One of the recent features of public administration trajectory in the world today is the profusion of schools and institutes of government and public policy around the globe—the Kennedy School of Government (US), Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy (Singapore), Blavatnik School of Government (United Kingdom), etc. The idea behind this proliferation is actually simple: the idea of government and policy making are too important to be left to the public administrators and politicians alone. This idea in public administration dynamic emerged around the need to enable the ruler to come to term with administering a large population and complex and sometimes confounding policy defining issues such as climate change, demography, infrastructure financing, cost of governance, terrorism and insurgency, youth unemployment, cybercrime and so on.
The emergence of the schools of public policy was premised on the urgent need to increase the capacity of the national state to meet new exigencies and demands in a modern world. In the case of the United States, for instance, that exigent situation was created by the needs of the post-Reconstruction era in 1945.
Thus, after the American Civil War, the American state was besieged by numerous new administrative tasks that required not only altering the traditional shape of the state, but also the training of a new critical mass of professionals to make the new state work. Enter the public policy schools as the new institutional framework that facilitates the working of the new task of government.
In Africa, the situation is different. What instigated the establishment of public policy schools is essentially the failure of governance predicated on serial state failure to decide on and implement the infrastructural dynamics that will bring democracy alive for the citizens as a socioeconomic remedy for hunger, unemployment, insecurity, diseases and other existential pains.
Since independence in the 60s, most African states have struggled, without significant success, to outline practical and workable means of articulating substantive collective goals that satisfy the public interest of all Africans. Thus, when the structural adjustment programme came to Africa, its ultimate goal was the unbridled rolling back of the state to achieve minimalism. Quite uncritically, however, the New Public Managerial-induced SAP not only rolled back the state but also all the advantages and capacities derivable from a state-motivated development effort. SAP damaged critical institutions around which socioeconomic recovery and progress could have been predicated.
Aside from all the political and economic rehabilitation plans that had gone into development planning since the 60s, few attention has been paid to the educational dimension of making the state work optimally. To track this charge, the critical question is: How many schools of government are really there throughout Africa? There are only very few—in South Africa, Egypt and Kenya, with the defunct Centre for Democratic Studies as the closest in Nigeria. Yet, these schools are the future of a critical merging of discourse and analysis of policy issues that border development, governance and democracy. In other words, the new governance space of collaborative democratic efforts require a functional and proactive school of governance that understands the dynamics of multidisciplinary synergy that brings government, academia, and the public and private sector together. For Nancy Kline, ‘synergy takes place best in structure;’ and the structure that best define such a collaboration of theory and practice today is the school of governance/government/public policy.
Nigeria is in an even worse state in terms of the availability of a suitably positioned institutional framework that represents the framework for a functional school that professionally intervene in the policy architecture of government to instigate a vibrant proaction. There are five critical institutions, at different levels of effectiveness, that function in this governance breach we have identified—the LBS, ASCON, NIPSS, CMD and the PSIN. Unfortunately, these institutions are limited by operational dynamics and bureaupathology. First, LBS is a business school which, according to its mission statement, is ‘committed to creating and transmitting management and business knowledge.’ On the other hand, ASCON, NIPSS, CMD and PSIN are established by government decrees, and hence automatically circumscribed by political influence and bureaucratic encumbrances even in their singular focus on government’s managerial capacities.
The implication is therefore mind-blowing: Nigeria lacks a genuine school of governance that not only intersects and interfaces several sectors in a multidisciplinary institutional framework, but also robustly engages the theory and practice of public policy discourse and problems in a professional, sustained and systematic manner. The Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy has been established to meet this gap in Nigeria’s public policy architecture. For Evelyn Waugh, ‘We class schools you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School.’ The imperative that demands the ISGPP also ensures that it must necessarily become the leading school of public policy discourse in Africa.
The establishment of the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy therefore comes with a critical historical burden and administrative responsibility that is essentially different from the dynamics that contributed to the emergence of, say, the Kennedy School of Government or the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy.
The ISGPP is not a business school or a school of public administration. While one generates business knowledge, the other is focused strictly on the efficient administration of public policies. On the contrary, it is a professional school that is systematically designed to be rigorously inserted into the rough terrain that connects government, the public and private sectors, civil society, the academia, non-profit organisations and the African and Nigerian Diaspora on public policy matters. The point is that the real-world governance predicament in Nigeria is too real, traumatic and urgent to be tackled by a separation between theory and practice, or between the academia and the government, between the public and the private sectors and between the homeland and the Diaspora.
The governance architecture in Nigeria requires a radical intervention in the form of sustained dialogues with policy issues, systematic executive education that brings the real-world governance problems home to students of public policy, rigorous researches into theories and practices, and persistent training on global reflection and local action. The ISGPP’s objective is to stimulate a serious synergy between policy intelligence and action research in a way that will impact policy thinking in Nigeria. This will require two curriculum paths. The first demands that the school ensures that there is a robust discourse on the complex political and social environments that shape the conception and implementation of public policy in Nigeria. The second curricular imperative demands that public policy analysts and executives must be effectively trained for insertion into this environment if they are to become efficient in calibrating a social policy framework that Nigeria requires to undermine her institutional deficit.
The vision of the ISGPP is to become Africa’s topmost school of executive training in governance and public policy. This vision derives from the fundamental difference between public administrators and policy leadership. For Raymond Smith, ‘Administrators are cheap and easy to find and cheap to keep. Leaders — risk takers: they are in very short supply. And ones with vision are pure gold.’ The vision is therefore to produce leaders with plausible visions of what Nigeria can be after a rigorous and sustained policy transformation. And what is the essence of leadership? In one word: scenario reflection and planning, or scenario analysis. This consists of the energetic capacity to project several alternative futures based on a rigorous analysis of alternative events, processes and outcomes. In an other word, scenario analysis seeks insights from all possible contexts in order to be able to arrive at different and differing alternative worlds. The value of scenario reflection for public policy is immediately obvious. Since one traditional path has left Nigeria deadlocked in policy stagnation for many years, administrative wisdom demands that we try not just another alternative but many alternatives.
The Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy is designed as a veritable site for scenario reflection by its very mandate. This scenario planning has a three-fold constituent. First, ISGPP is situated within a particular context; a reality which it must enable policy makers to grasp and understand as the first condition in policy making. Any hope of achieving daring pictures of alternative futures must first be grounded in the murk of existing reality. Second, ISGPP is set to challenge policy makers on the relationship between policies, politics and history. These are three elements which are the core of any substantive development any state wants to make. Three, ISGPP is established as the institutional context that enables what Plato regards as the dynamics of ‘weaving the future.’ George Bernard Shaw once inserts a rigid gap between doing and teaching: ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ As the ISGPP resolutely explore the thorny path of policy entanglement in Nigeria and Africa, it carries a brand promise: the power to discover, lead and transform!
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