A New Civil Service for Nigeria

The trouble with governance in Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of the Nigerian civil service. The story of Nigeria’s failure to rise to its true potential over the past 25 years at least is simply the failure of the civil service to rise to its true position as the custodian of the government and the state.

The civil service is that permanent institution of government with three key functions, chief among them being policy development and delivery. It provides institutional memory to the government and the state, linking the past to the present, and charting the path for the future in governance. The civil service is also often the first point of accountability for the government of the day, making clear to elected and appointed leaders what is permissible or not in governance under the country’s laws, rules and regulations.

Civil servants do all of these things by marshalling the best of society’s human and material resources, by constantly providing independent and impartial policy advice based on objective evidence and research, and by strictly and impartially enforcing laid down codes and procedures of governance, first on themselves, and then on everyone, in order to deliver quality public services.

Moreover, the civil service is underpinned a tradition of public service and a set of enduring values: sacrifice, patriotism, probity, frugality, objectivity and impartiality, which makes it easily the foremost institution of development in the country; the light that shines on through all weathers, fair and foul. This is why in many countries, the civil service attracts some of the brightest minds in society who would rather offer their intelligence and expertise in the service of the public interest than for personal profit.

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Some of the world’s best-known scientists, from Isaac Newton to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, were also public servants in the employ of their countries’ civil services. So too were, and still are, distinguished economists, doctors, lawyers, engineers, town planners and all categories of modern professionals. Indeed, the true secret of the China’s rise in the past four decades lies in its meritorious civil service.

Even in Nigeria’s not-too-distant past, our civil services at federal, state and local government levels were institutions we could be proud of, even if problems remained. It is on record that in those days, senior civil servants will clash with military or civilian leaders to insist on what they believe to be right over important matters of state direction. And to date, the public services developed for Nigeria during those years such as schools, hospitals and roads remain the stand-out public facilities available in the country.

Sadly, that civil service—imperfect but still true to its roles in Nigeria’s governance system—is now long gone, replaced by a bureaucracy almost no one will recognize as such. In short, the decay in our civil services today is simply beyond words. Almost everything associated with our civil service has been bastardized completely: from recruitment to promotion, to everyday functions of record keeping, policy planning and service delivery.

Nigeria’s 774 local government civil services now exist only in name and monthly pay checks. The actual functions of inspecting schools, markets, hospitals and drainages have long been forgotten. At the state level, the 36 civil services have since turned into hubs of sleaze, laziness and redundancy. And of the federal civil service, nothing more needs be said. It is the dirtiest cesspit of corruption in the land, where a single nondescript civil servant can be found to own hundreds of personal houses acquired illegally, of course.

With exception only of the very few, Nigeria’s civil servants are today to be distinguished by their complete lack of imagination, except in the shady circumstances where public resources can be pilfered into private pockets. No compromise is too much, and no penny is too small to line their pockets.

As a consequence, virtually nothing works in the land. Our new federal government claims to have an eight-point agenda to deliver “Renewed Hope” to Nigeria’s over 200 million people. But we are fairly confident that the government will struggle to achieve even a single one of its agenda under the current hopeless civil service with which Nigeria is saddled, even assuming the government is itself to committed to the agenda.

We, at Daily Trust, therefore, recommend a complete overhaul of the federal civil service as the first step towards the realization of Renewed Hope, and as a model for governments at lower levels to copy. First and foremost, merit, rather than patronage or outright purchase, must return as the guiding principle for recruitment and promotion in the civil service.

Second, the civil service must be consciously and practically dissociated from politics, especially at the most senior levels. The appointment of Directors and Permanent Secretaries must be guided by merit and previous distinguished service, rather than connections, politics or political expediency. Heads of agencies and departments must rise through the ranks or based solely on their demonstrable ability to solve particular problems.

Third, retraining and reorientation, not only in terms of technical or professional skills, but also in terms of the traditions and values of public service are sorely needed. The average civil servant must again learn to think of themselves as public servants in the true sense of the term, to put the public before self. This entails, among other things, a package of salaries and benefits that will free civil servants of personal material worries. For Renewed Hope to work, Tinubu must first give us a new civil service befitting the name.