Representative Bureaucracy and Administrative Discretion: Analytical Challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa

Public Policy is a ‘political idea’ which is easy to state by the political class but difficult idea to convert into reality to generate ‘Pareto-optimality' for the entire society. Both in Nigeria and Kenya tax reform bills proposed were opposed by the Gen z who reasoned, that their parents were to bear the burden of the new tax in Kenya, while the northern governors and elites in Nigeria were the protesters. This affirmed one of the theses of this study, that each policy has target beneficiaries. The descriptive-study design was used as a data-gathering approach wherein we relied on secondary sources for data assemblage. The ‘principal-agent’ and ‘public service motivation’ theories were deployed as the perceptual prism of analyses. Findings indicated; that there are different beneficiaries of each public policy in society; policy administrators should possess administrative discretion to tailor public policies towards the intended beneficiaries; very often, the administrators are not allowed discretion as the executive drives the policy processes from the executive offices; (iv) these challenge arose from the absence of ‘dichotomy between politics and administration’ in the third world and specifically in Africa. Effective public policy in Africa would depend strongly on; (a) the top civil and public servants being made to know that their critical role is defining the pathway for the implementation of public policies (b) they should know how to identify and reach the social aggregates in the society, their recruitment to be merit-base and subjected to regular skill acquisitions to meet changing times