New public management and public administration reforms in Nigeria

Abstract EN

New Public Management reform has since the 1980s been a world trend for improving public sector management in most countries, but the level of success of the reform path in developing countries is rated low in literature.

This study investigates the various attempts to implement public administration reform in Nigeria since the adoption of Structural Adjustment Programme in the mid-1980s.

The objective is to identify the strands of New Public Management, the extent of progress made, the rationale and the failure recorded in implementing NPM reform path in Nigeria.

A methodological approach of extensive review of government documents and other secondary materials drawn from literature on NPM and historical data on the implementation of successive public service reform proposals in the period is used for the study.

The author argues that the poor success story of NPM reform in Nigeria is as a result of the misconception of the fundamental aspects of the reform - the bureaucratic aspect in favour of the more appealing neoliberal socio-economic reform strands.