Pride and Performance in African Public Services: Analysis of Institutional Breakdown and Rebuilding Efforts in Nigeria and Uganda

Abstract

Pride in public service is inextricably linked to institutional performanceespecially in countries like Nigeria and Uganda, where the state is as yet not fully institutionalized or even legitimized. Despite their colonial origins and the challenges which confront the modern state in Africa, the Nigerian and Ugandan civil services functioned well in terms of their primary responsibilities. They proffered policy advice, regulated their nascent economies and societies and delivered high-quality services to their citizens in the immediate post-independent years around 1960 up to the late 1970s. However, by the 1980s, these civil service systems had declined sharply in terms of all three functions: the quality of the policy advice they gave to political executives, regulatory capacity, and the services they delivered to the public. The two economies were also in tatters.(Table 1 provides a comparison of key parameters for both countries.)This article analyses the factors that have contributed to the success of the civil service in the immediate post-independence years and those that led to the rapid decline of these institutions shortly thereafter. This analysis aims to help in the search for the most appropriate strategies to revitalize the civil services in these countries. The emerging view is that the state is important and that the civil service, as an instrument for making institutional choices in a volatile environment, is crucial to the development process.Nigeria and Uganda -located in the western and eastern halves of the continent respectively -were praised for their civil services in the 1960s. The Ugandan civil service was regarded as one of the very best in the Commonwealth. Nigeria's civil service received a similar rating by scholars and policy-makers in the 1950s and 1960s. However, by the 1980s, the Nigerian civil service was described by a study group set up by the federal government as an institution in which morale was already lost. The Ugandan civil service was also in a deplorable state in the mid-1980s and had practically stopped functioning before the civil service reform programme was initiated.This article identifies the critical variables that enabled the civil services in

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