Professionalising the Nigerian Civil Service

Being Keynote Lecture delivered at the 4th International Conference of the Faculty of Administration, Nasarawa State University, on ‘A century of Public Sector & Corporate Governance in Nigeria, 1914-2014’ held at the Assembly Hall, Keffi on the 8th of October, 2014.

If government fails to recruit and retain the best in the labour market, then how can it achieve the objective of building a Human Resources Management structure that will backstop its vision of a world class public service institution?

Back to Shakespeare: To be or not to be?

For sixty years now since the inauguration of the Nigerian Civil Service, NCS, we have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Isn’t it time to take arm against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, to end them?

It took a while for Hamlet to resolve his indecision and that came by chance. On the contrary, the Nigerian Civil Service cannot leave anything to fortune. From what point can we begin to undermine our hesitancy?

Democratic state

To be or not to be? That is the essential question that the NCS must necessarily answer if it must indeed earn the epithet of a functional democratic state that is committed to an efficient and effective service delivery to its citizens.

In the first part, we saw how since its inauguration, the evolution of the NCS constitutes the sum total of outstanding starts; evolving, immature and weak structures; ambivalent decisions; bold steps; compromised reforms and fortuitous breakthroughs. This evolution simply implies that the organisational growth of the NCS has failed to reach a point of maturity from which it could commence a reformulation of its original objectives. Thus, most of the reform efforts since its inauguration have been mere attempts at damage control. Hence, when Prof. Adamolekun categorised Nigeria as a hesitant reformer, it is not difficult to see the analogy with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is often said that when a person or an institution is through changing, then it is through. It doesn’t really appear that the NCS is through changing despite its compromised institutional growth trajectory. When the wave of democratisation began in the early 90s, Nigeria had to decide whether it still wanted to be a hesitant reformer or make the urgent push for advancement in reform management.

From 1985 to date, we have had five specific reform attempts aimed at refurbishing the professional status of the Nigerian civil servant — the 1985/1988 Phillips Commission, the Ayida Reform of 1995, the Obasanjo Renewal Programme, Yar’Adua Civil Service Reform Programme and the present Jonathan Transformation Agenda.

Put together, all these reforms had a very simple objective: Reconstructing the persona of the Nigerian civil servant through professionalising the NCS and its HRM architecture. Some of the essential steps taken in this direction include: (a) To re-professionalise as a means of creating a new generation of officers and technocrats with sufficient skills, knowledge and motivation for institutional innovation; (b) the conduct of vigorous and systematic evaluation and reporting of professional performance to make policy-makers accountable for resources used and for results; (c) modernizing core operations and systems of the NCS using ICT; (d) creation of a number of more specialized cadres; (e) putting in place a system of capacity utilization wherein core skills are better matched with jobs; (f) injection of high skills and competencies available in other sectors of the economy into the public service, using a range of incentives; and (g) strengthening policy and research synergies through enhanced collaborative projects, including public-private partnerships.

Yet, reconstructing the modus operandi of the NCS requires more than just token attention to the imperative of reform. 

It requires, essentially, a paradigm shift. The simple reason is that we can never hope to continue at this hesitant rate and hope to achieve a world class status with the same indecisive level of administrative functionality.

Transforming into a ‘new public service involves answering two simple but basic questions: How do we want to be seen as an administrative institution? What must we do to achieve this new perception?

The National Strategy for Public Service Reform, NSPSR, provides a straight forward answer to the first question: The Nigerian civil service ought to be perceived and to function as A world-class public service, delivering government policies and programmes with professionalism, excellence and passion.

Its mission statement is also simple: To efficiently and effectively implement the policies and programmes of government, operating collaboratively and transparently with other stakeholders to ensure quality delivery of public services.

sorce: vanguard