We now live in a world that is daily undergoing what has been called a poly-crisis—crises that are not only fundamental but are also interlinked in ways that affect several regions of the world. In administrative terms, the poly-crisis defines a VUCA—vulnerable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—policy environment where governments have to anticipate challenges before they even happen. With the COVID-19 pandemic, public administrators and public managers are confronted with the contexts of a new normal in all aspects of public administration. In manoeuvring through the landmines of this new normal in governance, governments and administrative contexts all across the world depend significantly on public policy professionalism and expertise that ensure that what governments intend for their citizens is what gets implemented by public servants. Successful governments all over the world, in other words, achieve good governance by paying critical attention to their public policy architecture.
Public policy indeed emerged as a fully developed field of study in the nineteen century and within the context of a flurry of theoretical and practical development that came after the Second World War. Several contextual issues—the emergence of statistical analysis, management science, and social science research methodologies, as well as the emergence of research institutes, policy schools and several think tanks—instigated a series of significant developments that consolidated policy analysis and policy-engaged research as a critical dimension of the policy inputs into government work and into public administration. By the time American universities began cooperating with think tanks, from the Brooking Institution to the Rand Corporation, policymakers, development workers, policy managers, public administrators and even policy researchers were all totally inundated within a robust policy ambience that generated seminars, workshops, public policy courses and discourses which enabled capacities to ground the policy process on solid evidence-based research protocols.
The public policy framework that we just sketched briefly above provides the handle by which the governments in developed societies cumulate the benefits of their intellectual capital. This is the sense in which policymakers and researchers/academics collaborate to facilitate policy-research linkage that burrows into the transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of public policy research to ground development planning and good governance. Unfortunately, Africa’s contribution to the global public policy and research experience is almost next to nothing. What the current global framework demonstrates is that most African states fixate on the hardware of development in terms of infrastructural development indices—roads, schools, hospitals, etc.—with no critical attention to the intangibles that serve as the bedrock for development and governance itself, from human capital and the rule of law to institutional stability and the quality of education.
To arrive at a cogent diagnosis of what had gone wrong with the failure of the continent to contribute to the global policy framework, we need to peer deep into the exogenous nature of the policy dynamics on the continent. Africa’s policy protocol is poor for three major reasons. The first is principally ideological—Africa’s insertion into and fixation with the Western neoliberal economic paradigm, and especially the Washington Consensus, that dictates supposedly universalist recommendations and conditionalities which are always at odds with local and regional economic and developmental realities. The second unfortunate reason that circumscribes Africa’s poor policy-research nexus is essentially political. It derives from the fact of bad politics that sees politicians formulating policies to satisfy clientelist interests and patronages, rather than fulfilling the social contract and servicing the common good. This is also further complicated by the stringent conditionalities that politicians and the political class needed to embed into the policy formulation framework that in the final analysis hurt the public interest.
This political perspective undermines the technicist view of policy formulation and implementation as a straight and linear process. On the contrary, it is often smeared by political considerations that are not always salutary. The last reason has to do with the conflicting time frame that conditions the policy-research relationship. On the one hand, politicians and governments need a quick turnaround time on policy implementation that provides political capital, but on the other hand, policy researchers build their policy intelligence and recommendations on the long-term incubation of policy ideas and paradigms for action. To undermine the gross uncertainties that often characterize policy design and implementation, the policy must be preceded by research intelligent evaluation and assessments.
Africa’s development is therefore caught in a bind. Given the macroeconomic shocks that have kept assailing the world before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, many African governments have failed to ground the framework and protocols of their policymaking practices on economic and statistical rationalities; and rather than exploring and exploiting local capacities to design and formulate policies that align with local interests and needs, many of these governments have ceded or outsourced the policy initiatives to donors to articulate solutions that are far from and sometimes totally disconnected from local realities. One sorry fact about the African policy management crisis is that a significant proportion of usable development statistics about African countries are generated and funded by foreign development agencies, from the World Bank to the United Nations. The chances of achieving success with such hastily drafted and non-indigenous policy recommendations become very low because they become top-down in ways that undermine the ability of the local population to own the policies.
Nigeria presents a rather symptomatic example of this general analysis. At the height of Nigeria’s first development plan after independence (1962 to 1968), the World Bank seconded Prof. Wolfgang Stolper as a technical adviser to assist with the design and implementation of the NDP. In 1966, Stolper penned his experiences in a book, Planning without Facts: Lessons in Resource Allocation from Nigeria’s Development. Stolper’s central experience which grounds his arguments, in the book, is that the first national development plan was articulated without the benefit of a data and statistical culture around which evidence-based development practices are founded. And so, given this paucity of data, development becomes a process of optimizing as one goes along. In other words, since there are no statistical analyses to optimise a long-run scientific projection, one is forced to depend on a series of short-run decisions and planning that limits the extent of the future one can predict. This lack of statistical parameters makes sustainable development a mirage for policymakers. It is therefore not surprising that from the first NDP (1962 to 1968) to the 1992-1994 rolling plan, Nigeria has barely been able to articulate a sustainable development that impacts good governance for Nigerians. And so, insecurity, terrorism, climate-change-induced disasters and macroeconomic challenges that other countries are managing with success go out of hand for Nigeria.
We can therefore conclude that Nigeria has been beating about the development bush because we lack a cogent understanding of what development demands—a strong collaboration between policymakers, researchers and think tanks. The policy-research linkage demands a significant relationship between the government and research institutes, tertiary institutions and think tanks that bring a certain sophistication to leadership and the change space of distributed leadership. This collaboration enables the leadership of a state to navigate the VUCA administrative environment and the demands of a knowledge and technology society. And that linkage comes with its unique peculiarity in the Nigerian policy space. On the one hand, consecutive governments in Nigeria don the toga of anti-intellectualism that sees the research industry as interlopers in the policy process rather than as staunch allies and stakeholders. While researchers do not often generate solutions to governance problems, they can articulate different scenarios that enable the government to better understand different problems that can enhance policy choices. On the other hand, researchers and scholars also face significant challenges in their commitment to government policy demands. For example, such researchers stand the risk of lower scholarly performances in terms of academic parameters and scholarly rating. Indeed, such scholars also generate some level of suspicion as to the genuineness of their research findings.
Resolving the disconnect between policy and research on the continent demands some critical imperatives in terms of how policy and research are framed for governance and development purposes that connect policymakers, policy researchers and research centres and institutes. The core imperative is that policy management must be a cumulation of policy research, strategic intelligence and pragmatic statecraft cum intuition that scientifically and practically guide the path of governance projection. And this demands that the government needs cogent collaborative plans that focus on the research profile of research organizations and think tanks. This is crucial because these organizations, institutes and centres are usually torn between the imperatives of conducting research and the demand of generating policy intelligence and scenarios simply as publications to earn promotion. There is, therefore, the need for a blueprint that helps research institutes to manoeuvre between external partners, civil society organizations and the organized private sector in their mandate to mobilize resources, and the necessity of their autonomy as institutes and centres that generate objective and evidence-based data and statistical analyses that government can use.
The other dimension to the resolution of the policy-research disconnect is that research institutes and universities need to also revisit their mandates and modus operandi. The town and gown initiative becomes an imperative that balances the need for research with the demand for development. The town-and-gown framework generates a dynamic of co-creation that expands the depth of what research implies. For instance, universities and tertiary institutions, as well as think tanks, can no longer ignore the fundamental implications of expanding the traditional content of who a faculty member is through the integration of the expertise of professors of practice and scholar-practitioners as a means of jumpstarting seamless interdisciplinary and interdependent policy-research partnerships. On their part, the public service in African states must also invest enormously in the professionalization of planning and policy analysis departments. Such departments will be manned by a special core of experts and consultants that will lead the research onslaught into developing future research and scenario planning on what needs to be done to make the public service world-class in spirit and truth.
Excerpts of a lecture delivered by Prof. Tunji Olaopa at the 6th General Assembly and Conference of the Association of African Public Service Commissions held in Nairobi, Kenya between 6th and 8th November 2024