Nigeria, Aug. 12 -- In an earlier article, attention focused on the antecedents to public service reform in Nigeria. As argued in the article, a number of factors accounted for the increasing interest in reform. Among these are the atrophy of public service institutions and processes, widening performance deficits, impaired access to essential services, the rising cost of governance, and the demonstration effect of reforms undertaken in other countries, particularly, Great Britain.

As a follow up to the previous article, the latest one shifts attention to a major disabler of reform, what is termed the 'hard' environment. We shall return to this later.

While any public service is obliged to get its internal organisation and management eq...