The following is an extract from a despatch recently addressed by the Secretary of State to the Governor of Mauritius :

"I am, of course, well aware that the Mauritius Agricultural College and its students are not uni-lingual, and that the fact that French is spoken in Mauritius does not prevent College graduates being available for service in Colonies in which English only is spoken.

"The whole question of education in tropical agriculture is now receiving much attention, and I will not fail to see that the advantages offered by the Mauritius College are brought to the notice of all who are concerned in preparing detailed plans for improving the facilities offered within the Empire.'

DOWNING STREET,

20th May, 1927.

APPENDIX VII.

The Relation of Technical to Administrative Services.

MEMORANDUM BY THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES.

The subject mainly concerns the larger Colonies and Dependencies. In fact it hardly arises in the West Indian islands or those territories where the area is small and the staff comparatively few. It arises in its most difficult form in those Dependencies where the technical and specialist staff is undergoing rapid expansion. It also presents particularly difficult problems in territories such as Nigeria, Tanganyika, and Malaya where in addition to British administrative staff there are various types of indigenous native administrations.

The Colonial Office has received a good deal of interesting material under this heading of the Agenda and it is the aim of this memorandum to indicate the chief points raised.

I am afraid that I have been unable to avoid the words "decentralization" and "co-operation." Decentralization is so often talked about and is as often difficult to achieve, while co-operation between the officers of different departments is the theme of many official pronouncements, Gazette notices, and

circulars, but it too is as difficult to achieve in practice, at any rate to the degree desired.

It is not easy, for example, to lay down a hard and fast definition of the proper functions of a Colonial Secretariat in its relation to Heads of departments and provincial staffs which will suit every Colony. In these relations as in all else in Colonial administration the personal equation is of major importance.

It is perhaps desirable to emphasise the view at the outset that the origin of these difficulties is due to the force of historical circumstances. In order to illustrate this it is desirable to take some concrete example such as Nigeria, which is one of the largest and easily the most populous of the Colonies. It is in its present dimensions, for the most part, the creation--as a British Dependency-of the last thirty years.

In the early days of this century the main efforts of Government were to ensure the effective co-operation between military and political officers in establishing the foundations of British administration in the Moslem Emirates and pagan tribes of the vast and populous new territories that were acquired. We must remember that even in South-Eastern Nigeria the extension of British administration over hostile and warlike tribes has been made effective in some places only since the Great War. Following the establishment of the Pax Britannica by military and political officers, the engineers of the Public Works Department, and the Railway Department, were brought in to open. the arteries of internal communications.

Following upon roads and railways came the introduction of technical services-the medical and veterinary departments, agricultural and forestry, the topographical and geological surveys, and finally the schools and the educational department.

The development of trade necessitated, apart from the administration of justice by the native tribunals, the creation of special areas administered under English law.

It must be remembered that Nigeria is a country seven times the size of England, with nearly twenty million inhabitants of almost unimaginable variety as regards tradition, belief, custom, and capacity. Year by year the revenue has been growing and correspondingly the numbers of the staff of each and every department have increased.

The rapid expansion of Government activities in a territory of so great a size inevitably leads to the straining of the administrative machine. There has been, to an extent, political decentralization by the creation of two Provinces, Northern and Southern, but the Government of Nigeria is still in the process of decentralizing its technical services, which are, as I have explained, historically later in development.

When a new policy is introduced, for example, in regard to forest preservation, it is inevitable that on its technical side it must be closely directed from headquarters. The result has

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been, as might have been expected, a tendency to over-centralization in the technical departments.

It is perhaps inevitable that at an early stage in the development a political officer in the province or district with his mind chiefly set on securing peace and order should be embarrassed by the demands and activities of technical officers which complicate the already often delicate relations with the indigenous population. On the other hand, technical officers may overlook political considerations.

There are thus on the one hand the difficulties of the central Government, i.e., the adjustment of the relations of the central with the provincial administrations and of the central secretariat with the heads of the several technical departments. On the other, there are the local problems which confront the administrative officer in the province or district in his relations with technical officers.

While all may be peace at headquarters, a district officer may, though with the best possible intentions, seriously impede the work of either the agricultural or the forestry officer in the field. It is equally perfectly possible for the peace of a station where there is a happy family of two or three officers of various departments to be disturbed by the eddies of a departmental conflict at headquarters.

I have heard of one case (I do not say that it occurred in recent years) where a junior Public Works Department officer got into hot water with the head of his department for discussing the plans of certain projected buildings with the chief administrative officer in the Province in which he was stationed.

I could quote other examples, but I think the existence of the Gazette notices and circulars to which I have alluded prove that these difficulties are not imaginary. The chief element in the solution of these difficulties is the personal equation. Everything depends on the existence of a proper spirit both at headquarters and in the field, though as I have tried to explain there have been inevitable conflicts in the past owing to expansion and development. I am not speaking here of Africa alone. The same problems arise in Malaya and elsewhere.

The memoranda submitted show that various modifications of the central administrative machine have been made to meet the difficulties which I have outlined. Sir Hugh Clifford's memorandum, which is printed as the first Annex to this, presents the issue very clearly.

It has been held, for example, that it is an advantage to have administrative officers in charge of technical departments, and the advantages of this have been pressed in some of the documents prepared for the Conference. In Malaya, for example, the Posts and Telegraphs, the Education and the Agricultural Departments are under the control of non-technical administrative officers. The General Manager of the Railways, too, is not a railwayman. I do not wish here to discuss the merits or demerits of this scheme. I am merely concerned to point out

that it is one way of obtaining better liaison between the different branches of Government activity.

Another method which has been suggested for obtaining better relations between secretariats and the central departments is that secretariat officers should be seconded for considerable periods to work in the headquarter offices of the several departments in order to obtain first-hand knowledge from inside of the working of the department, while at the same time their attachment should be useful to the technical officers as it should give them assistance and relief in dealing with the correspondence side of their work-particularly in the presentation of their case to Government.

It seems to me that this idea is worthy of consideration and might even be extended by the permanent attachment of secretariat officers to technical departments where these are large enough to warrant full-time employment.

For example, I have noticed that the heads of big departments, like the Medical, have too much of their time occupied by purely routine matters of much of which they could be relieved if they had a properly trained secretariat officer to assist them.

Similarly, by organising the central secretariat so as to ensure that a particular secretariat officer deals with all correspondence coming from a particular department, misunderstanding can be avoided. I think, however, that it is indisputable that a secretariat officer would obtain a better working knowledge of a department from working actually inside it than merely from receiving correspondence from it.

Several Dependencies have reported on the continuous increase of interdepartmental correspondence, and one is left with the impression that a great many matters are dealt with in this laborious manner which would better be settled by personal intercourse and friendly discussion. Secretariats breed paperto their own undoing.

As I have indicated, however, it is not only the machinery of Government at the centre which requires attention, but also that in the province and the district. I may call attention to the second and third Annexes to this memorandum, which are typical of the instructions issued by Colonial Governments in Tropical Africa. The administrative staff in the provinces are the principal executive officers of Government, and the technical departments should in no case take executive action without acquainting the principal administrative officer in the province. or the district, as the case may be, of their intended action; for in this area the administrative officer is, though to a necessarily limited extent, the representative of the Governor. Such a position makes it essential that the attitude of the administrative officer to his technical colleagues should correspond to the attitude of the Governor to heads of departments. Too often in the past the administrative officer has regarded himself as a departmental officer whose duties are confined to a strictly.

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limited sphere, namely, the preservation of peace and order. Where development is taking place the sphere of his duties is automatically enlarged and it becomes essential for him to have some knowledge of, and, what is more important, sympathy with, the work of the various technical departments.

For example, it is, I think, indisputable that in the past there have been considerable difficulties with the administration of forest policy by forest officers owing to the ignorance on the part of the administrative staff of the importance of the subject.

I have alluded to the importance of personal intercourse at the headquarters of Government. It is even more important in the districts. If effective co-operation between all departments is to be assured, it will be the duty of the administrative officers to promote friendly relations between the departments in their

area.

It is with the intention of endeavouring to eliminate such difficulties that we are trying to instil into the probationers now undergoing special courses at Oxford and Cambridge the urgent importance of attaching proper weight to the activities of the technical departments. Though little can be done in the short time available such instruction will, at any rate, implant that idea at the beginning of their careers. In any case it is bound to be of advantage for every administrative officer to have at the outset even an inkling of the aims of tropical agriculture, of the education policies of Government, of the importance of forestry, &c.

This memorandum has been written mainly from the point of view of general administration. The need for securing more effective co-operation between the various technical services must also not be ignored. It is becoming more and more apparent that problems arise which necessitate the combined activities of more than one department. The fight against trypanosomiasis, for example, requires the several activities of the medical, veterinary, agricultural, forestry, administrative, and, where they exist, the game departments. Another example which occurs to me is the co-operation required between different departments in connection with any new railway construction. The first stage. of any such project requires close liaison between the survey staff and the officers of agricultural, and possibly forestry, departments. In some cases the geological department may also be concerned. Later, in the actual process of construction there are the very important questions of the provision of labour and its medical care to be considered. In short, the construction of a railway involves practically every department. I should not call attention to this unless I had seen examples where more effective co-operation would have produced more satisfactory results.

Finally, the recent expansion in Africa of the educational facilities made by Government brings in the share which each