This is how “public servants” from the Levitical Order in the Bible through the pharaonic scribes before we arrive at the modern public servants functioned. It is however modern cultural and administrative exigencies, especially in Africa, that facilitated the decline of vocational values and virtues. 

In Nigeria, bureaucratic corruption is critical to understanding this administrative dysfunction. It has engendered a debilitating culture of immediate gratification that is much preferred to the virtue of delayed gratification. This terrible culture of “something for nothing” inevitably created the deep-seated moral deficit in work culture and organizational behavior. This is why a fundamental cultural change is urgently required as the change management model to infuse the public service with the reform dose necessary for transforming its institutional objectives. It is definitely institutions and their structural foundations and frameworks that ensure that public servants are constrained within certain institutional ethical boundaries that structure the ethical and administrative choices public servants can make. Organizational and management culture, on the other hand, provides the required fillip and parameters that motivate public servants to respond to their professional calling to serve the public. Culture change therefore points at the fundamental and innovative addition to organisational frameworks and dynamics that enable the organisation to be better capacitated to act more efficiently and effectively.

Cultural change is centered round two administrative dynamics, public spiritedness and professionalism. Public-spiritedness places the responsibility of the professional within the context of a personal and public accountability that motivates the professional to personally hold him/her responsible for the discharge of his/her duties to the public. Most essentially, the public spirit ensures that the civil servant is not so preoccupied with the technical details of his/her responsibilities to the exclusion of their human concerns. On the other hand, professionalism is a concession to a well-trained workforce as well as a commitment to the value of neutral competence. It combines technical requirements with value orientation that become action-molding dynamics whose function is to positively constrain the public servant to serve efficiently and effectively. Both are supposed to engender the establishment and consolidation of a public service system of values that HRM will utilize as the essence of defining public service vocational strength.

What is called the public service system of values consists of a generic body of values that sufficiently captures the picture of an ethical and entrepreneurial public manager. A few of these values are important. One: public interest. A public service is judged on its capacity to interpret and implement the specific policies that will break the “public interest” into empowering democratic projects for the citizens. Two: merit. This is what entry conditions into the service, as well as human resource function in hiring, training, and retaining potential public servants. Once a public service loses the merit factor, it essentially becomes de-professionalized. Three: equality. This has two applications. It means, first, that public servants’ career development must be founded on equality. And also more significantly that the policy making which the public servant supervises must not be seen to discriminate in terms of class, gender, income, ethnicity or religion. Four: respect for democracy. This requires that the public service be seen as an accountable, responsive and responsible institution that is determined to deliver goods and services to the citizens.

Five: citizen-friendliness. This professional value is measured in terms of the public servant’s awareness of the importance of the citizens in service delivery. The public servant is therefore constrained to treat citizens at all times with dignity, fairness and respect. Six: responsiveness. This value revolves around the frank, timely and impartial advice that public servants are expected to give the government in terms of policy making. And this value is aided by the professional acumen that defines the capacity readiness of the public servants. Seven: accountability. This value demands that public servants must be transparent, accept responsibility for decisions taken, submit to administrative scrutiny, and be dedicated to the best and prudent utilization of available resources. And eight: discretion. This capacity for discretionary judgment arises from the deep experience and training of the public servant, and allows him or her to identify the significance of a situation or policy out of the myriad others competing for administrative attention, and framing the situation or policy for discussion and administrative action.

Related News

The challenge of culture change therefore requires facilitating institutional and cultural reforms that reverse the current dysfunctionality in a way that restores the public service to optimal and professional functionality. For the public service to regain its vocational glory, there must be a conscious effort to re-inject it with further dose of professional consciousness that will keep public servants on their toes with their professional responsibilities and mandates always right before their eyes. This is the basic implication of rebranding the public service for better service. And it implies a change in the culture of doing things which cannot occur simply by changing regulations, structures, processes and technology, but by changing the orientation of public servants. The culture change needs to occur by changing the value orientation of the public servants.

Two reform frameworks are crucial for achieving this, I believe. The first is a crucial scheme of re-professionalization. Re-professionalization process constitutes a prominent dimension of the performance management system that is geared towards overcoming the capacity gap and to ensure that public servants keep performing no matter the challenge and no matter the time. This process comes in two dimensions. The first dimension involves the need to evolve a new career management system leading to the acquisition of officers with capacities and skills in specialized fields of knowledge, and who are sufficiently incentivized to carry out their responsibilities. The second dimension of re-professionalization has to do with the process of constant re-skilling as well as the deepening of strategic policy intelligence and action research in service. This dimension commences through a thoroughly reformed human resource management. This means that the public service must overhaul its human resource practices to begin to recruit and retain the most talented people whose skills must be upgraded through an adequate training and re-skilling programmes.

The second reform framework involves the urgent establishment of a strong charter of public service ethics, appropriately domesticated into specific public service domains. The ethical framework for public servants outlines the responsibility which the public service owes the society and the citizens and the question of how the public servants carry out their duty. The charter also integrates sanctions and rewards for ethical behaviour that pushes the boundary of an exemplary public service.