public service are embedded in.

The key issue I need to engage in this piece is the extent to which public administrators and manager can afford to be politicized. To what extent can public servants sidestep their constitutional role to dabble into politics? As Woodrow Wilson noted emphatically, political questions are not administrative questions. When both are properly articulated and separated, the processes and act of governance is given a boost that leads to good governance. Indeed, Weber’s understanding of the dichotomy is founded not just on the distinction between the politicians and the administrators. The distinction itself is the function of how we understand politics. Weber insists: “Thus, [the public servant] should not do the very thing which politicians, both the leaders and their following, always and necessarily must do, which is to fight. Partisanship, fighting, passion…all this is the very element in which the politician, and above all the political leader, thrives.” The very nature of politics demands that the administrators stay out of the fray that will likely compromise her public-spiritedness and professionalism.

It is this very attempt at preserving the professional capacity of the public servant that necessitates the need to prevent the politicization of the public servant. The apolitical bureaucrat is expected to be neutral, dutiful, impartial and professional even though the political space is impassioned and contested. And this is what enables an administrative continuity that undergirds political succession. Government come and go, but it is that solid space of administrative diligence, capacities and continuity that sustains the very business of government and governance. Once that space is compromised by the very status of the politicized public administrators and managers, then it is not just the dichotomy that is breached. It sends a signal to the politicians to tamper with the sacred vocation of public administration. In a most significant sense, breaching the politics-administration dichotomy activates an identity crisis. It calls to question the identity of a public servant, and her status within the governance space. The real point here is that the status of the politicized public servant is ambiguous, compared to the traditional roles and expertise she has been trained for, and which requires regular reskilling to meet current administrative and governance challenges. Within the political space, the public servant is asked to maneuver and exercise her discretionary acumen blindly.

The professional credentials of a public servant are founded on her capacity to maintain a strict neutrality that enhances her capacity to mediate policy formulation and design for any government. However, when politics intervenes, the public servant is confronted by a conflict between ideological and professional interests. And sometimes, the ideological would plausibly override the professional because it is inherently political. Here, professionalism coincides with the essence of being a public servant—the publicness of public service. In other words, publicness demands a level of accountability that derives from engagement with the citizens. And this is enabled by a professional dedication to an impartial deliberation on public values, social equity and policy intelligence. However, all these would be compromised once the public servants have to weigh their loyalty to the government as well as to the citizens. In all likelihood, politics almost always wins!

Politicians are known for their pursuit of quick wins. This facilitates their constant attempt to store political capital. And this often stand in stark contrast to the policy objectives of the civil servants, among which is the deployment of technical expertise and policy intelligence towards concretizing long term governance and development matters. Political partisanship, without doubt, would involve not only the padding of the bureaucrat’s technical expertise, but also the compulsion to step down the expertise in favor of less informed opinions. And this ultimately compromises the responsibility the public servant owes the state and its citizens. Beyond the compromise of the technical expertise, there is also the deeper issue of the breach of public ethics. To ask a public servant to be brazenly political and partisan is to drag her into the murky realm of political matters that seems to abhor ethical ad moral consideration which underlies administrative dealings.

And yet, a public servant must not just be traditionally defined by the imperatives of the politics-administration dynamics; she must also be found adequately qualified to handle the demands of democratic governance. In my view, a public servant must be able to balance the significance of her traditional vocational expertise with the necessities of administering and managing institutions in a VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—world. A public servant does not need the disruptive tendencies of politics to operate and deploy her expertise in a twenty-first century world already disrupted by many challenges from pandemics to political conflicts. Thus, a public administrator or manager needs to evolve in line with the demands of the time. Three such evolutionary phases have been identified. The first is the traditional rule-based Weberian bureaucrat. The second phase is that of the performance-oriented civil servant who embodies managerial tools, values and techniques in the pursuit of measurable productivity in business-like fashion. And lastly, there is the public manager as collaborator who manages a network of governance actors working together to facilitate infrastructural development and ultimately good governance. All three are not different and distinct, but usually morph into one another. All three would be undermined if the public servant ever strays into politics.

All these do not require a civil or public servant to compromise on her professionalism, expertise and sense of neutral and impartial commitment. On the contrary, she is called upon, in the service of the political and policy mandates of the politicians, to keep sharpening her professional competences and credentials in order to be able to better deliver on her own constitutionally approved mandate of instilling the policy formulation and implementation responsibility with technical expertise and ethical soundness. Politics intrudes in this fundamental evolution of the public servant and compromises her capacity to genuinely deploy her evolving competences to serve democratic governance. Nigeria needs more of the impartial than the politicized public servant if her democratic governance project would ever be concretized.

*Prof. Tunji Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission