By Tunji Olaopa
In its many centuries of historical evolution, from the ancient Egyptian and Roman period all through the French and Prussian ramifications to the British iteration of its essence, we can say without any form of exaggeration that the public service has never known the same type of challenging reality that it is currently facing in the twenty-first century. While it is true that the public service has weathered all the possible challenges it has ever encountered, from wars to famines and droughts, as well as economic recessions of all kinds, it now confronts all across the world all these challenges in even more severe and complicated forms.
Today, the world is in a polycrisis. This simply means not only that the world is confronted with unimaginable conflicts, problems and all sorts of predicaments, or that these crises and challenges are manifesting at a degree never before seen in any century. A polycrisis implies that these conflicts, crises and challenges are connected in some terribly complicated and complex ways that spell serious headache for governments, public administrators and public managers. The challenge posed by climate change, for example, is not just a challenge about the inclemency of the climate alone, but how that problem aggravates agriculture, ethnic conflict, and geopolitical and geoeconomic crises everywhere across the world. Cybersecurity challenges instigate terrorism that cripples national government and throws the world into governance crises. And that is how every other conflict and crisis make other conflict and crisis more troubling.
At the heart of all these problems, challenges, crises and predicaments of the world lies the public service that every government must depend on to confront and engage with these challenges that policies must undermine on behalf of the citizens. In 2001—September 11—the United States experienced one of the largest terrorist attacks in modern human history, and according to a commentator, a government system that “had defeated the Nazis, the Japanese and the Soviet Union was no match for a handful of terrorists.” When the World Trade Centre came tumbling down in a shower of bricks, and steels and bones, it was the American public service that shouldered the burden of what it did not expect and on that horrible scale. When the coronavirus hit the globe from 2019 to 2021, it was the public services all over the world that were at the receiving end of its most brutal and traumatic charges—hospital workers, doctors, nurses, armed forces, law enforcement officers, etc. The public servants withstood the pandemic at its most cruel points, and often without the required equipment. It was worse for every state, especially those touted as the very embodiment of infrastructural development, whose sophisticated healthcare facilities failed woefully to contain the onslaught of the ravaging virus. No government or policies or public service was prepared for the pandemic or the other crises from the Internet bubble collapse of 2000 to the US-Iran conflict of 2026.
This is a very good way to commence a reflection about the state of the public service in what has been called a VUCA environment, a twenty-first century environment that is vulnerable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. A world in polycrisis is therefore a world that generates uncertainty, ambiguity and vulnerability with our most cherished infrastructural advancements. The VUCA environment simply implies that the public service might not always be prepared for the worst that the human minds and actions have to offer in the human society. And the complexity of managing such human world concerns how the governments and their public service have been challenged to not only rethink their policy understanding of human progress and flourishing, but the idea and structure of the public service that would implement these policies.
Given these challenging realities of the VUCA environment the public service must operate in, what questions confront the political and bureaucratic leadership in all the states across the world? The questions are simple but significant. First, given that many of the world governments and public services were caught unawares and struggled with the administrative implications of the multiple crises that had befallen the world in the twenty-first century, how many more crises and upheavals are lurking in the crevices of global geopolitical relations and public governance that the public services of different states might be called up to manage in the years ahead?
Second, and given that the administrative lessons, skills and experiences of the twentieth century have become most inadequate for engaging with today’s challenges, how should the government and its public service commence the reflection and reinvention of government business in ways that fit it for today’s administration and governance? In other words, how ought the governments, especially in Africa, reengineer the traditional Weberian public service in ways that make it resilient, preemptive and agile sufficiently to enable public managers confront the VUCA environment and prepare for the decades ahead? In what ways, for example, can the Nigerian public service become effective and efficient in handling current polycrisis and the hard knocks that come with future crises while also learning from them?
Many countries in the world today, and especially the Commonwealth of Nations of which Nigeria is a part, inherited the Weberian bureaucracy. This is the largely hierarchical, rule-based and rational institution that determines the structural shape of the public service. This legal-rational institution promotes maximum efficiency through insistence on compliance with rules and procedures, and the respect for hierarchy and specialization. This makes the bureaucracy a stable, impersonal and officious entity designed to manage tasks in a predictable manner. The Weberian model of government business is therefore fashioned as a stabilizing rather than an innovative operating system. This stifles the administrative creativity and rapid adaptation that the system requires to confront and manage disruptive challenges and innovation in the VUCA environment.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit the world, the Nigerian public service was able to shake its rigid characteristics and managed to adopt digital tools that enabled a data-driven decision-making administrative speed and efficiency, especially in terms of the policies that led to school closure, social distancing and other significant measures. This made for a much efficient resource allocation and monitoring capacity that undergirded the data-rooted strategic communication which facilitated public trust and compliance with the measures. However, and on the downside, there was no way the system could shake its accustomed institutional inertia and poor coordination across the three tiers of government. This was compounded by under-investment, and hence insufficient, infrastructural development especially in healthcare. This led to shortages of supplies, low-technological deployment of resources and inefficient resource distribution across the country.
What has been the preferred framework and trend of change management for the Nigerian public service that has conditioned its administrative reforms and praxis over the years? How, in other words, has the system pursued the reform, restructuring and reengineering of the public service institution over the years and since independence? I will just highlight two cogent frames of change management strategies. The first is an acute reliance on global best practices, imported administrative models, external experts and consulting firms. These institutional and structural innovations and practices are usually driven by development agencies that project neoliberal paradigms, models and ideas that are developed within different contextual frameworks.
Unfortunately, they generate a conception-reality gap in which institutional reforms become essentially technicist because the paradigms and models are transplanted from their source into a different and often more complex context. This makes them radically decontextualized in ways that limit or even undermine their efficacy. This is wat happened with so many reform efforts, from some public-private partnership projects to the 6-3-3-4 educational model. External experts and consulting firms also often operate without deep insider knowledge or collaborations. And so, this fails to generate first-hand insider perspectives on the institutional challenges and the appropriate solutions for them. The flip side of the equation is that many of the MDAs also often lack the appropriate skills and competences to efficiently deploy these universal and expert-driven practices and models in ways that enable them to adapt and adopt them into the Nigerian administrative context.
The second frame that has conditioned the change management plan is the deepening of institutional reform implementation through a concerted investment in training and capacity building for reform managers. These are meant as operational attempts to instigate institutional reforms and innovation through encouraging public officers and servants to learn and test new ideas and models in the context of practice.
This competency-based framework manifested, for example, in the emergence of the organization and method (O&M) unit that evolved eventually into the Management Services Office, and replicated in the MDAs through such units like the Organization, Operation Management Research unit of the Department of Planning, Research and Statistics. Or what we now call the Reform Coordination Department today.
Unfortunately, this deepening of the reform impulses is rather episodic because it is not intentional, systematic and part of a more comprehensive reform blueprint. Rather, it is triggered by accidental circumstances like economic crises or public criticisms.
All this raises for us a very important question, going forward: How can the Nigerian public service take full advantage of existing structures, systems and reform strategies in order to further stimulate and deepen the production of innovative reform solutions meant to engage and resolve both deep-seated and emerging problems? The answer, for me, lies in context-sensitive governance reforms that aim to reconfigure public governance through innovation-rooted reform strategy, especially through a more participatory and inclusive process that gestures towards drawing in citizens, public employees, private stakeholders and the larger society. This reform strategy demands creating national innovation systems that facilitate the collaborative relationship between public and private actors in reform networks and knowledge exchange, especially through the infusion of, say, entrepreneurial insights. This collaborative effort taps into local and private knowledge to generate “collective intelligence” that could prove to be more reliable and resourceful methodology than unbridled reliance on pre-packaged imported models and paradigms. This can be reinforced with a proactive research and development (R&D) backend that facilitates other methods like ethnography including participant-observation and design-based methods like prototyping.
If this analysis of the shape of the reform process is cogent, then we can multidimensionally enhance the scope of the civil service reforms by embracing public governance domains that allow innovative approaches contribute to more social inclusion of administrative praxis.
I will highlight five such domains in conclusion. One, a more expansive focus on transparent and open government through the enhancement of digital and automated access that makes the public service citizen-friendly while reducing costs. Two, strengthening citizens participation in the policy process in ways that foster trust in government and its policy actions. Three, to achieve this citizen-centered public service, the skills and competency set of public servants must necessarily be enhanced also. This implies a paradigmatic shift that encompasses a new mindset conditioned by new concepts, culture and attitude. Four, effective reform implementation demands strategic communication tools which must be integrated into public policy instruments.
Fifth and lastly, there is a need to build critical and multi-pronged collaborations that have the capacity to orient reforms towards social inclusion—collaborations within the institutional level, between national and subnational levels, between the public service and the innovation ecosystems, between the government and the larger society, and through deepening public-private relationship.
*Olaopa, a Professor of Public Administration, and the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, made this
presentation as guest speaker at Nigeria Public Service Lecture marking the United Nations Public Service Day organised by the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR) in Abuja on June 23, 2026.