Olu Falae’s The Triumph of Grace: Critical Insights for Deepening Administrative Reform in Nigeria

By Tunji Olaopa

I have made the critical statement, as part of my reform architecture for transforming the civil service institution in Nigeria, that we must always look toward history and the historical evolution of the public service in Nigeria for reform insights. One critical resource that forms a crucial part of that historical trajectory are the memoirs, biographies and autobiographies of public administrators, public servants and scholars of public administration and the public service. These biographical resources furnish us with even deeper insights into specific administrative acts and policy directions and institutional dynamics that might not be obvious when these critical actors and protagonists were in service.
Some of the most critical biographical contributions that have made the list include Simeon Adebo’s The Unforgettable Years, Jerome Udoji’s Under Three Masters, Theophilus Akinyele’s Beyond Pushing Files, Ladipo Adamolekun’s I Remember, Tunji Olaopa’s The Unending Quest for Reform, and many more. These biographical narratives are important for the understanding of institutional reform because these administrative figures constitute institutional memories by which we can reconstruct where we were and where we want to be. They present some insider’s perspective on the workings of the civil service and how they were able to navigate the inner dynamics of the institution; their failures, successes, ideas and visions. This is what makes Oba Falae’s autobiography—The Triumph of Grace—another welcome development not just for collective enlightenment but also for understanding the missed and persisting opportunities that we still need to give critical attention to move the civil service forward beyond what these critical figures left for us.
The Triumph of Grace comes in twenty-two chapters that narrated the complex historical, professional and social experiences of a husband, father, economist, public servant, banker, politician, public figure and patriotic Nigerian. No one will doubt the significance of such a narration or the fact that the name of Olu Falae rings loud and clear in the annals of the unraveling of Nigeria. What the autobiography promises, in his words, is “a true and adequate presentation of the essential occurrences in my career in public service, in the banking industry and in partisan politics.” This explains why a large chunk of the chapters are dedicated to highlighting Falae’s active role as a civil servant, the persona that essentially brought him into national reckoning. These larger-than-life experiences as a public servant definitely interests me, and that is for reasons that transcend his own explanation. My objective in this piece is not to review the autobiography (as the usual review go), but rather to deploy his experiences as an avenue to draw attention to crucial insights we might not have learnt in transforming the public service.
Olu Falae’s journey through public service was illustrious, the more reason his autobiography speaks significantly and fundamentally to us. From the moment he entered the civil service as an assistant secretary in the National Manpower Board in 1963 (narrated in chapter two), we would encounter a civil servant who stamped his presence wherever he was posted. In chapter four, he began narrating the commencement of his public service experiences, starting with the daunting task of singlehandedly producing the Mid-West Regional Development Programme (1964-1968). This experience was very critical for him when he made the move from the National Manpower Board to the Central Planning Office, especially after the civil war had ended and the second national development plan was afoot. In chapters six and eight, he detailed his involvement with the second and third development plans, but also a very heavy involvement in policy articulation and institution building. The highlights of the years, between 1963 and 1977, derived from the series of civil service institutional reforms he oversaw and instigated.
The core of that difficult task came when General Obasanjo alleged that the public service was not performing and hence supporting his administration as it had the late Murtala Muhammed. A panel was set up, and Olu Falae was asked to head it. It was a frightening responsibility which he thought would spell the end of his tenure as a civil servant. However, it turned out to be a real opportunity to not only interrogate the Murtala-Obasanjo brutal purge of the civil service in 1975 and the consequent demoralization of the system. It also allowed the panel to raise fundamental reform recommendations about how the system can regain its internal drive for effectiveness. The panel recommended, for instance, the dissolution of the administrative pool of public service officers who had no technical expertise and so could be posted to any ministry. In a rapidly professionalizing service, the administrative pool became momentarily redundant.
By the time the transition programme brought in the Shagari administration, Olu Falae found himself relegated to an insignificant “department” that was meant for the training of typists and stenographers! The lesson from this is a story for another piece. He took this redundant assignment with alacrity even though thoroughly disappointed. That was the beginning of his retirement plans and transition to the private sector as first the managing director of the Nigeria Merchant Bank (chapter 7), and then the owner of Midland Farms (chapter17) and finally the Ondo Plastic Industries Limited (chapter 19). And at the bank, he became a sterling performer until Nigeria came calling again: the Babangida administration needed a Secretary to the Federal government (SFG). And he responded! That he eventually stepped out of public service to take on the challenge of murky politics in Nigeria—the concern of chapters 9 to 16—is a further demonstration of a patriotic zeal to keep giving his best to the Nigeria that deserves his best.
One good way to represent Falae’s public service persona is not just that of a committed, professional and public-spirited person (which is in itself a very fundamental characteristic that lies at the core of the culture change which institutional reform demands), but that of someone who articulates a career modeling that makes it possible to smoothly transition from a successful public service to private practice. This mirrors one of the current best practices in managerial thinking that allows a public manager to be at the core of a complex policy concerning, say, a tax audit for ministries, and the next day—in retirement or otherwise—such a manager finds herself managing an international airline or some other private enterprise. Unfortunately, this is a career modeling that has become increasingly difficult to replicate for many bureaucrats in service today.
The second issue that becomes laudable in The Triumph of Grace is Falae’s narration of the strict, fruitful and rigorous depth of policy-engaged research, policy intelligence and analyses that attended first his membership of the Central Planning Office, and second his position as the SGF. The Central Planning Office was a segment of the Ministry of Economic Development. Emanating from a small Economic Panning Unit founded by the late Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade, the CPO became the hub of critical policy intelligence that pooled public servants and university scholars in the service of creative policy-engaged research. In my biography of Aboyade—A Prophet is with Honor (1997), I submitted that the “Central Planning Office became the power-house for generating creative and influential advice on the running of the war economy. It cast what might be called a spider’s web of bright and innovative ideas around the activities of the Federal Executive Council.” Beyond the war economy, the CPO models a very influential and energetic policy-research collaboration that is not grounded on the anti-intellectualism that undermines today’s policy architecture. Indeed, what Falae did not mention in the autobiography is that the CPO practically became an extension of the Department of Economics at the University of Ibadan, and the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research adjacent to the University. This was due to the fact that under the intense participation of economists, under the leadership of Aboyade, in the policy process, the CPO became an intense laboratory of policy intelligence that the government drew heavily from.
The second crucial insight is Falae’s role in the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF) as the center of all implementation activities that have to do with the supervision of government’s programmes ad policies. Indeed, the OSGF allows for the mining and harvesting of the technical reports and policy research coming from permanent secretaries, special advisers and special assistants to ministers and other for coordinated mainstreaming into the policy process, programming, policy implementation, policy tracking and reporting protocols including the performance and change management of the development and governance processes. This framework is what enabled Falae as the SGF to achieve a policy analysis front office as a crucial backup for the cabinet operations of the president, especially in the interface between the OSGF and the presidential advisory committee (PAC) headed by Aboyade—a space where I also interestingly cut my policy teeth.
Let me now make some brief but cogent deductions based on Falae’s narration in the autobiography and some wider institutional issues. First, from Olu Falae to the Central Planning Office to the Presidential Advisory Committee, we have had truly significant moments in the civil service when policymaking and governance space were meritocratic, motivated and genuinely peopled by intellectuals, from Ojetunji Aboyade to Sam Aluko; and intellectually minded bureaucrats, from Falae to Ayida, and from Asiodu to Joda, from Alhaji A. Alhaji (Triple A) to Chu Okongwu to Kalu Idika Kalu. The possibility of such a multidisciplinary hub, similar to the Council of Economic Advisers in the United States, speaks to the urgent need for a strategic space for policy tracking, monitoring, evaluation and timely feedback to government. This is the specific framework for grounding not only the policy-research partnership but also the strategic relationship between politicians and technocrats cum bureaucrats.
The policy-research collaborations, that models the town-gown relationship, are usually informal but symbiotic arrangements for top-level political and policy dialogues and discourses that enable the cross-fertilization of ideas, outputs, technical expertise, paradigms and critical findings modulated by best practices and governmental experiences on policy formation and implementation. They however need to be institutionalized to generate the best results in intelligent policymaking. This requires the critical presence of universities, research institutes and think tanks.
Falae’s civil service experience also calls attention to the urgent necessity of not only rethinking but reinventing a multidisciplinary professional cadre as a critical subset of the elite senior executive service (SES). This will be a crucial part of professionalizing the planning, research and statistics departments as a complement to a service-wide professionalization of the human resource management of the system. This reform exigency cannot be divorced from another: the need to recalibrate the national monitoring and evaluation system, as well as deepening of data culture in the civil service. The M&E system allows us to undermine the gross disconnect between the realities of policy implementation and the aspiration contained in government development plans. This not only bring the MDAs into the planning processes, but also enable them to become fully aware of their responsibilities. With a professionalized cadre in each of the MDAs, evaluative thinking is therefore deeply embedded in the policy and programme design, alongside measurable performance indicators for effective outcomes. There is therefore the need for a coordinated data architecture and institutions that allows the M&E Units in the DPRS across the MDAs to be coherently integrated with other structures, like the Management Services Office and others, in the data ecosystem.
The Triumph of Grace, for me, is more than an autobiography. It signals the life of a formidable public servant who, like his administrative forebears, laid the standard of meritocratic and meritorious pubic service within a system that is still struggling to regain the critical sense of its national mandate. In reading the autobiography, we should see Oba Olu Falae speaking to us on the need to retrieve and rebuild what we may have lost but that we must regain in the service of the greatness that lies ahead.

*Prof. Tunji Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja