ABUJA – The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has explained why government depends less on the output of local researchers.
According to Olaopa, it is probably because local research does not contain deep and practical content that solves the specific problems of government .
The professor of public administration spoke yesterday when the Director General of the Nigerian Institute for Social and Economic Research (NISER), Prof. Antonia Simbine visited in his office in Abuja.
To Olaopa, the interface between the policy space and research industry needs a “recalibration with a significant dose of strategic communication which requires a lot of research evangelists with the essential research elite and the public intellectuals and the press.”
But he lamented that he had observed at a personal level and based on his “experience of over three decades and the significant expertise that is built in the course of my working on international development projects, and much later when I rose to senior positions in the civil service, that each time that I led major development projects or policy design works that required deep analytics, our most reliable allies were the foreign development agencies, who alone appreciate the range of expertise and knowledge that such efforts require and are ever willing to fund them.”
He said until lately when some foundations were rising up to the challenge, “the unfortunate reality in the policy space was that local capacities and institutional capabilities of our research institutions, think tanks, and experts have not been systematically built and harnessed , thereby making our experts’ output to be gradually irrelevant and consigned to publication and for individual promotion and professional development and not as input into the public policy making process.”
