Olaopa Seeks Citizen-centred Reform in Public Service
The adoption of citizen-centred reform in public service is fundamental to democratic consolidation in the country, Prof. Tunji Olaopa has declared.
Olaopa , the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), spoke on Tuesday in Abuja on the topic “The Public Service in Challenging Times: Rethinking Praxis for More Inclusive and Innovative Reform” during the Nigeria Public Service Lecture marking the United Nations Public Service Day organised by the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR) .
According to Olaopa who was the guest speaker at the event, public service reforms have not yielded expected results because they have failed to include the citizens who constitute the bedrock of democracy.
Consequently, he urged that future public service reform should be citizen-centred in order to strengthen democracy.
Olaopa decried a situation where institutional reforms were driven by foreign models that did not reckon with the local environment, thereby paving the way for exclusion and constraining democracy .
Olaopa urged innovation rooted in a more participatory and inclusive process to take the benefit of users and citizens who include public employees especially those working in the frontline, private stakeholders and the society at large.
“Context-sensitive governance reforms that change and adjust the balance will be essential. Public innovation can be spurred by creating national innovation systems that bring together relevant public and private actors in networks that facilitate coordination and knowledge exchange. It would increase the infusion of entrepreneurship and other core features of private firms for example.It will entail tapping into local knowledge and interactions to generate new solutions to shared development challenges and therefore less reliance on pre-packaged imported models that are not subjected to decoupling and action research interrogation to elicit context specific indices.Pooling together insights, skills and ideas in such collaborative process as ‘collective intelligence’ has proved to be more reliable methodology to problem-solving and at scale, especially when it is inclusive – when it creates space for people from all walks of life to make contributions. This can then be reinforced with research and development (R&D) backend that brings innovative methods ranging from ethnography such as participant-observation to the quantitative like experiments, to design-based methods like prototyping.The application of these methods produces working hypotheses and generate actionable evidence to validate them,” he said.
He urged that institutional reforms should shift significantly from what he identified as “public service institutional centredness” to public governance domains where innovative approaches would contribute to enhancing social inclusion, thus expanding the scope of civil service reforms multi-dimensionally.
He urged much more expansive focus on access to public services through digitization and automation.To him,
this requires designing and redesigning services around users’ individual needs, with services delivered to them digitally while closing the gap by simplifying local inhabitants’ interactions with the public sector.
According to him, the value of this lies in the ability to interact with the state without having to travel and to do so in a seamless manner while from the government perspective, it means reducing costs, accelerating the scalability of solutions and applying them in various contexts
Highlighting the need to strengthen citizens participation in public policy process, he said that trust in government has become a significant challenge
Consequently, institutional reform innovation must begin to focus on mechanisms for citizen participation in the design of public policy and services, all as part of policy drive to improve trust in government and ensuring the legitimacy of their actions
Olaopa urged enhancing the skills of public servants to improve the human-centricity of public services. He said that public policy aimed at social inclusion must introduce new methods and routines into the work of public servants. He noted that a paradigm shifting of a sort would encompass imbuing in officers a new mindset that is conditioned by new concepts, language and epistemology, that are carefully ingrained into the way their daily work is carried out
To him, strategic communication cannot be underplayed in effective reform as it would be a veritable tool for reform programme implementation.
” It will entail the incorporation of communication tools into public policy instruments,” he said.
Olaopa urged the building of multi-pronged partnerships as fundamental to reorienting reform towards social inclusion. He said that such collaboration would occur within the government institutional level; between national and subnational governments; between the public service and the innovation ecosystem; deepening public-private partnerships; and between government and the society at large.
“The key objective here is to build partnerships that leverage identified comparative advantages of institutions involved, with the aim of working for the common good”, he added.