A key element in development is effective government. Lots of countries around the continent have policies, plans and blueprints coming out of their ears, many of them fantastic. The problem is actually implementing these policies. Furthermore, governments are not just implementing agencies they also provide a range of public services to their citizens. However actually using these services often means navigating a minefield of corruption, bureaucracy and inefficiency that is both demoralising and dehumanising. Effective service delivery is just as important as effective development policy implementation and at the centre of both is the public service and its failings.
This is not a new problem, and over the last three decades, we have seen multiple efforts (usually donor-funded) around the continent aimed at reforming the public service, to be more efficient, effective, relevant and cost less. The problem with many of these efforts is that they are top-down, often designed externally that do not properly consider the people that they are trying to reform or the people in whose name the reforms are being pursued. To effectively reform the African bureaucracies, we have to rethink how we think about public service reform policy.
What is the point?
As with any policy, public service reform must have a goal at its core. Goals that are understandable to the wider public and local in their origin.
Most public service reform efforts are highly technical focusing on cost driven issues around wages, performance tracking and enhancement and efficiency. These things are important, but they are not visible. And when reforms are not visible, they cannot be seen and felt by the public at large, which means the reforms will run into political and institutional resistance. Most studies of public service reform efforts emphasise the need to depoliticise the public service and get political support for reforms. However, while political support is useful it is not a necessary condition for reform. If the reforms are visible, understood and can be felt by the public then political support can be formed from public support rather than the other way round.
With this in mind, it is crucial to ensure that the goals of public service reform are not purely back office, metrics-based ones but goals that have an impact on citizen-facing services. This ensures that you can bypass political resistance and that the reforms are rooted in local concerns.
Reforming bureaucracy is about people
Often, when public service reform is talked about in terms that dehumanise it. It’s about reforming systems, and structures, the target is a faceless bureaucracy, which no one likes. That’s all good and well until you remember that those bureaucrats are people, with concerns and aspirations of their own, families to support and careers they wish to protect. Too often public service reform is something that is done to people rather than with them. If you want your reforms to stick you need to get the buy-in of the people you are trying to reform. The public sector has decades of experience in appearing to comply with or blocking action. If you want compliance and reform, then it requires that reforms be done with the people in public agencies and departments. They must have a voice, feel that their concerns are taken seriously and have the goals of the reforms explained to them. In short, you cannot do public service reform without the buy-in of a key stakeholder, the public servants themselves.
The second area in which public service reform is about people is culture. All organisations and institutions develop a culture, which informs how people view and do their jobs, and the goals of their organisation. The public service has a culture, an ethos. For sustainable public service reform, you need to change that culture and ethos. The first key to that is making the public service something to be proud of. Explain and emphasising the role that public servants play, and its potential to make a positive impact. Working in the public service shouldn’t be something that causes others to roll their eyes or make jokes, it should be something people can be proud of. In doing so you can start to create a new culture of service and excellence, and that is precisely the culture we want in the public service.
Efficiency is fine, results are key, transparency is a must
As stated earlier, often civil service reform efforts focus on efficiency, which is important, but results are key, particularly results that people can feel and see. I know I have made this point previously, however reforming bureaucracy to be more efficient is useless when citizen facing institutions are services are terrible. Thus, efficiency is fine, but visible results are key.
On top of visible results. Public accountability and transparency are key to reform. If the government remains a black box, reforms will never take. In addition, it discourages bad behaviour by making those actors and agencies accountable to the public and their peers.
The best, the brightest… and the youngest
If public service reform has people at its core, the recruiting the right people is critical and recruitment can take advantage of Africa’s young people who are driven to solve problems and build a better future. Taking advantage of our best and brightest, of talented young professionals and university graduates. Recruiting and integrating them into the public, creating a new generation of motivated, professional and skilled public servants who can form the core of a reformed public service.
A great example of this is Liberia. After fourteen years of civil war by the time, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became president the country was a mess, and the public service was a nearly broken institution. Recognising this, President Johnson started the President’s Young Professionals Program a two-year program “that recruits and places recent Liberian university graduates in important government roles and provides them with training and mentorship as they support the government’s top priorities”. A 2016 report by Princeton University showed that program had been immensely successful, and that “About 90% of the program alumni continue to working government and or are studying abroad on government scholarships. A few fellows have risen to become departmental directors or assistant ministers.” The Liberian example shows that attracting young talent into the public service is not only possible but with the right mentorship and training, they can make a real difference. Around the continent, we produce over 10 million graduates a year, half cannot get a job. While the government cannot employ all of them, the government can hire the best and brightest without nepotism or political consideration but on merit. One feature of public service reform is hiring on the basis of merit, whether it was the introduction of exams in imperial China 2000 years ago or U.S. Civil Service reform in the 1880s. There is no reason we cannot follow suit and recruit the best and brightest of our youth not just to help drive reforms but incubate them for the long-term.
Africanising public service reform
If we want to implement our development programs, we need an effective public service. If we genuinely want public services to be accessible and effective, they do require reform. These reforms must not only cut costs and improve efficiency but improve accountability, transparency, with people, their culture and most importantly results that positively impact the public at its centre. In other words, we need to Africanise public service reform policy itself because after years of trying we have learned that copy-pasting solutions without contextualising them to Africa never works.
Other than a policy aimed at hiring young people, I have tried to stay away from advocating specific policies. This is because while the challenges facing public service reform may be similar in many African countries the local context also makes them wholly different. What’s needed is a policy approach from which solutions can follow. An approach that recognises that public servants are citizens and stakeholders in the process of reform, that the culture of public service needs positive change, that the public needs to see concrete results if they are to support reforms and that transparency is crucial if the reforms are to stick. Despite all the failed attempts at public service reform, I don’t think it’s hopeless, I think we just haven’t tried the right approach yet.