Reinventing the civil service

The civil service in Nigeria is an institution or system peopled by employees of government most of whom are career civil servants working in ministries, parastatals, departments, commissions and agencies. From 1954 when the system was inaugurated to date, it could be said that, in terms of number, it has grown, but it has increasingly become an epitome of low productivity and dysfunction. The system as currently structured cannot serve the interest of this country because it is not only weak and unwieldy, but also unproductive.

At independence in 1960, when Nigerian nationals took over the administrative leadership, no attempt was made by them to restructure the service to suit the country’s developmental needs. Nigerian bureaucrats who occupied the leadership position in the service imbibed the colonial mentality of wealth acquisition for self-aggrandisement and self-superiority such that instead of working to improve the lot of the country, they became colonial masters in turn.

Several attempts have been made to structure the service and, by the last count, there have been about 21 attempts at reforming it. These include the Udoji Reform that gave fabulous salary increase to civil servants with the attendant hyper inflation. The latest attempts are the Bureau of Civil Service Reform, the Presidential Committee on Restructuring and Rationalisation of the Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies headed by Stephen Oronsaye, among others.

These efforts were all geared towards making this system work, but emphasis has always been on reforms and has suffered several setbacks due largely to observable implementation gaps. One of these gaps centres on government’s inability to connect the intention of reform with the environment within which that reform intent would be implemented. More often than not, an unfriendly environment undermines a good reform.

It is pertinent to us, therefore, to draw the attention of the incoming Muhammadu Buhari administration to these gaps, hoping that the government will find a way around it and, by so doing, make this system truly an engine of growth in the economy.

It is our firm belief that for the incoming administration to have a functional civil service that will aid governance and raise productivity, the administration will have to embark on comprehensive reform that will right the many wrongs in the system.

We have discovered that almost always, government fails to dimension the scope and contents of reform that are sufficient to create desirable multiplier effect and systemic impact and this demonstrates failure to recognise the limitations of public administration in relations to reform.

We subscribe to reducing the size of the civil service to make it more efficient and productive, but we are not unmindful of the negative social impact of such action. This is why we call on government to carry out the load-shedding in the system alongside creating productive areas such as industries that will create employment, and developing the agric sector, especially mechanised farming, which will employ the thousands of workers that will be thrown into the labour market.

Aside from reform, government also has to look into the internal mechanisms that make the civil service in this country what it is today. Corruption is endemic in the system such that government employees embezzle public money with impunity. They connive with political officeholders such as ministers, commissioners, presidents’ or governors’ aides to cheat on government and where the ‘politicians’ are not ready to “play ball”, they would frustrate their efforts at executing government policies and programmes.

The way to end this, we strongly believe, is to reform and strengthen all anti-graft institutions, especially the ICPC and EFCC, so that any erring civil servant should be prosecuted by these agencies and the full weight of the law brought to bear on the judgment. It is our hope that when there is a comprehensive reform and the government musters political will to fight corruption by giving these agencies appropriate and adequate teeth to bite, this system called civil service will work and produce results.