Representative Bureaucracy, Meritocracy, and Nation Building in Nigeria by Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola (review)

In Representative Bureaucracy, Meritocracy, and Nation Building in Nigeria, Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola set out to examine one of the most important pubic institutions that continues to define Nigeria’s developmental trajectory: public service. Drawing from rich historical and archival sources, they provide a concise but excellent synthesis of the historical development of the Nigerian public service from the colonial period to the present, and they highlight its regional composition of the federal public service, key reforms, disjuncture, major challenges, and prospects. They then focus on “representative bureaucracy” in the Nigerian public service, interrogating the application of the concept, the myth of representativeness, and the folly in the federal character principle, promoted as the instrument that would produce fair representation of all the ethnic groups in the nation’s public service.

According to the coauthors, the federal character principle as currently practiced in Nigeria is the same as the spoils system as practiced in the United States in the early nineteenth century. This differs from “the positive affirmative action practiced in the second half of the twentieth century” in the United States (p. 9). The federal character principle was designed to force some balance and equal representation of all the regions in the Nigerian public service; however, it failed to acknowledge a critical ingredient for appointment into the public service: the possession of appropriate skills and competence derived from formal Western education and training. For several reasons, the northern part of Nigeria lags behind the southern part in educational attainment.

This book offers rich historical data evidencing a huge gap in educational attainment between the North and the South, starting in the colonial period. This gap reflects the system of colonial administration in each region, early missionaries’ activities, the role of the regional governments, and the role of private organizations and households. The South embraced Western education from the early days of the colonial period, but the North did not. Wide gaps in educational attainment meant that the South dominated the Nigerian public service since the 1940s.

At independence in 1960, the departing British colonial officials handed over political leadership to the North despite the region’s backwardness in educational attainment. The new political leaders from the North felt that what they observed as imbalances in the federal public service must be addressed to promote equal representation of all regions in federal institutions; however, instead of strengthening the variable that would give Northerners the same chances that are available to Southerners through aggressive and methodical investment in education, the country decided it would force equal representation in the federal public service simply through legislation. The authors argue that the federal character principle, as practiced in Nigeria, undermines the virtues of merit and the pursuit of excellence, promotes a culture of mediocrity, and systematically makes the nation’s public service sector another weak institution of the state.

Dauda and Falola argue that besides weakening the public service, the federal character principle creates another problem, similar to the one it seeks to solve. Political leadership in postindependence Nigeria has been dominated largely by the North. Forcing “representative bureaucracy” would entail a “transfer of administrative powers to the same group that has hitherto been enjoying political leadership and the associated powers” (p. 103). This means that the North would control both the political leadership and the bureaucracy, and in an environment with weak institutions, where ethnic tensions and rivalry are the norm, such an arrangement could pose serious challenges for the South. This apparent miscalculation is not the only paradox associated with the federal character principle. The authors point to the real paradox, where the Nigerian constitution on the one hand admonishes all public officers and institutions to operate rationally and to treat all Nigerians fairly, irrespective of ethnicity, tribe, and religion, and yet on the other hand mandates that Nigerians can receive an undue advantage in appointment to public office or admission to federal educational institutions simply...