The topic of Okey Marcellus Ikeanyibe’s presentation during the faculty seminar on December 12 was “Bureaucratic Politics and Implementation of Economic Liberalization Reforms in Developing Countries: Insights from Privatization in Nigeria’s Oil and Gas Sector.”
Ikeanyibe, who is a visiting research fellow at the School of Public Policy (SPP) at Central European University, reviewed the primary characteristics of some of the bureaucratic politics model that are most commonly used to explain how decisions are made in the executive arm of government. He observed that there are multiple actors in the administrative policymaking arena and that these actors have diverging, and often conflicting, interests. Interaction among these actors is characterized by continuous “pulling and hauling” that eventually ends in consensual rather than rational decisions.
He noted that the bureaucratic politics model is rarely employed to explain what happens in the implementation of public policies, particularly in developing countries where policy decisions are poorly or not implemented. The tendency, Ikeanyibe said, is to explain implementation failures in developing countries by blaming factors like corruption, lack of professionals, weak state institutions, nepotism, or poorly formulated policies.
He expanded the traditional bureaucratic politics model usually employed to explain the formulation of policy decisions to enable him to explain what has happened in the implementation of privatisation (restructuring/unbundling, commercialization, and divestment of the government from some of its subsidiaries) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) since 1988.
Ikeanyibe provided a detailed history of the NNPC, a state-owned monopoly that he is using as a case study to examine the nature of bureaucratic politics surrounding the privatization of state-owned enterprises in developing countries. Ikeanyibe noted that NNPC was among the major state-owned parastatals to be commercialized after Nigeria adopted a structural adjustment program in 1986. The essence of the privatization and commercialization policy is to: (1) privatize or commercialize public enterprises based on classifications; (2) minimize government interference in both privatized and commercialized enterprises; (3) ensure the integration of market and commercial orientations, and financial self-sufficiency in those enterprises that are commercialized; (4) ensure operational and management autonomy for the entities; and (5) reorganize some parastatals, which entails the program of unbundling complex government enterprises into specific autonomous operational areas to ensure effective privatization and commercialization as the case may be. While efforts seemed to have been made to implement this policy in relation to NNPC and other strategic state monopolies, government control – presidential and ministerial controls - over the company is actually greater now than it was almost 30 years ago.
There are rational reasons for why this is the case, such as self-serving concerns related to bureaucratic autonomy and maintenance of spheres of influence and critical tasks. Ikeanyibe said that these same factors explain why “implementation slippage” occurs in many developing countries. “My research is contributing to building a theoretical model of bureaucratic politics that will enhance our understanding of why this implementation slippage takes place,” he said.