The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Professor Tunji Olaopa, has said that over the years, the service has derailed by the standard set by the British in 1855 and turned itself into a tool for political patronage.
Speaking while receiving the Chairmanship of the Yobe State Civil Service Commission, Professor Olaopa lamented that federal character has been used to suppress merit in the civil service.
“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, and helplessness to the whims and caprices of our political lord 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 the mid-70s.
“We have emasculated merit and replaced it with political patronage and 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,” he said.
Furthermore, the FCSC Chairman further stated that this trend has also almost irreparably destroyed competency-based human resource management as an enabler of policy intelligence in a capable developmental state.
He said 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.
Professor Olaopa further noted that the global community of practice and service has created such a huge portfolio of smart, good, and best practices that late starters have no excuse to be so far behind in being so uninnovative.
“Indeed, the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Merit Protection Board, as well as the United Nations Service Commission, remain purveyors of good adaptable practices that are readily available if we are not just intellectually lazy and politically unwilling to change.
“In terms of our 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 control systems that require reforms to beef up bureaucratic efficiency and modernise our standard operation practices, on the other hand.
“Yet our disciplinary processes and appeals procedures are comatose. Ditto with our system of promoting officers as career managers, which sadly still relies on an annual performance reporting (APER) system that measures nothing concrete.
Yet the service deluded itself by believing that its continuity essence and platform would midwife public administration as Nigeria navigated the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions. 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 the low institutional capability readiness of MDAs, and we are carried away by our empty-handed powers as accounting officers and chief administrative officers,” he noted.
He therefore said that the FCSC is carefully putting together and activating a new set of ideas, strategies, instruments, and innovations that it will begin to share with state civil service commissions and other service commissions in the public sector in due course.
In his remarks, the Chairman of the Yobe State Civil Service Commission, Hamidu Alhaji, lamented poor capacity and training for the civil servants in his state. He sought the collaboration of the FCSC to build the capacity of civil servants in Yobe State.
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