EDUCATION AND TRAINING FOR PUBLIC MANAGEMENT SECTOR IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: THE CASE OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE CORPS OF THE FEDERAL PUBLIC SERVICE IN NIGERIA.

摘要

One of the pressing problems of development in the less technologically advanced countries is the lack of managerial capability to plan and implement government programs. The crucial research questions are: (1) whether the managerial techniques that have been found useful in the more technologically advanced countries are transferable through the educational process; (2) whether efforts towards the adaptation of certain Western public management education and training models to the needs of developing countries have produced fruitful results in terms of making the desired change in the level of performance and the pattern of behaviour of public servants.;The administrative corps of the federal civil service and the public management education and training system in Nigeria have been examined as cases for this study. The research methodology involved the synthesis and analysis of relevant literature; analysis and use of relevant unclassified government and institutional documents; IBM Computer analysis of data based on responses from sample of 30 federal Nigerian public administrators; the analysis of data based on questionnaire responses from samples of 28 and 30 public management trainers and graduates respectively; and the relating of the public management education and training system in Nigeria to its socio-political, economic and technological environments. Because of the access of the three survey groups to similar information on public management, there were no significant differences in the patterns of their responses to the hypotheses and research questions. The four main hypotheses which guided the study have been validated by the results of the survey. However, the responses from management trainers (which are also reinforced by abundant evidence from the literature) show that there is need to improve the course content of existing programs. There were differences in job performance between administrative officers trained at the Nigerian public management schools and those of the arts and social science preparation who learned public management on the job. But the need for survival within the existing government bureaucracy coupled with certain constraints from the socio-economic, political and technological environments have made the graduates of public management schools less change-oriented in their management practices.