Bureaucracy, Bureaucratic Politics, and the Policy Establishment

Abstract

Bureaucracy is the machinery through which the aspirations of the state and of its operators are articulated, formulated, and executed. The study presents an overview of the bureaucracy, reviews its evolution, its reforms and transformations as well as engages the salient issues that dominate the discourses on the bureaucracy. Relying on secondary sources of data such as textbooks, journals, official documents, reports, and a discourse analysis, this chapter argues that impartiality, anonymity, and political neutrality are hallmark of bureaucracy, which allows it to function effectively without being encumbered by the vicissitudes of the kaleidoscopic political environment. The finding was that the Nigerian bureaucratic establishment exerts tremendous strain on public overhead expenditure to the detriment of investment in capital project and infrastructure. Rather than draw down the size of the bureaucracy, successive administrations have continued to grow the service as a result of desire to grant political patronage to supporters and acolytes. Considering the endemic corruption that permeates civil service and the entrenched culture of nepotism, this chapter proposes that Nigerian bureaucratic establishment requires much deeper restructuring and a change of mentality and attitude to work than the periodic peripheral reforms seem to offer.