Public Administration and Development of Public Programmes in Nigeria: Reappraisal of the Contending Issues

Abstract

The paper attempts to point out some of the contending issues often overlooked in the treatment of public administration in development programmes. Conflict in planning arising from poor articulation of public policies and programmes objectives, communication and credibility gap between the levels of government rooted in competing interests in public programmes call for, a discourse of alternative approaches to assessing the possible developmental role of bureaucracy in Nigeria. Over the years, the emergence of political technocrats in public administration has weaken the civil service as institution professionally and also creates conditions for government poor performance in service delivery. The paper contends that the numerous administrative hierarchies with complex mechanism, red tape, titles and conflicting issues of commitment and accountability which features as a permanent social force and a monolithic immovable structure account for the systemic crisis of poverty, insecurity, corruption, backwardness among others in Nigeria. There is need for balancing the trade off which public administration generates to address the issues of non availability of a strong bureaucratic tradition of responsible and accountable behavior that is compatible with professional norms of impartiality and political neutrality for efficient delivery of public programmes. Discourse of the paper is on the nature of public administration and development programmes: A reappraisal of contending issues. The paper adopts quantitative survey method and secondary source of data to analyze the data collected. A sample of 500 questionnaires was administered and chi-square statistical technique was employed to test the hypothesis. The result of the findings shows that Nigeria public administration lacks a strong bureaucratic tradition to address the task of promoting socio-economic development programmes for the wellbeing of the people. The paper recommends a reformulation of public administration with development functions to address the present and future crisis of development in Nigeria.

Keywords: Public administration, development programmes, planning, bureaucratic tradition