Supervision and Public Service Productivity in Nigeria: A Theoretical Discourse

Abstract

One of the major challenges confronting the public sector in Nigeria is the daunting criticism that it is neither efficient nor productive. This criticism has placed the public sector at the front burner of various reforms more prominent in this millennium. Despite that, there has been little or no improvement in the public perception of the service as ineptitude and incapable of administering development. This paper therefore did an expose of the Nigerian public sector productivity especially focusing on strategic supervision as a major variable that could birth productivity and efficiency in the sector. The work relied mainly on secondary sources of data and desk analysis of same was done. It concludes that public sector productivity rests squarely on the synergy between the political and bureaucratic supervisors in the various MDAs and more importantly attitudinal re-orientation among both the supervisors and the followership in the task of public service provision. In order to bring about attitudinal re-orientation, the supervisors must combine both transactional and transformational characteristics.

Keywords: supervision, productivity, public service, bureaucracy, accountability