These numbers vary in their significance depending on the nature of the work of the public official. However, given the constitutional role of the civil service, they indicate the magnitudes of population and geography that officials govern. Civil servants must therefore negotiate the diversity of the citizenry that they serve as well as confront the sometimes large geographic distances between them. The quality of quantitative data to support their decision making across these populations is often poor, and of far poorer quality than that which assists public officials in the developed world.

# **Financial Resources**

Faced by a downstream responsibility to serve rather large, at times disparate populations, civil servants also face an upstream responsibility to spend the capital investments allocated to them by the public budget process. Conversely, the public budget process is the means through which public officials obtain capital to fulfill their responsibilities to citizens. A mismatch between these pressures confronts public officials with significant challenges. Different officials will have varying degrees of involvement in developing an annual budget proposal, but the organization as a whole is mandated with its expenditure.

The surveys for which we have federal, state and local government data were also those surveys focussed at the level of the organization. Table 3 provides descriptive statistics for the 520 organizations in Nigeria and Ethiopia for which we have organization-level surveys, and therefore concrete budget numbers. It outlines the total budgets of the organizations we survey, including capital and recurrent expenditure. Federal government agencies have budgets of the order of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, particularly in infrastructure-heavy sectors such as works (which traditionally includes the building of major roads) and water. Local governments have far smaller budgets, but state/regional governments can have budgets that exceed those of federal organizations.<sup>11</sup> Though the state may separate implementation across sectoral agencies like at the federal level, there is often a greater degree of centralisation of budget authority within a centralized state secretariat. Thus, civil servants at centralized state agencies can control substantial budgets relative to their local and even federal government counterparts.

To put the scale of these budgets into perspective, we use the Centre for the Study of Africa’s publicaccess manufacturing firm data (CSAE, 1998). This is now almost two decades old, but has the advantage of providing capital measures for African firms. The median capital budget of the sample of firms they survey in Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe is USD28m. Thus, this data implies that an employee working at a median manufacturing firm in sub-Saharan Africa works in a more resource-rich environment than a local government official. State level governments have budgets more in the order of the 75th percentile of firms. Given that the age of the firm data imply these are upper bounds, these do not seem large resource envelopes with which to govern the large, potentially disparate populations described above. These averages mask some significant outliers, such as the oil-rich Delta states in the south of Nigeria whose organizations are wealthy relative even to the 90th percentile of firms in the CSAE data. However, there are many government organizations in our data, particularly at the local level, who have a significant responsibility of service and a limited accompanying budget.

> Ethiopia’s as a whole - Guangdong (94,500,00), Shandong (93,700,000), Henan (93,600,000), Sichuan (81,300,000) and Jiangsu (76,300,000) - and whose average land area was not that different from an Ethiopian region. Chinese provincial officials therefore faced a similar order of magnitude of citizen complexity in their daily work as an Ethiopian federal civil servant.

> 11The organizational budgets assessed in Federal Government of Nigeria (2010) give a figure for total state budgets of USD622m, so almost equivalent to that of our sample.

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