For instance, Olaopa believes that there is an administrative pathology in the Nigerian civil service which he tagged “debilitating bureau-pathology” and that this conundrum can be surmised as “too many people doing nothing; too many doing too little and too few doing too much.” He doubled down on this public service equivocation in The making of a public servant reformer. Here, he dissected the messy, complex conundrum of reforms. More significantly, he laid out the task demanded of a public service reformer, as that of a responsibility to “think politically and act strategically.” The environment in which the reformer is expected to work is one that is circumscribed by politics and politicians, he says.
In the book, you will be availed with Olaopa’s assessment of the Nigerian public service. To him, it is an institution that is inherently paradoxical, whose dysfunctional nature is matched only by its potentials. Using the Chinese philosopher, Confucius and his philosophy of pedagogical dynamics, Olaopa used this philosopher to explain the expectation of society from the public servant. The expectation, he said, if for them to “work anonymously but assiduously at the foundation of good governance without any care for self-serving benefits.”
Olaopa also offers his frown at the pathological bureaucratic culture of the Nigerian public service, submitting that this culture is the very antithesis of the efficiency that is expected of the service and limiting its quest to serve as complement of democratic governance.
In other chapters of the book like Abuja and the presidency, From the MSO to the BPSR, Becoming a Permanent Secretary, Reform philosophy for Nigeria: The Socratic Imperative, Reform agenda, Administrative leadership and the politics of reform, From ISGPP to NIPSS: Retirement and post-retirement think tanking, the reader will come in contact with an effusion of the author’s constantly iterating mind and his eclectic prognosis of the Nigerian public service dilemma. You will invariably wonder how Nigeria would retire a man with such humongous recipes for her atrocious public service challenges at a time when the country required his services the most.
In From the MSO to the BPSR, Becoming a Permanent Secretary, for example, the reader will be thrilled about how the author deployed pre-Socratic philosophers’ treatment of the concept of change and the relationship between permanence and change, into explaining the flux, the “administrative befuddlement” that he met when he eventually left the speech writing office at the presidency for the Federal Ministry of Education. For him, what he called the “kaleidoscope of dizzying dysfunction” in the Nigerian public service has a relationship and explanation in Heraclitus’ world of flux and logos. This then explains the paradox of “how the logos can remain the same universe defined by constant flux.”
Olaopa’s understanding of the role of the Permanent Secretary differs from the simplistic “I am directed” zombie that he is perceived to be. For him, he is multidisciplinary or a generalist who is expected to serve “as an institutional memory, as well as the custodian of the traditions, knowledge and the chains of the interlocking conventions, rues and due processes that constitute the ministry she heads.” He thus needs, according to him, “a mix of strategic, tactical and operational capacities and commitments” to navigate through the dysfunctional complexion of the civil service.
In the Socratic Imperative as a reform philosophy for Nigeria, Olaopa bears his mind on how the Nigerian public service must, like Socrates, examine itself because an unexamined life is not worth living. The civil service, in overcoming its bureau-pathology, must accept the optimal system model. This offers a comprehensive analysis of how the service can overcome “both its internal administrative incapacities and external political challenges to effectively become an agent for good governance.”
The book ends with a chapter entitled, Prospecting Nigeria’s future as a nation which is essentially a diagnosis of Nigeria’s leadership dilemma and its objectionable following, as well as the ailments latent in the due. He submits that there is an urgent imperative for restructuring.
The book is a very compelling autobiography, the type that is a rarity in this part. From the beginning to the end, it is a compelling work which, like the preoccupation of the weaver of a tapestry, needles together primary data of the encounters of a participant observer in the theatre of governance.
Though downcast that he did not study philosophy as he desired to be navigated by his childhood mind compass, Olaopa eventually made a profound art of philosophy as a philosopher, practitioner, expert-insider, advocate of a better society, theorist and a man whose research mind will make a first class traditional ethnographer cringe with envy. In this book, the reader will hear the voice of a political scientist and an intellectual public servant whose understanding of the workings of the service is at best professorial.
All in all, the 249 pages of this book, The Unending Quest For Reform: An Intellectual Memoir ripple with nuggets and invaluable insights into the problems of Nigeria, from the vantage of the public service. Olaopa provides a verdant assessment of the service and, ipso-facto, boring down into the Nigerian existential malaises. On a personal note, it has been long I read a book of that intellectual texture that provokes such immeasurable fervor in me, from any public intellectual. It should be a must-read for students of political science, public administration, political theory, development studies and philosophy. It should also be an important companion for, not only anyone aspiring for a career in the public service but for anyone in doubt about the value of philosophy and intellectualism in any life engagement.
Concluded
Adedayo, PhD, a public affairs analyst, wrote from Lagos.
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