7.1 Major Challenges Posed to Effective Civil Service Reforms:
A number of country-specific challenges are identified below. It is also instructive to note that even though the challenges are country-specific, they resonate in CSRs in the four countries.
7.1.1 The Ghanaian Experience:
The outcome of the CSPIP has been influenced by the weaknesses inherent in the design and imple-mentation process. They include the following: (i) Too many reform activities going on concurrently, with inadequate sequencing that seemed to have overburdened the same people and did not exploit the synergies of the various reform dimensions such as public financial management reform pro-gramme, legal reform and decentralization. As is usually associated with change, turf battles ensued, but were not properly dealt with by the National Institutional Renewal Programme (NIRP) and the OHCS, which were supposed to provide coordination and oversee the process in order to enhance the reform success; (ii) key service-wide constraints relating to budget reform, pay and reward reforms were not undertaken, thereby serving as a major disincentive to employee morale. For example, people kept asking “what is in it for me?”; (iii) it targeted too many organizations, 180 MDAs in all (see Table 6) and hence support was thinly spread, which reduced its intended impact; (iv) Service Delivery Standards and Client Services Units that were established did not receive the necessary financial backing and logistical support to function as anticipated; (v) support for the reforms at the highest level (both political and bureaucratic) was cosmetic; (vi) the reform methodology became too mechanistic. For example, the Ministries of Agriculture and Health, that were relatively advanced by virtue of their past sectoral reform exercise could have by-passed certain stages of the process;
(vii) the expected skills transfer did not take place because the programme was aimed at meeting targets, a situation that is supported by the literature. Donors tend to treat public sector reform as an
“engineering problem”, a phenomenon to be addressed through textbook solutions and hence favour mechanistic interventions featuring quantitative targets (Antwi et.al. 2008; Schacter 2000).
7.1.2 The Kenyan Experience
inadequate time and resources were not allocated; (ii) reform process and rationalization were not fully internalized, owned and homegrown for eventual implementation and sustainability because reforming MDAs did not fully comprehend the way forward and therefore fully involved in the de-velopment of the action plan for implementation; (iii) no acceptance of reform was built among top managers in the service; (iv) lack of adequate funds to mount demand-driven training programmes for all cadres in service led to capacity problems (Kenya, Republic of 1997; Adamolekun 2005; Kpundeh 2004; Kenya, Republic of 2005).
7.1.3 The Nigerian Experience
Some of the factors are: (i) increasing pressures for employment, utilization of informal sources of recruitment, long military era, federal character principle, lack of independence of the Federal Civil Service Commission and delegation of recruitment function have affected recruitment in the civil service; (ii) job description and standard personnel requirements are not adequately used in the re-cruitment process, especially at the lowest category of grade levels; (iii) the key contributory factor to weak service delivery include poor incentive structures for staff, capacity depletion and a very lim-ited application of management information system technology; (iv) institutionalized corruption as a result of the inability of anti-corruption agencies to perform their functions; (v) long years of military rule and its effects on the development of a democratic culture or ethos; (vi) inadequate public ser-vice culture or tradition which is value-based, which cannot draw from universal public serser-vice val-ues such as public trust, impartiality, equity, transparency, ethical standards and selflessness (Otobo 1999; Agagu 2008).
7.1.4 The South African Experience
Some of the reasons are: (i) Performance management contract has been undermined by the lack of a substantive performance culture in the South African public service; (ii) there is the question of or-ganization culture. The working environment of civil servants and other public servants has impacted negatively on “Batho Pele’s” effectiveness. Management’s failure to act decisively on ethical trans-gressions and alleged corruption coupled with a general wave of materialistic greed undermine the promotion and application of professional ethics and constitutional values (DPSA 2007: 13, 47); (iii) McLennan (2007) argued that “Batho Pele” has created a framework for treating citizens as customers which has arguably created a self-interested rather than professional culture within the public service;
(iv) the achievement of the developmental state goals became unrealistic because even though the public service is highly educated in terms of tertiary qualifications, there is still a problem of poor skills level within the service. According to Butler (2008: 2-3), South Africa does not have the skills base that the East Asian developmental states enjoyed. Southall (2006) states that a meritocratic pub-lic service forms the basis of these developmental states; (v) given the historical injustices of the past, one of the major priorities of the ANC government is to promote a more representative workforce.
The ANC therefore introduced a policy of affirmative action for blacks, women and gender (Ncholo 2000). There is evidence to suggest that patronage appointments in the public service have grown substantially since 1994. There is the influence of the controversial deployment policy of the ANC, which deploys party members to senior management positions in the public sector, many of whom lack experience (UNDP 2004; Picard 1999; 2005); (vi) there are still staff shortages in the public service leading to the introduction of Occupational Specific Dispensations (OSDs) for specific pro-fessions such as health and education in order to retain skilled staff; (vii) there is brain drain from the civil service to the more lucrative private sector (Cameron and Milne 2008). A PSC Report of 2005 stated that there was not enough skilled managerial staff. Heads of Departments have indicated the failure to retain skills in the government as the major reason government departments outsource projects instead of implementing them with their internal staff. This suggests that outsourcing was undertaken for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons (PSC 2005).
7.1.5 Evidence of Reversal of Elements of Civil Service Reforms in Some African Countries
Even though civil service reforms have some successes, there is evidence of reversal of some of its elements in some areas and countries. A key area that has suffered reverses is downsizing. Downsiz-ing was done without puttDownsiz-ing in place a policy of ensurDownsiz-ing that a sufficient, motivated and competent workforce remains in the civil service. The experience of many African countries is that such policy was missing, and this led to reform reversals even in successful countries such as Ghana and Uganda where the size of the civil service rose again (AfDB 2005).
Excessive or inappropriate downsizing in several African countries has constrained the capacity of the state to perform and deliver services effectively. Staff reduction and employment freezes have created shortages of skilled professionals and technicians throughout the services, and of front-line workers needed to sustain, improve quality and expand public services in key areas such as educa-tion, health and agricultural extension. Often, retrenchment has concentrated on labour in the lower echelons – drivers, messengers and daily paid workers. Wages saved from such retrenchments are substantially insufficient to achieve the desired targets. Freezing of employment also contributed to the ageing of the civil service, with implications for pensions payments as the older civil servants retire (AfDB 2005).
7.2 Civil Service Reforms and Poverty Reduction in the Four Countries
Poverty and inequality continue to be pressing problems facing African countries. Reforms were therefore meant to build the capacity of the civil service to enable it perform its functions.
Fundamen-though civil service reforms in Africa were not specifically targeted to poverty reduction, the unstated underlying assumption was that once the civil service was capable of providing value for money public services, this will cascade down to other state institutions at the local level to build the neces-sary capacity to be able to provide services for the poor. Unfortunately, civil service reforms in the four countries were not able to reduce poverty through the provision and delivery of public services to the poor. Furthermore, much poverty in rural areas in Africa goes unperceived as public and civil servants concerned with bringing development perpetuate biases which overlook and misunderstand the nature and extent of poverty.
As a result of the inability of reforms to deal with poverty, the donor community especially the World Bank and IMF asked countries to design poverty reduction strategy programmes (PRSPs). In addition, the four countries are far from meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which have become a priority.
7.3 Point at which the Countries are Addressing the Challenges
There is growing concern by governments and their citizens in the four countries over the slow pace of reforms. Accordingly, the four governments have taken some steps to grapple with the challenges of sequencing and the pace of the reforms. Some of the measures taken include the following: (i) more political and bureaucratic commitment and support to reforms through treating them as a priority in the allocation of service budgetary resources both by the government and development partners; (ii) situating or placing the reform efforts more closely in the context of country specific-ity by acknowledging that successful and sustainable economic reform cannot take place without a competent public administration; (iii) the recognition that the reforms are a continuous exercise that have tended to develop their own momentum that successive political leadership teams as well as successive administrative leadership teams will deepen, in varying degrees, depending on prevailing circumstances within and outside the countries; and (iv) the decision of the governments to involve more stakeholders in the reform process through the appointment of some representatives of the leg-islature and selected stakeholders from the private and civil society sectors at the reform design stage to enhance its credibility and the chances of successful implementation.