Public Administrators working in the culture sector have been called upon to understand the cultural milieu of the society in which they are operating if they are desirous of effecting positive socio-cultural changes.
Dr. Lawal Ebenezer Ejalonibu of the Department of Political Science, University of Ilorin, who stated this in a paper, titled, “Public Administration in a Cultural Setting,” at the technical session of National Institute for Cultural Orientation (NICO) workshop on staff capacity building, looked at public administration as comprising those activities that are involved in carrying out the policies and programmes of government.
The university don went further to state that, the fact that public administration is shaped by the cultural context in which it operates, cultural change and orientation could be engineered through the mechanism of public administration, arguing that public administration and culture reinforce each other in a symbiotic manner.
On the role of public administration in a cultural setting, Ejalonibu opined that conducting periodic surveys to monitor changes in public attitude, habits, values, preferences and opinions on salient cultural matters, integrating new media platform into the overall strategy of cultural orientation, collaboration, adaptation and “glocalization,” were all the responsibilities of administrators in cultural settings.
He also highlighted some limitations of public administration in a cultural setting, which include, inadequate funding, lack of political will, poor infrastructure, lack of access to modern technology, fragmentation of identity and cultures across the county, lack of synergy with other agents of socialization, education and cultural orientation.
Naseer Saeed Ategba
NICO NCZ