The InfoStride Forum

Protocols

I would like to start by expressing my gratitude to Dr. Tunji Olaopa – one of Nigeria's most impressive and hardworking public servants – for the kind invitation extended to me to speak at this discourse on public sector reforms.

We usually think of the public service as a hotbed of corruption, ineptitude, tardiness and mediocrity. In the national consciousness, public servants are represented by a host of negative stereotypes – the extortionate official who will ensure that files get missing or do not get to Oga if his or her palms are not greased, the tardy clerk whose negligence and ineptitude ensure that the files get missing anyway, the thieving permanent secretary under whose watch billions of naira have mysteriously disappeared and whose close friendship with high ranking politicians saves him from the stress of answering for his crimes, etc.

The media renders the frequent corruption scandals involving public servants in salacious headlines crafted to shock and provoke. News of the pensions scam, the SEC scam, the fuel subsidy scam, the police equipment fund scam, to cite but a few of the most recent examples, suggest that the public sector is a haven of fraudsters. The inability or unwillingness of political authorities to see these scams as grossly destructive of their legitimacy and credibility, and therefore move to speedily prosecute wrongdoers does not help matters. The cumulative effect has been a sharp decline in the reputation of public servants, a devaluation of public service itself which is now largely seen as an avenue through which elites engage in corrupt self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement. Above all, the credibility of political authorities and civil institutions is continually being eroded at a pace that is perilous for our young democracy.

We should note that the public service has not always been seen in these terms. Once upon a time, its reputation and operation were ensconced in the firmaments of excellence. To understand how and why its decline came about, we need to embark on a brief excursion through history.

The Golden Age of the Public Service

The structure of the civil service inherited at independence, as was the case in all African Commonwealth nations, was based on the British model. At the apex was the administrative and professional class, below it the executive class with its general, technical and specialized cadres, then the clerical and technical grades and at the base, the sub-clerical and sub-technical grades. The entire system was managed by the most senior officers of the administrative and professional class. Professional and technical departments were integrated into ministries together with other departments such as the administrative, personnel, financial etc. Each ministry was under a permanent secretary who was expected to coordinate all the work of the ministry and tender the final official advice of the ministry to the minister on policy matters.

During the First Republic, the public service while generally well regarded was not without its problems. Public contact with the government was usually with low level civil servants. They provoked the public to annoyance through their sluggishness, ineptitude and discourtesy. Petty corruption flourished. Politicians, particularly those who were not in office, tended to distrust senior civil servants, perhaps seeing them as rivals or opponents. This created a gulf that distanced politicians and public servants and made interaction remote. In the service itself, there was the problem of how to manage the tensions between competing allegiances that inevitably arose from the salience of identity in the politics of the fledgling nation. There was the matter of how to ensure that the permanent secretary and his team were loyal to the minister especially if they were from different ethnic communities. The regions, which were one-party states, sought to address this problem by enforcing Northernization, Westernization and Easternization which in turn inflamed minority discontent in the process.

Despite these challenges, the public service generally performed creditably. It is noteworthy that the developmental strides made by the regions in the areas of education, industry, agriculture, housing and infrastructure were choreographed by their competent public services.  Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ahmadu Bello and Michael Okpara are rightly lauded for their visionary leadership in their regions and their feats of socio-economic engineering but their achievements rested very much on the corps of efficient public servants that they had assembled.

Without a doubt, the golden age of the public service came in the dramatic first period of military rule from January 1966 to May 1967. During this time, there were no politicians associated with government. The new military regime had abolished the position of ministers and no appointees took their place. The permanent secretaries successfully resisted the initial idea to make them political heads of their ministries preferring instead to remain as civil servants. This sentiment speaks volumes about the prestige which the public service enjoyed and the unwillingness of bureaucrats to trade it for political perks. What ensued then was that instead of rendering advice to the ministers who would then take their papers to the council, the permanent secretaries now initialed council memoranda and tendered their advice to the cabinet as a whole. Under the circumstances, such advice was not qualified or tainted by any partisan political considerations and could not be said to emanate from the mandate of elected representatives of the people.  Decisions flowing from them could be said to be imposed on the people.

But this was also a time of great political uncertainty stemming from two coups and the threat of secession that was steadily pushing the country towards war. In the absence of ministers and with the military leaders as opposing protagonists, it fell on the leaders of the federal civil service to articulate and defend the ideal of federal unity. Their visible activism and advocacy in favour of the federal union gave these public servants a higher profile than they had ever enjoyed, and in the national consciousness, they ceased to be invisible bureaucrats and became political actors in their own right.

Senior bureaucrats saw themselves as uber-patriots seeking to serve the government of the day to the best of their abilities and preserving a social order threatened by centrifugal tensions. It was easy to see how their new visibility might be viewed by politicians as an usurpation of their own privileged status. But it was the political dynamics ushered in by the military intervention which paved the way for the prominence of public servants. The new rulers were young, impetuous soldiers, unschooled in the art and science of governance. It was clear that soldiers needed the moderating wisdom of savvy bureaucrats to steer the ship of state. Among the bureaucrats who came to prominence during the Gowon years were the trio of senior bureaucrats – Allison Ayida, Philip Asiodu and Abdulaziz Atta – Oxford-trained bureaucrats who the press soon dubbed "super perm secretaries" or the Oxford Mafia, both terms intended to convey their clout and exclusivity.

Regardless of these issues, the darkest period of our nation's history turned out to be the finest hour for her public servants. The contributions of the civil service from 1966 to 1975 when the nation fought a civil war and steered itself towards recovery and reconstruction were remarkable. Its claims to loyalty and objectivity were accepted by the military and the public, hence its success in helping to arrest the slide towards complete disintegration at a crucial moment of our national life. It was public servants that helped umpire the negotiations that led to the restoration of a government immediately after the July 1966 coup.

The Years of Decline  

History teaches us that moments of great triumph are often followed by moments of decline. This was the odyssey of the public service during the mid 1970s following its fine showing from the civil war period until its aftermath. Two defining events created the circumstances for the decline. In 1973, the Jerome Udoji Commission was set up to among other things oversee the reforms of the public service that were intended to adapt its structure and orientation to the managerial and developmental demands of a rapidly expanding public sector. Its brief included the design of new salary structures and incentives to attract and retain people of the right caliber in a new context of a rapidly growing private industrial and commercial sector offering attractive and prestigious enough careers.

The Udoji commission abolished multiple salary scales in the public service and unified all salaries in the public service which was defined to includenot only the civil service, but also university staff, the judiciary, and the public corporations and other parastatals, into Grade levels 1-17. The commission also recommended sizeable salary increases in an attempt to harmonize public sector wages with salaries of people with equivalent training and responsibilities in the private sector. Its report also contained recommendations for systematizing training in the service, for setting targets and measuring results, and improving morale – all of which was hoped would engender increased productivity and thereby justify the large increases in salaries.

However well intentioned the Udoji commission was, the practical effects of its recommendations and the way in which they were implemented were far from salutary. Large arrears were paid in one fell swoop. Salary hikes – in some cases by nearly as much as 100 percent – were proclaimed with screaming and inflammatory banner headlines in the press which characterized it as "a bonanza for public servants." The inflationary response to these increases in the market place was immediate and catastrophic. Little attention was paid to the reforms for greater productivity and efficiency.

The civil service became a scapegoat for the economic problems of the country and senior bureaucrats who were thought to have misled the government for their own benefit were held responsible. Shortly, this was extended to blaming them for ill-advising the Gowon regime to renege on its promise to return the country to civil rule. This allegation was unfounded. But the atmosphere at the time ensured that civil servants who had enjoyed a high profile since the fall of the First Republic could now be blamed for everything that was going wrong.

The second event that sparked off the downward trajectory of the public service stemmed from the first. In July 1975, the Gowon regime was overthrown by officers who had felt alienated and had grown increasingly distant from Gowon after the war. In what would become standard operating procedure throughout the military era, the new regime accused its predecessor of corruption and economic mismanagement. It is not surprising that the pent-up resentments that had trailed the prominence of senior civil servants, and their presumed proximity to and influence on Gowon, which had annoyed both politicians and military officers, led to the targeting of the public service.

This led to a massive and unprecedented purge of the public services and over 11, 000 people were retired or dismissed. In any country, this was a large number of people to lose. In a developing country suffering endemic manpower shortage, there would be adverse repercussions.

The purge was executed in a matter of weeks and 'with immediate effect', a phrase popularized by the military rulers of the time. It was also carried out without regard for due process. Civil service regulations that allowed fair hearing in disciplinary proceedings were set aside. There was no attempt to observe simple procedures of natural justice. Civil servants often heard their dismissal or retirement on the radio stemming from complaints about their conduct that were not even brought to their notice.

Like the Udoji Awards, the purge proved counter-productive. Civil servants who had taken risks to expedite government business or had been loyal enough not to publicly air their disagreements with the government were among those fired. Their successors learned to avoid taking risks to infuse urgency in government processes and discarded any notion of loyalty that would imperil their own careers. This persistent theme of insecurity and uncertainty helped inform the mentality of survivalist careerism that would later become associated with public servants. It is an attitude that dictates taking full advantage, including illicit benefits, from one's position in the service because there is no telling when one might be sacked.

It is ironical that a purge designed ostensibly to rid the public service of corruption ended up entrenching it. Indeed, every ill that the authors of the purge claimed to be seeking to eradicate was fortified instead. The failings of the purge demonstrate the limitations of messianic authoritarianism and the fallibility of dictators who claimed to be able to perform developmental miracles. In this very instance, the notion that the military could impose radical and dramatic change with positive effects on public life turned out to be disastrous for the public service.  In subsequent years, military dictators would continue to tinker with the public service, often using its senior positions as carrots of patronage, politicizing and debasing it in the process, until the impression of public service as a channel of corrupt self-enrichment became indelibly stamped in the national consciousness.  The erstwhile institutional values of productivity, initiative, risk-taking, innovation, morale and loyalty to the government of the day have been adversely impacted. These deficiencies continue to plague the public service to this day.                

The Devaluation of the Public Realm: The Myth of a Private-Sector Driven Society

Since the mid-1980s, successive regimes have adopted privatization virtually as the sole direction and design of all government policies. The predominant understanding of this view is that the goals of growth and development that we seek are best pursued by unshackling free enterprise and allowing the market to generate these outcomes. It has become a kind of governmental orthodoxy. The mantra of private sector-led growth has been articulated in such a way as to suggest that the public sector is irrelevant to the quest for national prosperity.

The inefficiency, waste and graft that famously characterized state-owned enterprises have been seized upon as an omnibus justification for the wholesale privatization of the state. The most tragic impact of this orientation has been the commoditization of public goods like healthcare and education which have been priced out of the reach of the majority of our citizens. The undermining of the public sector since the 1980s is most powerfully reflected in the virtual collapse of public education, infrastructure and healthcare. Witness the dilapidation of our schools and hospitals, the decrepitude of our infrastructure and the disappearance of public libraries. A whole generation of Nigerians has grown into maturity with scant experience of what we used to call social services.

It is one thing to argue that the government needs not concern itself with running hotels or breweries. It is quite another to propose a retreat from social services such as education and healthcare. These are public goods vital to the advance of any society. Widening access to them should be a core value of any progressive government. In the last few decades, the prevalent sentiment among policy makers has been to see these critical public goods as commodities better left to the free market. Private schools and private hospitals are all the rage. The impression that has been fostered is that the "private" is superior to the "public." Although, in moments of candour when we discuss as concerned citizens and parents, we usually admit that the standards in private hospitals leave a lot to be desired. In such moments, we admit too that despite the very high fees that we have to pay private schools to obtain a decent education for our children, what they have to offer is inferior to the education that the public schools of yore dished out.

With such commonly shared observations, it is a surprise that the debate has not revolved around reclaiming the public sector and reclaiming the notion of education and healthcare as public goods rather than commodities up for grabs by the highest bidders.

Consider the banking scandals of 2008-2009 in which top bankers allocated unsecured loans to themselves and their cronies, fed fat on depositors' funds and brought their banks to the brink of collapse. A number of bank chief executives were removed by the Central Bank of Nigeria while the banks were subjected to administrative protocols to stave off a full scale financial collapse that would have bankrupted businesses, households and individuals on a massive scale. Some of the bankers were also prosecuted. But the crisis escalated to the extent that it did because of a very lax regulatory environment which in itself reflected the long term degradation of public sector capacities.

The scandals exposed the wanton violation of business ethics and corporate governance codes by entrepreneurs who recognized no fidelity to their customers or duty to society at large. Among the many lessons to be learned from the banking crisis is the fact that the public sector has no monopoly of corruption neither is the private sector populated by saints. Without proper policing and institutional oversight, actors, whether they are in the private sector or public service, will be corrupt and self-aggrandizing.

The fact is that no matter how private sector-driven we aspire to be, authentic economic growth is impossible without a competent public sector. There are spaces that can only be administered by a functional public service. Not everything can be privatized nor should every area of society be surrendered to the whims and caprices of market forces. Indeed, the calling of public service is to see that the pursuit of profits is submitted to the higher imperatives of the common good.

My Oga at the Top and Matters Arising

Recently, a senior official of the National Security and Civil Defence Corps performed poorly in a live television interview in which he was unable to give his agency's website address pleading his unwillingness to offer information that might be later contradicted by his superior officer. His somewhat incoherent response and his excessively fawning reference to his ultimate superior as "My Oga at the top" made him the butt of several satirical skits that soon went viral and made the rounds on social media.

The official's performance illustrated not just his own limitations but the deficiencies of his organization's culture, indeed, the defects of the public service at large.  Certainly, it exhibited the culture of sycophantic deference to authority figures which made the official himself, a senior executive of the agency, act as though the organization's website address was classified information. It exposed the corps as a hidebound hierarchy that is out of touch and out of step with the times. It also demonstrated the inadequacies of excessive regimental mentalities and rigid hierarchies in a culture in which authority is venerated at a time when the information revolution ushered in by technology is proving subversive of hierarchical systems.

Under this system, the main operative assumption is that all expertise is situated at the top of the organization while the other levels of the organization exist as instrumentalities for executing the will of the top. In other words, the brain of the organization is located at the very apex of the pyramid, while the rest of the organization are mere limbs, incapable of acting on any initiatives or original impulses of their own accord.

The practical effect of this is that policies are designed at the top and far removed from any interaction with the environment, and consequently insulated from the aptitudes developed at the front lines. By the time the feedback reaches the capital city, the headquarters or the boardroom, it is too late.

The senior NSCDC official has been removed from his post but some will argue with some justice that he has been made a scapegoat for embodying the defects of the dominant institutional culture. The times call for organizational climates designed to tap into the wisdom of the multitudes rather than the power of the few. It is about sharing power with the people, not exercising power over them. It is about genuine curiosity and revelation through dialogue, interaction and discovery. Are we fostering institutional conditions that enable public servants to take greater responsibility and demonstrate initiative, secure in the knowledge that they will not be victimized for failure or branded over-ambitious prima donnas trying to outshine their superiors?

            Building a competent public service prepared to meet the challenges of the 21^st century head on calls for the demolition of the fossilized hierarchies that have paralyzed our bureaucracies and the construction of collegial systems that leverage the collective wisdom of the organization's people rather than the presumed infallibility of a few wise men at the top. In practical terms, this means moving from a leadership culture of fear and intimidation to one based on mutual respect, civility, consensus and dialogue. We have to create an environment in which initiative, independent-mindedness, non-conformism and creative thinking are encouraged and rewarded, not punished.

The Public Service as a Developmental Vocation

What is at issue is the very idea of public service as a dimension in which we come together to pool our talents and gifts in order to protect and project our common interest. This notion of public service has been lost for decades and needs to be restored. Public servants, regardless of how high or low their station, are the preservers of the common good. We must no longer see the public service as an irrelevant organization filled with slothful errand boys and errand girls. On the contrary, it is the engine of governance and the fulcrum of policy implementation.

One of the main reasons for the gulf between policy conception and execution is the scant attention paid to the people which are actually charged with executing. High-sounding policy initiatives are often announced with much fanfare only to die almost immediately because the strategic role of the public service as the policy vehicle has not been factored in. With very low or non-existent levels of buy-in among civil servants, it is no surprise that these initiatives are dead on arrival. Much of the sloth and lethargy frequently attributed to civil servants mirrors how lowly they are esteemed in the calculus of governance and policy architecture.

Revitalizing public service goes beyond issues of working conditions and morale. These are, of course, important but they are only a tip of the iceberg. The real key is to restore a missionary sense of purpose to the public service; to get civil servants to see their work in sacramental terms at the altar of a transcendent purpose. To this end, political leaders have to see themselves as being organically bound with civil servants in the service of the common good. Restoring the lost idea of public service means modeling a culture of servant leadership in which political executives see and define themselves as servants. It also means creating an atmosphere in which rank and status cease to be important and pale in comparison to the task of achieving excellence.

Meritocracy and Its Discontents                      

One of the instructive portents of the shifts in societal attitudes regarding the public service is how it is seen by the young. For young talented Nigerians from the 1950s to the 1970s, the glamour jobs that offered opportunities to fulfill their potential and demonstrate their abilities were in the public sector. It is not so at present. Young Nigerians today want to work in oil and gas, banking and telecoms. Public service holds no attraction for them. It is basically seen as a last resort. I submit that there is a problem when the public service cannot tap into the rich store of idealism, vigour, passion and enthusiasm which the society's youths can bring to bear on any endeavour. Far from just being the stuff of youthful exuberance, these are the very energies that drive national progress. It is no accident that public sector agencies in advanced countries aggressively head hunt talented youths even while they are still in universities. It was once the fashion in Nigeria for government agencies to seek out talent in higher institutions.

The sharp change in how public service has come to be seen has to do with trends which over the last thirty years have changed the dynamics of public sector employment.   One of the main means of measuring organizational health is evaluating the relationship between work and reward. It is a highly critical index of motivation.

What sorts of people are celebrated in our public service? What virtues are esteemed? Is hard work a reliable pathway to reward and recognition? What is the nature of our reward system? These are all salient questions as we consider the transformation of the public service in the 21^st century.

For decades, recruitment into public service has been guided by the desire for a representative bureaucracy that expresses all of our diversity as a people. The constitutionally-enshrined federal character principle is designed to achieve this goal. Under the 'Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy' first set forth by the Constitution Drafting Committee in 1978, the provision proclaimed that 'The composition of the federal government or any of its agencies and the conduct of their affairs shall be carried out in such manner as to recognize the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity and command national loyalty. Accordingly, the predominance in that government or its agencies of persons from a few states or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups shall be avoided." A similar provision was crafted in respect to both state and local governments. This idea was embodied in the federal character doctrine established in the 1979 constitution and retained in subsequent constitutions since that period.

The notion of a representative bureaucracy that reflects the diversity of a society and the crafting of statutory measures to enhance a broader participation in the processes of governance is a laudable goal. Affirmative action programmes exist in various formats in countries such as the United States, South Africa and Australia. It is a mechanism for creating equality of opportunity in racially and culturally diverse societies ensuring that social harmony is maintained. However, in Nigeria the pursuit of equal opportunity in the form of a representative bureaucracy has been conducted in such a way that it has negated merit as a factor in public sector recruitment. The recruitment parameters are circumscribed almost entirely by questions of identity i.e. the ethnicity, state of origin or religion of the prospective public servant.

Even promotions within the system are guided by such concerns. Obsessed with creating parity between ethnicities, states and faiths in the public service, or preventing the presumed dominance of particular groups, the small matter of who is best qualified or who possesses the requisite skills for the job, which should be the overriding consideration, is overlooked. The quest for ethnic balancing and sectional arithmetic in the public service including strategic branches such as the armed forces, the security and intelligence agencies and law enforcement administrations, has often led to the retirement of whole cohorts of officials in order to pave way for the "right person" to fill a leadership position. In the process, we have sustained huge losses of trained manpower, repositories of institutional wisdom and experience who should otherwise be serving as mentors to incoming generations. These ill-conceived turnovers have also fuelled the loss of confidence within the public service. This explains the lack of institutional memory that characterizes official bureaucracies today. There is a distinct textural and qualitative difference between public servants of yore and their contemporary descendants.

The bizarre paradox of affirmative action programmes that pursue equal opportunity within the bureaucracy at the expense of merit and institutional performance is that they cannot ultimately lead to a more equal and just society. Only a public service populated and led by our best and brightest can justly and efficiently provide the public goods such as education, healthcare and housing that will create a truly egalitarian society. Only such a meritocratic system can deliver excellence. By opting for the low hanging fruit of equal opportunity at all costs within the official bureaucracy, we have sacrificed the means by which we can achieve a truly equal society. Worse still, we have encouraged the politicization of the public sector, its perversion as a zone of patronage where politicians can reward cronies and party loyalists with positions and the perception that it is a theatre of sectarian contestation by sectional champions purporting to seek positional advantages for the narrow constituencies and interests they claim to be representing. Indeed, the default assumption at the heart of the way the public service is run is that its purpose is simply "representation" rather than "service."

 

Dynamic Sub-National Civil Service Reforms – Ekiti State, Nigeria's Experience

 

At its inception in October 2010, the Dr Kayode Fayemi administration announced an 8-Point Agenda with consummate objectives for the socio-economic transformation of Ekiti State, Nigeria.

The administration recognized the critical importance of the Civil Service as a major instrument for ensuring the successful implementation of the agenda and therefore instituted a Civil Service Transformation Strategy (CSTS) to address obvious challenges to Public Administration in Public Sector Management. These observable challenges include:

 

• Appointment of partisan politicians with inadequate pre-requisite experience into regulatory bodies e.g CSC, TSC, LGSC, SIEC e.t.c, and consequent compromise of due process and procedures particularly on issues of appointments and discipline.
• Inadequate motivation of officers manifesting in less  than decent pay, poor training, inadequate working tools leading to vulnerability of little-minded officers in corruption and low productivity, Noticeable on-set  of labour agitation and industrial disharmony.
• Mass recruitment unrelated to actual personnel needs leading to an over-bloated bureaucracy. Oversized Public Service in Contemporary Public Service of the country is a big challenge as the recurrent expenditure profile in most States of the Federation takes over 85% of the entire revenue that accrues to the State. While little or nothing is left for the delivery of public goods.
• Nepotism such that many political office holders tended to feel more "at home" with their kiths and kins rather than better qualified and more efficient officials.
• Obsolete Civil Service Regulations and slackness in enforcement.
• Unwieldy MDAs and overlap of structures and functions. Over bloated workforce often weakens control measures.
• Ethical issues of lack of accountability, corruption, ghost worker syndrome, certificate forgery, age falsification etc.
• Inefficiency due to low level professionalism, poor training and re-training, inadequate work tools and lethargy on the part of officers.

The CSTS Has Six Key Result Areas:

• Effective Governance of the Civil Service
• Organizational Efficiency and Effectiveness
• Professional and Result-Orientated Civil Servants
• Ethical and Accountable Workforce with a Changed Work Culture
• Improved Competence of Civil Servants
• Improved Public Financial Management

The Transformation Strategy was quickly approved by the Ekiti State Executive Council while Government had also established an Office of Transformation Strategy & Delivery (OTSD) to supervise and entrench the initiatives.

We adopted a merit-based system of appointments and promotion of civil servants, including at the highest levels of the bureaucracy. The chief bureaucrats, including the Head of Service, Permanent Secretaries, and the Accountant-General, were all selected through an open and competitive process. In an environment which had been dominated by patrimonialism and clientelism, this was a transformative step and it has led to the rejuvenation of the civil service, such that we now have civil servants who are capable of driving the people-focussed policies and programmes of the government.

Herein lies the position of the Government of Ekiti State on merit based appointment and elevation in its public service and written examination in all its cadres which made headlines in the local press.

Happily, the Federal Government also recently inaugurated its own Committee on Transformation in the Federal Public Service. It is therefore my hope that with these reforms and transformation agenda, the proper place of Public Administration in Public Sector Management shall be restored and our public services across the country shall witness the following:

 

• Greater Strategic Thinking and Planning
• Improved Operational Efficiency:  Doing More and Better with Less
• More Customer – Focused  Civil service
• More Focused and Talented Civil Service with Honest Leadership
• Greater Transparency and Accountability
• Proper Monitoring and Evaluation of Projects  and Service Delivery
• More Engagement with Staff and Customers
• A Highly  Competent and Professional  Civil service

It  is believed and very strongly too that in a matter of time, the Nigerian Public Service shall be guided again by reliance on a set of values which will propel and guide it to function  efficiently and effectively as the administrative machinery of government for the promotion of the Common goods. The values, which are universal, are very well articulated in the balanced framework of four groups of value as categorized hereunder by the Canadian Public service:

• Democratic Values: Helping Ministers, under law, to serve the public interest
• Professional Values: Serving with competence, excellence, efficiency, objectivity and impartiality.
• Ethical Values: Acting at all times in such a way as to uphold the public trust
• People Values: demonstrating respect, fairness and courtesy in their dea ling with the Public

These values are indeed universal and easily adaptable to any civil service structure anywhere in the world, regardless of the peculiarities of the local environment. The Government of Ekiti State, Nigeria have domesticated and adopted these values.

 

Conclusion

 

In discussing the future of public service in Nigeria, it is impossible to exhaustively cover the vast theoretical and practical field in the limited time allotted at this forum. Even so, we can lay down certain markers upon which further conversation will proceed. To my mind, the imperatives are clear. The challenges of development that we face as a young nation cannot be met with an indifference to public service and an uncritical acceptance of laissez faire mantras. Rather, as I have argued the public service is the missing link in the policy discourse. The dignity and prestige of the public service has to be restored. Cultural and structural changes are necessary in this regard. It is absolutely essential that the public sector is made a meritocracy shorn of the warped affirmative action schemes that have enthroned mediocrity. Secondly, entrenching an institutional culture that empowers public servants to exercise their initiative and take greater responsibility is vital. Thirdly, rediscovering the public service as the primary vehicle of policy implementation and execution is necessary.

There is a need to review the working conditions of our public servants; to see to it that they are justly rewarded for their efforts and that they can live healthy productive lives. However, we must not restrict the conversation about improving productivity and efficiency to fiscal motivation. Too often in our recent history, the debate over this issue, as conducted by the government and organized labour has been simplistic and zero sum with one side arguing for more money and the other arguing for less. Framing the debate in coarsely monetary terms not only fails to adequately capture the extent of the problem; it limits our ability to craft holistic solutions.

During the 1970s, the radical academic Bala Usman argued that the Udoji Awards had made the public service more mercenary and that the desire for private accumulation of wealth, whetted by the awards, had paralyzed them. As he put it, "Reducing somebody who teaches his brothers and sisters, or sees to their health, safety and well-being to the same level as one who sells toothpaste or cigarettes ...aligning the public with the private sector – is to subvert the very essence of public service." While it was necessary to improve working conditions, he contended that this goal ought not to have been interpreted strictly in terms of fiscal inducement. Better facilities, equipment and more humane regulations should be pursued but the main thrust for improving public service performance should be in instilling patriotic commitment and selfless discipline through training and practical examples set by the leadership.

The task of creating an efficient public service is inseparable from the calling of political leadership to motivate, inspire and rally a corps of public servants with whom they will jointly seek to actualize the people's aspirations for a better quality of life. It is only in this way that the quest for the better life can be properly institutionalized and thereby go beyond the politician's tenure. No matter how gifted a politician may be, his ultimate success lies in his ability to strengthen institutions so that they can function optimally independent of his own exertions. The public service is the designated site of this success.

The reforms that we need call for political leaders to set the right tone in terms of professional and public conduct, in their approach to the task of governance and the sanctity they accord to the people's mandate. Political leadership which is itself an instrument of public service is a sacred trust. The challenges of the hour call for politicians and civil servants – all public servants – to plumb new depths in fulfilling the ideal of leadership as service.

In a nutshell, these constitute the clear and urgent imperatives of governance that we must address in our time. We simply have no alternative to a public service that works. Indeed, Nigeria will work better for everyone when we have a public sector that works.

Thank you for listening.

SOURCES

 

• Alex Gboyega, "The Public Service and Federal Character," P.P. Ekeh & E.E. Osaghae, eds., Federal Character and Federalism in Nigeria (Heinemann Educational Books Ltd 1989)
• Adewale Ajadi, Omoluwabi 2.0: A Code of 21^st Century for Nigeria (Bookcraft 2012)
• Chris Ngwodo, Revolution By Other Means: The Challenge of Nigeria's Emerging Generation (Afriscope Publishing 2009)
• Yusufu Bala Usman, For the Liberation of Nigeria: Essays and Lectures 1969 – 1978 (New Beacon Books 1979)
• P. Chiedo Asiodu, "The Civil Service: An Insider's View," Oyeleye Oyediran, ed., Nigerian Government and Politics Under Military Rule 1966 – 1979 (The Macmillan Press Ltd 1979)

Via: Ekiti State Government - Official Press Release

Ekiti State is a developing state I must say. We can all see signs that the state is reaLly improving.  I kudos the Governor.