Speaking ex tempore can be quite challenging especially when the issue you are raising is quite germane, and you might not be able to speak to its nuances on the spur of the moment. Thus, when Professor Antonia Simbine, the Director General of the National Institute for Social and Economic Research (NISER), visited my office as the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) most recently, the cumulation of our discussion veered, not surprisingly, towards policy architecture, local research outputs and Nigeria’s productivity profile. When I, therefore, made the argument that there is a crucial disconnect between local research outputs and Nigeria’s policy space—that “our experts’ output [are] gradually [becoming] irrelevant and consigned to publications and for individual promotion and professional development and not as input into the public policy making process”—I was not attempting to generate a soundbite that would generate notoriety. On the contrary, I was simply alluding to a national reality that requires more analysis to unravel its critical nuances. My statement to the press only provides a partial picture of what is really wrong with the policy-research nexus in Nigeria. This contribution is simply a modest attempt to build on my statement as a measure of recognition of the significance of the subject matter.
A significant dimension of my institutional reform concerns has always been the policy-research nexus that could be energized by the town-gown. The policy-research linkage refers to the relationship between policy makers and the academia that strengthen strategic policy intelligence and the need for critical problem-solving in governance. My policy-engaged research advocacy derived from the belief that Nigeria’s development planning and management has a lot to benefit from a reinvented town and gown symbiotic relationship. This belief has a historical basis in the immediate post-independence period when Nigeria was struggling to put together a development structure that will serve as the basis for good and democratic governance.
This instigated a community of practice that brought academics and scholars into key conversations around the academic and administrative implications of policy designs. The consequence was the development of significant action research hub that stimulate policy intelligence for the government and its policy-making capacities. This community of practice is what brought the likes of the late Profs. Ojetunji Aboyade and Akinlawon Mabogunje, and Dr Pius Okigbo, into critical policy conversation with Simeon Adebo, Allison Ayida, Ahmed Joda, and the public administration/public service structure into policy-research-industry complementary relationship that government regularly drew upon for its development thinking. From what we now regard as the golden age of public administration in Nigeria to the present struggle to make sense of democratic governance, a lot has gone wrong both with the policy-making architecture, Nigeria’s higher education dynamics and the significance of research and development (R&D) as the fulcrum for enabling action research and ultimately the policy-research nexus.
There is one obvious culprit that undermine the framework that enables policymakers and researchers/academics collaborate to facilitate policy-research linkage that deploys the transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of public policy research to ground development planning and good governance. This culprit is the government’s anti-intellectual posture along the line which takes researchers, think tanks and research institutes as interlopers and non-significant actors in the policy process rather than as critical partners and stakeholders. This is a charge that should not be taken lightly. It is one that has been borne out by my entire professional trajectory as a public servant with a significant interest in studying the intellectual basis of public administration in Nigeria, and its interface with academia and other intellectual resources available to the government in terms of its policymaking function and service delivery requirements. My intellectual and professional tutelage under Aboyade and Mabogunje, for example, also further accentuated how the public service could be rabidly reactionary against every attempt at facilitating collaboration with the academia and research dynamics. This is despite the cogent evidence of the role of the town and gown in molding the successes of the Adebo-Udoji up to the era of the Gowon’s super-permanent secretaries in public administration—a situation that got to a height during the IBB era and still subsisted under the Abacha administration with the National Economic Intelligence Committee (NEIC), headed by the late Prof. Sam Aluko. Unfortunately, the commencement of Nigeria’s democratic experiment in 1999 has failed to undermine this anti-intellectual posture and ignite this policy-research collaboration.
There are several consequences deducible from this posture. The first is that the many research institutes, think tanks and tertiary institutions have no visible influence on Nigeria’s policy articulation in ways that qualitatively transform the policy intelligence of government. A recent study carried out on Nigeria’s sixty-six research institutes paints a very dismal picture of systemic, operational and structural challenges that undermine the contributions that these institutes could make to policymaking. The same can be said for the over two hundred and fifty public and private universities in Nigeria. This state of affair leads to the second implication of the government’s anti-intellectualism: the failure to ground the framework and protocols of their policymaking practices on economic and statistical rationalities. This implies that successive Nigeria governments plan economic and developmental processes without the benefits of statistical analyses and scenario intelligence that the action and empirical researches of the research institutes, think tanks and tertiary institutions could have provided. This was the crux of Prof. Wolfgang Stolper’s stricture regarding his development experience in Nigeria between 1962 and 1968. In his book, Planning without Facts: Lessons in Resource Allocation from Nigeria’s Development (1966), Stolper decries the situation where the government articulated development plans within framework of a weak data and statistical culture that could make the development process an evidence-based practice. Development therefore becomes an arbitrary process of depending on a series of short-run decisions and planning that limits the extent of scientific prediction. This paucity of statistical and data parameters is one of the most singular reasons why the trajectory of Nigeria’s development planning, from the first NDP (1962 to 1968) to the 1992-1994 rolling plan, has impacted good governance for Nigerians.
The third implication of the government’s anti-intellectual posture is simply that rather than depending on local research capacities to design and formulate policies that align with local interests and needs, the consecutive governments have significantly outsourced the design of policy initiatives to external donor organizations and foreign development agencies, chiefly the Bretton Wood institutions like the World Bank and IMF. And it is not surprising that some of these policy designs are somewhat disconnected from local realities. Thus, when crucial economic and development data are funded and generated by external bodies, not much is left to the imagination as to the capacities of these statistics to backstop national development. This is a strange condition of research given that Nigeria is the largest producer of social science research in Africa. A recent 2020 study by the National Centre for Technology Management and The Global Development Network articulates significant and revealing findings: (a) there is a general and unfounded bias in favor of the pure and natural sciences against social science research in Nigeria, (b) local researchers are compelled to follow the agenda of foreign funding agencies since their grants emanate from them, (c) poor coordination undermine the level of interaction within Nigeria’s social science research system, (d) research capacity-building is not designed to meet the need of researchers, (e) there is an extremely weak communication between policymakers and researchers in terms of conceptualizing and designing research.
The policy-research dynamics in Nigeria are often constrained by different time frames that separate political and research considerations. Most research uptakes are grounded on the long-term implications of policy ideas, paradigms and programmes of action. In other words, an evidence-based policy research project might reveal that an item of policy design will not mature in the lifetime of two administrations. On the contrary, politicians derive political capital from a quick turnaround time on policy implementation that enable them consolidate their hold on, or the possibility of gaining, power. Even this temporal consideration is further undermined by the bad politics that derives from aligning policies to clientelist interests and patronages, rather than the governance interests of the populace. The research space in Nigeria is therefore left in a critical state of dysfunction as a result of lack of government attention to the funding and sustenance of the research culture that enable the public policy process in terms of empirical and evidence-based action research and policy intelligence. Several studies have been conducted on the state of Nigeria’s higher education dynamics, as well as the knowledge production dysfunction. Inadequate knowledge production has been taken to be the result of the following factors: “inadequate and inconsistent funding, weak linkages between research and industry, poor extension services and technology transfer, bureaucratic bottlenecks and administrative inefficiencies, brain drain and low research motivation, poor research commercialization and patent culture, infrastructure decay, weak policy implementation, lack of monitoring, evaluation and accountability.” Since Nigeria constitutes one of the countries with the lowest research funding in the world—Nigeria allocates less than one percent of its GDP to research—then we should not be surprised that its productivity profile is defined by significant deficiencies like low labor productivity, weak manufacturing base, high youth unemployment, etc.
Quite inevitably, governments in Nigeria have failed to catalyze both human capital development and deepen research and development (R&D) in their attempt to strengthen Nigeria’s national innovation culture. Nigeria’s research infrastructure therefore does not amount to much in terms of Nigeria’s capacity to transform its policy architecture through innovative action research. And on the other hand, higher education keeps flooding the market with human capital that does not have the capacity to innovate. We can therefore conclude, as I have argued previously, that Nigeria has been beating about the development bush since we have failed so far to deduce how development emerges from the crucial partnership between the government, researchers and Nigeria’s higher education system and research space. We see poignantly how the strengthening of the planning, research and statistics department in the MDAs, as a structural means of institutionalizing the policy-research collaboration, has remained unattainable.
This is one of the most immediate motivations for the establishment of the Ibadan School of Public Policy after my retirement in 2015.
We therefore see the critical link between Nigeria’s low productivity profile and its lack of interest in domestic research capacity. The anti-intellectual orientation of consecutive Nigerian governments facilitates the inability of its research space to generate the scientific, empirical and evidence-based research culture that ought to stimulate effective policymaking efforts for grounding good governance. To reverse this unfortunate state of affairs requires that we first admit that both the government and the policy research (and the entire research space) in Nigeria are complicit in this policy-research deficit. Both have failed to see each other as critical actors in the co-creation of fundamental policy research for national development. On the one hand, government requires a policy management framework that is consciously organized around the collaborative relationship between policymakers, policy researchers and research institutes and tertiary institutions. This demands a blueprint that significantly situate research institutes within an administration’s research focus and objectives in ways that articulate what the government specifically demand, in terms of its research aspirations, from specific universities, polytechnics, research institutes and think tanks. On the other hand, the research space made up of these institutes and institutions must also reframe their mandates and objectives around the significance of interdisciplinary research that helps them to balance between their traditional research focus and the urgent need of government for development designs and planning.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission Professor of Public Administration
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