One critical question that I have contended with for some time as a public service institutional reformer is, why has it been so very difficult to institute performance-oriented values and systems to alter the inherited ‘I am directed’ traditional public administration tradition in the civil service in Nigeria? Indeed, implementation of the performance management system has been largely rhetorical, entailing moving in circles since the Jerome Udoji Public Service Reform Commission reforms’ first attempt in 1974. Why is this so? One, civil servants generally take on their job as a career, largely because of job security. They, therefore, would generally resist any reform that threatens their jobs, even if such reforms are in the public interest. This attitude translates, for all practical purposes, into a general dislike for change and an unreflective defence of the status quo.

Two, civil servants are accustomed to a tradition of ‘wait for your turn’ to gain seniority within hierarchical structures, and, therefore, value the respect and authority that their positions carry jealously. This orientation contrasts with performance management’s need to reward individual initiatives, creativity, authority of knowledge, and proven expertise, while rewarding officers based on evidence of performance, usually measured as outputs, outcomes and impact within results-based management frameworks. Three, in any governance context and administrative environment where entitlement mentality prevails, where cultural practices of patronage and nepotism that would usually override merit on the altar of ethnic, religious and sectional parochialisms prevail. One where personal connections and loyalty influence appointments with brazen disregard for merit, as is common in our clime, it is usually difficult to achieve the flexibility that enables the fairness and objectivity required for a performance-based system to function effectively. Let us now proceed to put this set of theoretical statements in context, to explain how the failure to institute performance-based systems in Nigeria’s public administration system over the years has, in part, been responsible for Nigeria’s arrested development.

Let me start with an axiom that has guided my reform optimism about the Nigerian state and the unfinished business of institutional reform. That axiom is that there is definitely no shortage of development visions, blueprints, development ideas and paradigms, well-intended policies and programs, or even expert or professional advisory support. As a public service institutional reformer and policy implementation researcher, I recognise all these as the very first step in the trajectory of getting reform done. Thus, while consecutive Nigerian governments could be said to have a surfeit of the visions and ideas that ground institutional reforms with varying levels of impacts, the momentum that translates these visions, ideas and paradigms into efficient institutions and transformative development progress has been missing.

Unfortunately, the institutional and developmental impacts have been less than salutary because of the lack of political will that backstops the success of any reform effort. This is the second level of the reform business that unlocks the possibility of success. We can all agree, without prejudice, that many Nigerian governments have played bad politics with development programs. By this, I mean that Nigeria’s political orientation, from independence to date, has made it extremely difficult to achieve the right composition of elite nationalism that triggers national development. First, there is the problem of policy short-circuiting due to administrative discontinues—each government always desires to reinvent the political and administrative wheels rather than building on the foundations the previous administrations have laid. Most fundamental is the lack of any genuine ideological bases for political parties that connect to an overarching philosophical construct for rethinking national integration and national development. Since 1999, when Nigeria resumed its democratic experiment, politicking has been more about trivial issues of religion and ethnicity than that of issue-based discourse on taking Nigeria seriously.

In institutional reform terms, therefore, we have been witnessing political administrations that have been entrapped in the conception-reality gap in the sense that they have demonstrated some real passion for institutional reforms, given the availability of outstanding ideas, insights and blueprints. However, the passion lacked deep knowledge that could have enabled the governments to intimately and critically interrogate the binding constraints that limit and undermine institutional reforms in the public sector change space, as well as the institutional architecture that the space represents. This failure makes it very difficult for these governments to recognise the devils in the details of development policy execution. This conception-reality gap is further complicated by the ready default of the prebendal culture of primitive accumulation that colours elite nationalism. This makes it difficult for any successive administration in Nigeria to take a gamble on development by initiating development bargains around which the Nigerian Project could have taken off efficiently and with the right dose of political will to raise the possibility of success.

From an institutional reform perspective, many of Nigeria’s past governments have moved from electoral victory to administrative performance to unlock the dividends of democratic governance without a thorough knowledge of the binding constraints that require dismantling within the governance, administrative and institutional dynamics of the Nigerian state and its public service.

Thus, every effort to ignite structural and developmental transformation has remained futile. From the technical angle of policy and development management, therefore, Nigeria has been benchmarking failures through change management initiatives that have been marred by several limitations: poor policy and programme design; poor resource allocation; unstable macroeconomic climate not matched with required policy intelligence and analytics; lack of disciplined and performance managed development policy and programme execution; policy and programme discontinuity; low public service organisational intelligent quotient and sub-optimal institutional capability readiness; and the wide-ranging sociological and cultural issues generally summed up as the Nigerian factor.

However, when his administration was inaugurated, President Bola Tinubu wisely opted for performance management as the best means to manage the Renewed Hope Agenda. And to achieve this, the President compelled key policy players to sign a performance bond. The administration further appointed Hadiza Bala-Usman to oversee the structural nodal point for implementing and tracking the trajectory of institutional performance. Whatever the process is called—performance bond, agreement or contract—it signals a political willingness on the part of the government to achieve a measure of performance and productivity through a judicious attempt to get the best out of the people, infrastructure, financial and material resources deployed by the MDAs. This will be achieved through a systematic set of actions that link the Renewed Hope Agenda’s policy goals and national development objectives with the performance and productivity expectations from the MDAs in terms of sector strategies, performance budgeting, improvement plans, targets, data, workplans, key performance indicators, training and capacity development, etc. And to achieve the utmost productivity, corrective measures in terms of rewards and sanctions are equally put in place when performance improves or falls short.

By opting for the performance management system, the Tinubu administration has keyed into a global best practice. From Florence Nightingale’s effort, in 1861, to instigate the publication of medical statistics in London hospitals and the impact of this on the British civil service, to F.W. Taylor’s scientific management method that facilitated process improvements on factory floors, performance management has come a long way. By the time colonial rule was over, and Nigeria had keyed into the inherited administrative traditions of the British civil service system, Nigeria had adopted the formal personality-based assessment models, the most popular of which is the annual performance evaluation report form. Unfortunately, this template would soon degenerate into oblivion because of its flaws bordering on its subjective limitations. And high-performing civil service systems across the world would later revise and supplement it with other rating instruments and scales, including psychometrics, 360-degree peer review feedback, management by objectives, critical incident techniques, behaviorally anchored rating scales, assessment centres, project-based appraisals, self-assessments, competency-based reviews, narrative appraisals, and many more.

For the Nigerian civil service system, the Udoji Commission report recommended and introduced the planning, programming, budgeting system, which ensured that MDAs and their performances were framed in terms of programmes and strategies rather than line items. The commission also introduced the management by objectives, and later the zero-based budgeting. At the global level, and under the prodding of the new public management, performance management planning and implementation would soon be enriched and upgraded at many critical and technical points to demonstrate the complexity of measuring performance in an increasingly complex administrative world. The Kaplan and Norton Balanced Scorecard became significant in the public sector because of its revolutionary shifting of the performance scorecard away from the traditional focus on the very narrow financial considerations to a broader assessment founded on four variables—financial, customer, innovation/growth, and internal processes. This has been followed by other performance management features, from value for money audit and service delivery units to performance-based pay and sanctions and citizens’ charter.

Despite the perspicacity of the Tinubu administration in opting for the implementation of a performance management system, there is still a fundamental question an institutional reformer is forced to ask. Are the MDAs’ structural, procedural and institutional dynamics capable of readying themselves for the performance-oriented change process? Are they prepared to shoulder the burden of performance management? Why, despite our best reform efforts, has it appeared as if the civil service system is just gyrating on an axis without any appreciable progress? The performance management dynamic of the civil service system in Nigeria has been dominated by the fixation with the APER template and some underlying assumptions. These have to be deconstructed to even begin to reinvent the performance management system that will anchor the Renewed Hope Agenda. First, therefore, we need to make it very clear that the staff performance evaluation that the APER takes care of is not the same thing as performance management. The annual performance appraisal is merely a one-off evaluation criterion that barely adds any value to a staff member’s promotion score. It is therefore just a key but not too too-significant component of performance management.

On the contrary, performance transcends staff appraisal. It involves a continuous cycle of monitoring and reporting of performance against certain set targets, goals, and objectives. To foreground performance as the basis for evaluating the MDAs, the Renewed Hope Agenda has to concretize a performance system that instigate performance monitoring, evaluation and reporting based on (a) whether or not the MDA is doing what it is supposed to do in terms of outputs, impacts and outcomes; (b) articulate gap identification in the MDAs that enables them not only to evaluate and learn but also to improve their performance; and (c) institute a reward and sanction system as a basis for rewarding high performance, and sanctioning low performance.

As a paradigmatic shift away from the traditional Weberian and “I-am-directed” bureaucratic system, performance management transcends technical and technocratic design, roll-out and training, and speaks rather to the necessity of transforming work and workplace culture, behaviour and attitude in ways that emphasise outputs through the baselining of quality information and data system with the capacity to produce high-quality data promptly. This then enables the MDAs to develop strategic plans, like the medium-term sector strategy, which stipulate quantitatively measurable goals, objectives, performance indicators and how they are to be achieved.

To, therefore, concretise the firm resolve of the Tinubu administration to frog leap the civil service system into an efficient mode through the adoption of the performance management system, more is required. The performance system must first be squared with the existing dynamics of technology, capacity, governance and technology. It is not just sufficient to introduce the system in a discrete manner that fails to cohere with the existing overall civil service limitations and possibilities in terms of structures and institutions.

Here, the Offices of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation and state Heads of Service will need to play a crucial role as nodal points in coordinating the strengthening of the monitoring and compliance dimensions of the performance management system in the central personnel agencies. This will facilitate not only the institutionalisation of performance as an accountability tool but also the necessity of unifying its dynamics and procedures across the MDAs. The second most significant step in the institutionalisation of the performance management system is the need to integrate it with the existing and reformed components of the human resource management. This will be two-sided. On the one hand, it will involve the HR processes of recruitment, promotion, training and deployment that articulate the significance of leadership pipelining and talent management for the civil service. On the other hand, there is also the imperative of a consequence management system that regulates performances and challenges through, for instance, a performance bonus or the establishment of a challenge fund that motivates performance. This must also be coupled with a service-wide capacity-building workshop and training program, especially for supervisors, to determine a schedule for periodic impact assessment.

The Federal and States Ministries of Budget and Planning, OSGF/OSSGs, Bureau of Statistics, Civil Service Commissions, government training institutions, and, of course, the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on Policy and Coordination, etc., have pivotal roles in PMS implementation. Their roles are multi-layered and integral, making the PMS inter-ministerial partnership an irreducible critical success factor in its implementation to be explored in great detail. Exploration of the dimensions of the latter is beyond my mission in this contribution, as it is far more nuanced and technical.

The Renewed Hope Agenda has taken off to a good start. It is a declared intention to shun bad politics in the articulation of a governance framework that is founded on a solid institutional reform blueprint that will deliver the stated goals of the Tinubu administration. What I have done in this piece is to outline the structural and institutional components of the performance management system that will backstop the success of the agenda. It is the last mile towards good governance.

Prof. Olaopa, the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, writes from Abuja