A Playbook for the People Who Make Nigeria Work By Godwin Agaba Ochube
Editorial note: The op-ed examines why public sector reforms fail to endure in Nigeria and how the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation’s Public Sector Reform Playbook offers practical strategies for implementing and sustaining meaningful change.
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Somewhere in a federal secretariat this week, a director is reading a circular about a new reform. She has read this kind of circular before. She has sat on the committees, filled in the templates, attended the retreat, and watched the whole thing quietly stop mattering eighteen months later when the permanent secretary was transferred. She is not cynical. She is experienced. And she has a question that nobody has answered for her in 20 years of service: not what should change, but how, from where she sits, she can make a change hold.
Source: UGC
On Thursday, November 19, the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation will launch the Public Sector Reform Playbook. What makes the Playbook different is that it puts her question at the centre of the discussion.
Nigeria does not lack diagnosis. Nigeria does not lack diagnosis. From the Udoji Commission and the Dotun Phillips reforms to the Ayida Review, the Oronsaye Report and the National Strategy for Public Service Reform, successive initiatives have identified many of the challenges facing Nigeria's public service. What sits in the gap between the two is not knowledge. It is craft: the practical skills of navigating institutions, building support and sustaining change. Much of this knowledge has remained fragmented, held by experienced reformers rather than systematically documented and shared.
The Playbook writes it down. Across 17 chapters, it walks a reform from diagnosis to design, from the first ninety days to the point where the change survives the departure of the person who made it. It comes with worksheets, a master checklist, a maturity model for self-assessment, and an annex that adapts every step for states and local governments, including a state with modest revenue that needs a basic tracking system it can sustain, not a borrowed dashboard it cannot maintain once the consultants leave.
What makes it useful rather than merely thorough is that it is built for Nigeria as Nigeria actually is. The Foundation's research, led by Professor M. J. Balogun, describes our public service as two environments living in one building. There is the soft environment of rules, the Constitution and the Public Service Rules, in which office is held in trust for citizens. And there is the hard environment of networks, favours and loyalties, in which office is something closer to property. Reforms written for the first environment keep crashing into the second. The Playbook does not pretend the second does not exist. It hands the reformer a Fiefdom Audit to score how strong the informal system is in her own agency, and then strategies calibrated to that score.
Three things in it will matter most to the working public servant.
The first is permission to start small. The Playbook argues against the comprehensive reform that fixes structure, systems, people and culture all at once, because that reform spreads capacity thin and unites every opponent on day one. It asks instead for a quick win that is visible within three to nine months, and it explains why: an early result proves reform can work in Nigerian conditions, earns the political capital needed for the harder steps, and creates facts on the ground that are costly to reverse. Nobody wants to queue for a passport again once they have applied for one online.
The second is a way of dealing with resistance that does not require contempt for colleagues. The Playbook insists that resistance is usually rational. An officer who fears a new system will expose that he cannot use it, a unit whose informal fees top up a salary that does not stretch, a director whose position disappears in a merger: Each has something at stake, and understanding those interests helps reformers anticipate resistance, address legitimate concerns and challenge practices that undermine reform. That is a more humane posture than the usual one, and a more effective one too.
The third is the idea that a reformer owes something to her successor. The Playbook asks for a Reform Implementation Team with a sunset clause, so that reform does not become one more permanent bureaucracy, and for a transition protocol before anyone leaves: a log of what was decided and why, the risks that were accepted rather than solved, a candid map of who has been won over and who is merely compliant. Most Nigerian reforms do not fail. They are forgotten, because the memory walked out of the door with the team. The Playbook is designed to stop that happening.
The Playbook's own description of success is worth repeating, because none of it is utopian. A land title that moves in weeks and requires no one's phone number. A ghost worker caught within a single payroll cycle. A permanent secretary posted elsewhere whose reform keeps running because it never depended on her. A new administration that inherits a predecessor's reform, reviews it and keeps it, because the evidence makes reversal the costlier choice. A civil servant who turns down a bribe not out of fear of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission but because her colleagues would find the request itself unthinkable. These examples illustrate what successful reform could look like in practice. Nigeria's experience also offers evidence that meaningful improvements are possible. The Treasury Single Account consolidated an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 government bank accounts and is still running a decade later. The passport backlog of more than 200,000 applications has been cleared, and about 96 production points have been replaced by one centre that prints within a day of approval. The task is not to prove it can be done. It is to make it repeatable.
That is why this is a public document and not an internal one. The Playbook names its users plainly: ministers and governors, but also directors, frontline officers, legislative aides, judges, civil society watchdogs, students and the citizens who will decide whether a reform is worth defending. It is candid that transformation takes ten to twenty years while political cycles last four. Its response is to think in phases, and to describe reform as a generational relay race in which the measure of a good leg is what the next runner inherits.
The director in the secretariat has been running her leg for a long time without a map. From 19 November, she will have one.
Godwin Agaba Ochube is a Programme Associate, Evidence and Impact at the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation
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