The imperative of policy research in Nigeria’s development process

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In 1966, Professor Wolfgang Stolper, advisor to the Nigerian government on the First National Development Plan (1962-1968), delivered a sharp and prophetic judgment that went straight to the heart of the development problems of Nigeria and every other nation, therefore material.

Stolper decried the inherent difficulties in planning Nigeria’s development without basic economic facts and statistics to underpin political intelligence, decisions and actions. Prof. Stolper stated this when he was a member of the Nigeria Economic Planning Unit that was preparing the First National Development Plan after independence.

One of the basic reasons for the failure of this development plan was the fundamental lack of statistical parameters according to which the development policy was to be shaped. Planning without facts means a lack of state culture and respect for key statistical raw materials and other parameters of scientific management in the process of shaping and implementing policy. This makes it very difficult for Nigeria to design and implement compelling policies that address the country’s development and governance challenges in a way that can be managed scientifically.

This challenge was taken up with commitment by people like the late Professor Ojetunji Aboyade and his likes. Much later, in 2006, the professionalization and reform of the former Federal Statistical Office’s statistical system gave credence to Nigeria’s growing awareness of the place of economic facts and statistics in development, policy design and intelligence. This agency, now renamed the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), is charged with generating “continuous and sustainable socio-economic statistics on all aspects of Nigeria’s development.” This becomes a significant addition to the task of infrastructure development that will elevate the development agenda of the Nigerian state. Unfortunately, viewing the development agenda solely in terms of infrastructure development locks Nigeria into a 19th-century perspective of what development is all about.

While no one can doubt the importance of development hardware – building bridges, highways, electricity, hospitals, etc. – to the well-being of citizens, a more significant dimension of development concerns what we might call development software. In this context, I mean the place and role of research in generating the necessary policy information and action needed to accelerate the critical progress that Nigeria needs. Neil Armstrong, the American astronaut, puts it simply: “research creates new knowledge.” The state regularly uses this new knowledge to address development and governance challenges. This is even more so because the world is now in the knowledge age, where the hardware needed to thrive requires software to understand citizens’ well-being. A nation without a viable and vibrant research industry or the sophisticated leadership to bring such an industry into line with the demands of the knowledge age lacks a clear and useful understanding of what development means.

Unfortunately, Nigeria seems to fall into this category. Let me share three compelling nuggets of experience to underscore my point about the interesting state of Nigeria in terms of research, learning and development. The first one comes from my coordination of the Education Sector Analysis project when I worked at the Federal Ministry of Education from 1999 to 2002. The funding we have received from development partners, running into billions of naira, has enabled a massive update of statistics for significant sub-sectors of the education sector. It is sad that when I left, the Ministry’s Statistics Division had not been able to generate sufficient funds to carry out its duties over the years. In 2003, as part of the government’s efforts to develop a national public service reform strategy, I coordinated a benchmarking tour of over twenty countries. This trip was successful because it tried to gather experiences and plans that would serve these countries well. However, upon returning from these study tours, there was no available budget or even any institutional incentives to organize educational events that would help analyze the basic findings from the tours, complemented by commissioned action research that would help adapt these findings to the local realities of Nigeria.

The final experience I want to share concerns my observations of public administration research frameworks over the past few years. This is crucial because it serves as a nodal point through which research discourses orient policy decisions and projects. This is called city synergy, which allows intellectual innovations and theoretical discoveries to come into a mutually beneficial relationship with experiences in public services and public policy. The reality in Nigeria today is characterized by a disconnect between research and politics, between the city and the dress. Anti-intellectualism in Nigeria’s political space creates a situation where policymakers would typically consider technical comments to the government too theoretical. On the other hand, academic research in universities and even research institutes focuses solely on staff promotion efforts rather than on contributions to guide policy development.

There’s more. Since the late 1980s, the public administration community has failed to build a coherent and optimal platform of professional associations or even a community of practice and expert coordination that could serve as the basis for professional practice in Nigeria. There is also no research database or conference platforms that can serve as a forum for continuous analysis of Nigeria’s administrative crisis and public service challenges in the knowledge age. The consequence of this is that gatekeeping has become a burdensome activity that allows many destructive practices to slip through the cracks. This provides a reasonable explanation for why government officials are dependent on external data sources – the UN, IMF, OXFAM, OECD, World Bank, etc. – to statistically understand our own reality, but also why Nigeria unreflectively adopts imported models and paradigms of development policy and practice .

Continued tomorrow
Prof. Olaopa is a retired federal permanent secretary and professor of public policy and executives at the National Institute
In Political and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos.
[email protected]