Building Policy-Research Partnerships for an Efficient Civil Service in Nigeria
In a previous reflection titled "Deepening Policy Intelligence in Government: Politicians and Technocrats as Strategic Partners," I argued that one effective way to strengthen and consolidate the policy function of government is through a structural and institutional framework that reinvents the town-and-gown partnership model. This model enables the government to engage in strategic relationships with technocrats and non-governmental entities to spark policy intelligence, which informs efforts in development management, economic growth, and democratic governance of the Nigerian state.
Global Benchmarks for Strategic Partnerships
The strategic partnership should be benchmarked around global best and smart practices that define high-performing economies today. In the United States and the United Kingdom, for instance, governments have established relationships with institutions like the Rand Corporation, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, American Enterprise Institute, and the Brookings Institution. These collaborative endeavors are typically informal or semi-informal arrangements, serving as symbiotic conduits for high-level political and policy dialogues. They facilitate the cross-fertilization of ideas, research findings, technical expertise, and critical insights on best practices and governmental experiences in policy formation and implementation.
Such partnerships enable policy intelligence, its development, management, and evaluation, while also creating a staff revolving door for the exchange of manpower, ideas, innovation, and practices. They position government officials, industrial experts, academics, and technocrats as key players in the governance space, generating relevance and contributions that push the economy to a cutting edge of global competitiveness.
Pushing the Argument Further with Concrete Examples
In this piece, I aim to advance this argument further by providing concrete national and global examples that should serve as benchmarks for grounding efforts to achieve policy intelligence for the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration. Beyond the technocrats within government corridors, this partnership framework expands the governance space to achieve a distributed leadership dynamic. This facilitates crucial interactions between government bureaucrats and non-governmental agents, including captains of industry, civil society organizations, policy experts, and subject specialists.
A prime example of this administrative arrangement is post-Second World War Japan, which transformed from a war-ravaged economy to a global economic powerhouse in just a few years. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan faced daunting reconstruction challenges. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) led the policy move for economic and developmental transformation.
Japan's MITI: A Model for Policy-Research Partnerships
MITI initiated a strategic 'deliberation council' as a springboard network for brainstorming, information sharing, policy consensus, and co-creation of ideas and frameworks. This system enabled the creation of several councils comprising government, academia, industry, and private policy specialists. These councils served as official spaces for interrogating national and sectoral policies, sharing knowledge, and building policy intelligence and consensus.
The outcomes of these discourses were transformed into research and development (R&D) initiatives, leveraging government support and incentives for private sector investment in high-risk development projects. MITI's methodology was three-pronged: it initiated a trade expansion policy moderated by strict regulation, similar to economic protectionism, to stimulate private sector growth. This non-socialist ideological framework oriented policy intelligence and development insights without replacing market mechanisms, instead gathering verified data to provide deep industrial knowledge for Japanese firms.
Change Management and Quality Control in Japan
Japan's policy orientation was supported by change management dynamics, including the keiretsu model, which organized firms into interlocking shareholding relationships to withstand market fluctuations. Within MITI, this model was transformed into a productivity principle that fostered economic cooperation among manufacturers, suppliers, bankers, and industries.
MITI further leveraged this model by bringing in critical experts like Edward Deming, who played a key role in shifting Japan's focus from low quality to world-class manufacturing. Deming's management philosophy, emphasizing quality, system design, and data-driven decision-making, was crucial in reducing variations and achieving efficiency. His teachings led to better product designs and enhanced workplace testing, contributing to Japan's competitive global presence.
Japan also enforced workplace quality control in the public service, ensuring it became capacity-ready for efficient service delivery. This transformation of the workplace as an engine room for productivity was pivotal in Japan's economic miracle.
Lessons for Nigeria's Civil Service Reform
The key insight from Japan's example is that institutional reform must avoid a purely technicist approach. Instead, it should integrate technical expertise, cultural change, and attitudinal transformation, as seen in MITI's project. This lesson is vital for Nigeria's efforts to generate policy intelligence through high-power policy-research partnerships, enabling the Tinubu administration to efficiently elevate its policy function for democratic governance.
Such partnerships aim to achieve critical capacity building, evidence-based policy intelligence, and functional R&D that makes innovative technologies available to the public. They can be facilitated by personnel exchange and secondment, allowing government officials to be seconded to universities and research institutes, while academics are placed within government sectors. This twinning initiative promotes knowledge transfer and town-gown conversations that bridge theory and practice for governance improvement.
Alternative Partnership Models for Nigeria
Beyond the twinning model, other partnership models are possible. First, the government could establish an in-house think tank for internal brainstorming on crucial policy matters. Second, it could outsource the policy intelligence function to an academic think tank for high-quality, unbiased research-based evidence. Third, a partnership hub could allow ongoing collaboration between government and academics to draw on policy evidence.
Nigeria's administrative history offers several examples of such partnerships. In the post-independence era, Chief Simeon Adebo's A-Club, later the Regional Economic Planning Advisory Committee, served as a brainstorming hub involving the University of Ibadan for the Western Region Government. Other examples include the Planning Office during the Gowon administration, the Presidential Advisory Committee under Professor Ojetunji Aboyade during the IBB era, and the National Economic Intelligence Committee led by Professor Sam Aluko under Abacha.
In recent times, the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) has facilitated partnerships between government and non-state actors. The National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) also contributes through its Senior Executive Course, where the government selects themes for research and presentation.
Implications for Nigeria's Renewed Hope Agenda
The template for kickstarting a robust and efficient partnership to generate evidence-based policy intelligence for the Renewed Hope Agenda is already available. For instance, NIPSS can be reformed to enhance its efficiency in facilitating policy research and partnerships with universities and research institutes. Universities and research institutes can serve as intermediary hubs for generating research inputs into Nigeria's policy process.
To restate the truism: good democratic governance depends on deeply researched and enhanced policy intelligence, which benefits from robust policy-research partnerships. By learning from global examples like Japan and leveraging Nigeria's own historical models, the Tinubu administration can build effective collaborations to drive economic growth and efficient civil service operations.
