THE CORE AND RECENT TRENDS IN GLOBAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: CORRUPT/INEPT BUREAUCRACY AS THE BANE OF NIGERIA EXPERIENCE

Abstract

Public administration and its bureaucracy involves the formulation/application of relevant policies/rules, methods and principles to ensure the day-today governing/running of modern state. Hence the state does not persist without such a functional system of civil dealings. The principles and methods of administration could be altered and improved upon from time to time, place to place—depending on prevailing needs, programmes and policies in a particular epoch. With the world increasingly becoming integrated (via globalization), issues and trends in public administration have also become increasingly global in nature. Hence there is the need to articulate those basic principles and issues form the core amid the current/recent ones that seem to reshape contemporary global public administration. The goal is to be enabled to evaluate the performance of Nigeria’s public administration and the place of its bureaucracy. Thus this work adopted both the expository and critical analytic theories to examine the issues. In the end, the work discovers that while improved digital/data management and diversity (amongst others) characterize contemporary global public administration; and that the Nigerian experience is lagging in dismal performance. The work concluded that the Nigerian fiasco is a result of a plethora of corruption and other factors connected to inept bureaucracy amid poor policy formulation/implementation. Consequently, the study proffered potentially useful suggestions for the revamping the Nigerian public administration/bureaucracy to advance at par with global best practices for national development.