The nation’s civil service that is the hub of internal administration in government is faced with an existential crisis on many fronts, the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service (FCSC), Prof.Tunji Olaopa, has said.
Prof. Olaopa spoke during a courtesy call on him in Abuja by the Chairman, Yobe State Civil Service Commission, and officials of the Permanent Secretaries Commission, and the Ministry of Establishment and Training, in Abuja on Thursday. 7 May 2024.
Olaopa warned of the current development where the Civil Service Commission is generally perceived by practitioners, policy makers, the public, in the literature of public administration today, and in discourse, as a relic of the growingly outdated Weberian bureaucratic model of public administration “which institutional economists and new public management (NPM) scholars have successfully challenged to be a-developmental, and rightly so.”
He lamented that stakeholders at the Service Commission unfortunately go about their duties in a manner that validates this notion.
He said: “The Commission has wantonly compromised the philosophical construct of the first principle of its founding by the British in 1855, in the way it goes about its work most especially in Nigeria. We have compromised merit not just on the altar of federal character diversity management praxis. We did in the way we submit our constitutional independence helplessness to the whims and caprices of our political lords and masters, largely because, as professionals, we have lost the capacity to speak truth to power as it was in Nigeria in the 1960s through to the mid-70s
“We have emasculated merit and replaced it with political patronage and an unreflective nepotism. The dynamic that this created, has inexorably destroyed the gatekeeping essence of the Commission’s constitutional mandate as the protector and defender of the merit system, and therefore as the institutional bulwark and guarantor of professionalism in policy and development management. It has also almost irreparably destroyed competency-based human resource management as enabler of policy intelligence of a capable developmental state
“Even the British who transplanted the service commission concept, along with many countries in the Commonwealth of Nations, have brought creativity and innovations to bear in their public service people management practices and therefore, in how far they have gone in rethinking their service commissions. The global community of practice and service have created such a huge portfolio of smart, good and best practices that we late starters have no excuse to be so far left behind in being so un-innovative.”
Olaopa drew attention to the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Merit Protection Board as well as the United Nations Service Commission as the purveyors of good adaptable practices that are readily available “if we are not just intellectually lazy and politically unwilling to change.”
According to him, in terms of its core remit, the civil service in Nigeria currently demonstrates “palpable evidence of the worst kinds of bureaucratic corruption largely due to institutional weaknesses that enable officers to exploit systemic loopholes, on the one hand and the breakdown of inherited internal management controls systems that require reforms to beef up bureaucratic efficiency and modernise our standard operation practices, on the other.
“Yet our disciplinary processes and appeals procedures are comatose. Ditto with our system of promoting officers as career management, which sadly still rely on an annual performance reporting (APER) system that measures nothing concrete.”
He lamented that despite this gross failure, the “service deludes itself that its continuity essence and platform will midwife public administration as Nigeria navigates the fourth and fifth industrial revolution. What a delusion of grandeur. Indeed, the civil service unknowingly faces an existential crisis. Consulting firms, external policy experts, and think tanks, that should complement our work, are taking over our core functions, due to low institutional capability readiness of MDAs, and we are carried away by our empty held powers as accounting officers and chief administrative officers.”
He disclosed that the FCSC is carefully putting together and activating a new set of ideas, strategies, instruments and innovations that it would begin to share with state civil service commissions and other service commissions in the public sector in due course.
“The 2024 conference of the national council of civil service commission will provide one platform for sharing and learning. While the national conference of the civil service commission at 70 to hold later in the year will be another platform
So much is expected of us, as if public administration fails, all else in the entire ensemble of the machinery of state will perform sub-optimally, which is another term for failure. We certainly cannot afford to fail in our onerous generational responsibility especially with the opportunity afforded by the President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda. All hands should be on deck to get the civil service to be part of the game changing that is playing up”, he said.
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