Downsizing the Nigerian Civil Service: Issues and Prospects
The Nigerian society is presently undergoing a serious turmoil occasioned by several economic variables, national and global. At the global level, the price of oil has forced so many oil-producing states into deep economic recession. At the local level, Nigeria’s mono-cultural economy has been one of the worst hit in terms of its capacity to absorb the fluctuations of the global economy. This economic weakness is severely aggravated by the internal shockwaves of the Buhari anticorruption agenda, and its effects on public service management and performance. On the one hand, several private sector organisations, especially the banks, have been forced to retrench thousands of their workers because of their inability to sustain their overheads within the context of economic troubles. On the other hand, several states in Nigeria have not been able to pay wages, and hence have triggered industrial action from the trade unions due to the threat of downsizing.
Downsizing is a terrible word in the lexicon of trade unions all over the world. It is a word which carries so much emotional burden. As a commentator bluntly puts it, whether we use “re-engineering,” or “rightsizing,” or “restructuring,” or even “downsizing,” it is essentially firing. And this translates into sending people with enormous family, economic and social responsibilities away from their means of livelihood. Thus, downsizing, in spite of its benign appearance, is often a sorrowful experience for those cut off from a regular source of income. In Nigeria, the downsizing of the public service is a very precarious business. This is because it is biggest employer of labour. And such downsizing exercise has a way of convulsing the economy.
Take, as a historically critical instance, the 1975 retrenchment exercise in the Nigerian Civil Service. By the time the Murtala/Obasanjo administration came into office, it was obvious that the principle of representation that guided the Nigerianization Policy had already failed. The consequence was a bloated civil service that was anything but efficient.
The purge was very brutal. From the civil service to the judiciary and even the universities, the official claim was that corrupt, ageing and unproductive officials and personnel were those involved in the massive retrenchment. Of course, the negative side of that uncritical exercise left an indelibly terrible impact on the civil service. Apart from the damage to the morale of the civil servants, the purge taught those in service a simple but dangerous lesson: the only security in the service is to be “smart” while you still have your job! In the final analysis, insecurity in terms of tenure wrecked the objective of efficiency that was the ultimate goal of the downsizing effort. As my doctoral dissertation thirty years later would reveal, the civil service did not adequately recover from the wrong signal sent to those in government business.
Like the Udoji Reform of 1974, it does not appear as if the government has learnt from what happened in 1975. In other words, we have failed to scrutinise the significant objectives, methodology and consequences of the purge. When we fail to learn the appropriate lesson from a problem, we continue to feel its pains. We have now come full cycle again to the stark reality of a bloated public service workforce—too many people doing nothing, too many doing too little, and too few people doing too much—and the necessity of downsizing.
According to James Surowiecki, “Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.” Creative destruction, according to Joseph Schumpeter, is an innovative process of restructuring by which new products eventually and consistently replace old one. A creatively destructive economy, therefore, is one that overcomes economic fluctuations and achieves productivity growth through structural readjustment that pumps fresh capacities into the economy and public service through a sustained and competitive wage structure.
This is what we call restructuring or downsizing, and its first major operation is retrenchment. Preston Townley gives three reason why restructuring is necessary: “There are three forces driving restructuring: first, the need to react to excess capacity; second, the need to lift profitability in the teeth of recession; and third, the availability of more competitive wage rates in the global labor pool.”
I have been in the civil service long enough to understand both the necessity of downsizing, and I am equally Nigerian enough to know the pain of retrenchment. The Nigerian economy is such that it lacks the capacity to absorb skills and capacities. The unemployment rate in Nigeria is so high because the economy is glutted by employable and unemployable graduates and persons who could not find something, anything, to do. I find in Alexander Pope, the English poet, a graphic illustration of the helplessness of an average Nigerian graduate:
Grief tears his heart, and drives him to and fro In all the raging impotence of woe. Grief comes from that insulting inertia that confronts one’s dreams and aspirations with pure impotence. From this pathetic condition, we can then extrapolate the horror and shame that attend retrenchment, as well as the determined effort to resist it. It is particularly terrible in the case of civil servants because most do not have any other skills set apart from their administrative competences.
And most have gone way beyond the vibrant age bracket that the few jobs in the labour market require. So, the internal strategy becomes a sit-tight syndrome, or worse still, a corrupt tendency that ensures that the civil service is ransacked in all manners to sustain the civil servants’ lifestyles. So, we arrive at a sort of dilemma: downsizing, especially in the case of Nigeria is urgent; but retrenchment constitutes acute human suffering for those to be laid off. We should say, straightaway, that this is a false dilemma. What is required is a combination of perspectives that creatively combine demographic statistics with human resource best practices. In the first place, the public service is made up of several sets of workers that are not supposed to be there—the aged, those who have reached the mandatory retirement age and those who lack the requisite skills and competences urgently needed for higher productivity.
These sets of workers are filling the spaces that ought to be filled by others who can do the work of democratic service delivery. Ordinarily, the public service is often perceived as a place for indolence; “government work is not what you do conscientiously”! To counter this perception, government must therefore embark on a recruitment drive, through a rigorously reforming and professionalised Federal and State Civil Service Commissions, to make the public service a destination of choice for the noble and the best among the youths that roam the Nigerian streets with amazing skills and competence sets that can transform the productivity profile of Nigeria.
Demographically, Nigeria is at the height of her youth bulge, the young people whose age falls within the working class bracket. This human capital can be tapped effectively not only when the FCSC and SCSC put in place an active and enticing recruitment package, but also when the civil service itself creatively rethink its downsizing strategies in a way that will make it easy for the concerned and retire-able civil servants to consider it as a worthwhile option.
The first thing to do is to put in place a retirement and post-retirement packages that will be juicy enough to compel civil servants to look towards retirement without fear or shame. In this connection, the Federal Government can begin a process of performance-managing the States and the entire national economy, through a nation-wide productivity movement (the dimensions to this I sure will take up in some other contributions).
This would entail at the basic level, entering into a pact with States to bankroll (in concert with the development partners) the severance package of retirees in States as part of a medium-term national public sector business remodelling and reengineering of Nigeria’s public administration system.
This should be implemented within the framework of a robust but carefully and systematically rolled out public service reform plan that is seen to be insulated from the politicisation that make a mess of past efforts. The reform principle here is very simple: We can’t eat omelette (institute national productivity) without cracking egg (inflicting some surgical pain even with anaesthesia).
While a retirement package will consist, partly, of the prompt payment of gratuity and pension in a manner that respect the years that the retirees have spent serving the Fatherland, a post-retirement package will address the twin issues of career opportunity and employability. Long before they even approach their retirement age, regular trainings, out-of-service opportunities ought to be a permanent feature for civil servants in a way that prepare them psychologically for life outside of the public service. Such trainings provide the civil servants with viable and sustainable exit strategies, especially in the forms of alternative skills and competence that would eventually replace administrative skills and provide the retirees with means of livelihood outside of service.
Nigeria and the states that make it up are at a crossroads now in terms of cost of governance, productivity and the challenge of freeing up spaces, via downsizing, to inject new skills and competences that translate into efficiency. While downsizing is a necessity, it requires a firm humaneness grounded on the humanity and dignity of those to be retrenched, and a labour union that thinks of Nigeria’s greater future beyond what the remedial solution that perpetual stagnation, adversarial militancy and blind defence of the status quo inspired Aluta will achieve.