Reforming Nigeria’s Federal Civil Service: Problems and Prospects

Abstract

Successive Nigerian administrations have pursued one variant of reform or another in the federal civil service since the country’s attainment of political independence. Yet, the federal civil service, as an essential organ of the executive arm of the government, still requires more reforms. The problems that instigated the introduction of a series of reforms in the federal civil service in 1999 consequent upon the inauguration of the democratic government included erosion of public service ethics, ageing workforce, poor succession planning, inappropriate organisational structures, unproductive work operations, lack of competent leadership, etc. However, these problems are currently the same problems facing the federal civil service after 16 years of implementation of reforms by the government of Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP). However, the emergence of a new government with its populist and progressive policy thrust, the rising awareness among civil servants, the global obligation of the Nigerian government to public service reforms, the proven efficacy of the ballot as an instrument for effecting change of government, coupled with the readily available support of donor agencies, which together, have the prospects of creating the right political atmosphere for the implementation of requisite reforms in the Nigerian federal civil service with utmost efficiency and likelihood of success.

Keywords

Reforms civil service public service civil service reforms public service reforms service improvement

Introduction

The Nigerian federal civil service is a product of the country’s political and historical development. Specifically, the Nigerian federal civil service has been a subject of a series of reforms from the colonial to the post-colonial epochs of its existence. The post-colonial history of the country’s civil service would depict the institution as a bureaucratic appendage of the ruling military administrations that dominated the political landscape of the country during which period the culture of impunity was entrenched in the service as evident in the draconian retrenchment of several thousand civil servants in 1975 in one fell swoop on flimsy grounds without due process. That action of the military administration was then portrayed as one aimed at ridding the civil service of corruption, indolence and indiscipline. However, that singular event unleashed a traumatic scourge of insecurity on the psyche of the Nigerian civil servants who began to nurse all manner of defensive attitudes to mitigate future reoccurrence of such untoward episode. No doubt numerous reforms had since been implemented in the service that had also led to the retrenchment or retirement of several thousand civil servants purportedly on grounds of policy.

It would be recalled that before the notorious purge of the civil service in 1975, there had been a number of colonial and post-colonial review commissions which addressed different challenges facing the public service generally at different times. However, of all the past reform initiatives, the Nigerian federal civil service would appear to have been broadly impacted by the numerous reform policies and programmes of the fourth republic. The advent of civil rule in 1999 instigated the desire to reposition the Nigerian federal civil service which was believed to have degenerated and lacking the orientation required for delivering dividends of democracy to the long-suffering citizens of the country. The problems of the civil service keep renewing itself from one administration to another under the democratic system of government regardless of the numerous reforms that had been introduced. It is this development that depicts the Nigerian federal civil service as being afflicted with a malignant malady which has seemingly defied all therapies.

This article critically highlights the current problems of the Nigerian federal civil service against the backdrop of the previous and ongoing efforts by the government to implement requisite reforms. In the first section, the why and the how of the reforms comprising the process and organs driving the reforms are briefly examined. The second section, which is an elaborate one, analyses the problems that are currently bedeviling the Nigerian federal civil service. The factors that could enhance the prospects of reforming the country’s Federal civil service are considered with specific reference to the new policy thrust of the Buhari administration in the third section which also concludes the article.

The Why and the How, and the Organs Driving the Federal Civil Service Reforms

Why Reform?

Reform is a process of effecting change in order to make things work better. It is a planned and systematic intervention aimed at producing a fundamental change involving innovation, modernisation and attitudinal reorientation in terms of values and service delivery (Abuja, Bureau of Public Service Reforms, 2005, p. 5). The underlining reason for reform in the civil service is the quest to bring about improvement in both the processes and quality of service delivery. Any effort directed at service improvement whether in terms of reequipping, retooling, provision of requisite infrastructure and the promotion of supportive attitudinal and behavioural superstructure could be described as a reform initiative (ibid., p. 9).

The civil service is the policy making and implementing organ of the executive arm of the government. The dividends of governance would elude the citizenry if the civil service is incapacitated or defective. A country can only develop as much as the level of its civil service. There is a general acceptance that public sector performance has a significant impact on total economic performance (Shand, 1997). This is so because the civil service is supposed to be the intellectual capital of the nation but, in fact as a result of political corruption, the civil service has become the dumpsite for ill-equipped, ill-trained and half-baked products of our rapidly decaying universities and other tertiary institutions (Olowu, 2010). Aside from the dearth of skilled personnel in the civil service, there is the unjustifiable belief that governments of developing countries could not pay for high-quality civil service due to poverty of their economies (ibid., pp. 632–633).

In our increasingly globalising world, the development challenges confronting nations of the world can only be unraveled by knowledge-driven approaches. That is why countries of the world keep exposing their civil services to well-conceived knowledge-driven reforms in order to grapple with unfolding and emerging challenges. In the last three decades, a good number of African countries have subjected their civil services to one form of reforms or another (Olowu, 2010, p. 640). For a good number of these countries, the concerns included the need to prune public expenditure by contracting the size of their public sectors as a way of yielding greater space for private sector participation in their economies. In Nigeria, government found justification in 2005 and 2006 for disengaging numerous personnel of the public sector especially in the civil service, through a combination of the policies of right-sizing, down-sizing and retrenchment or retirement (Abuja, Bureau of Public Service Reforms, 2005, p. 12). These policies were supposedly meant to ease out unwanted elements from the civil service while creating the space for much-needed skillful and well-trained personnel (ibid., p. 14).

The whole essence of embarking on civil service reforms particularly during the extant democratic dispensation is to ensure that the service is restructured to be able to provide necessary support to the government in the pursuit of good governance which would ensure the delivery of democracy dividends (Abuja, Bureau of Public Service Reforms, 2005, p. 15). In embarking on perceived desirable reforms, certain institutional organs were created by government to drive the reform process.

Process and Organs of the Reforms

There are three organs responsible for the country’s public service reforms. These are the National Council on Reforms (NCR), Steering Committee on Reforms (SCR) and the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR). The NCR, which is headed by the president, is the highest organ for the overall coordination of the reform process but because it sparingly meets questions are raised about the relevance of its existence. The SCR, which comprises 26 members, is expected to provide technical leadership for the reforms at the level of planning, design and implementation while also providing high-level strategic guidance to the BPSR. In March 2015, the SCR approved the updated National Strategy on Public Service Reform (NSPSR). However, the unwieldiness of the SCR still remains a problem for the BPSR which does not need such lethargic and inactive SCR (Bureau of Public Service reform, 2014, pp. 80–88).

The NSPSR was put together by some experts from the academia with insignificant inputs from the public service. The approval of the strategy document coming towards the tail end of the Jonathan administration in March 2015 recommends it for necessary modifications that would take into account the new policy directions of the Buhari administration. The NSPSR devolves reform responsibilities to key institutions in each of the four pillars to which public service reforms were classified, namely, an enabling institutional and governance environment, an enabling socio-economic environment, public financial management reforms and civil service administration reforms. The BPSR seems to be concerned about the development of some abstract theoretical matrices on public service reforms which were not derived from any practical experiential engagement with the ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs). This methodology makes its templates on the civil service reforms largely utopian, speculative and conjectural because they are not based on any empirical analysis of the objective conditions of the MDAs. This is the reason why the BPSR lacks vital statistics on the MDAs. The BPSR has to deepen its engagement with the MDAs by establishing a monitoring and evaluation regime to ensure effective coordination of reforms in the MDAs, thereby creating a feedback mechanism that would further facilitate its work. This should not be difficult with the recent establishment of Reform Coordination and Service Improvement Department in some ministries by the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation (OHCSF).

The issue of who funds the BPSR is also very important in determining the kind of reforms it will pursue and how it would implement it to achieve its predetermined outcomes. Since inception, the BPSR has been dependent on donor funding with insignificant support from the federal government for its programmes which were donor-derived. The UK Department for International Development (DFID) has been funding the Federal Public Administration Reform Programme (FEPAR) which was conceived as a 5-year ₦ 6 billion (6 billion naira) programme running from 2011 to 2016. However, recently, the budget for the programme was increased to ₦8 billion, while the time scale remains unchanged (Ekott, 2013). It is noteworthy that the FEPAR which has been working with the BPSR, OHCSF, FCSC, National Planning Commission (NPC), and Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF) and government’s service delivery arm (SERVICOM) has observed some measure of resistance to its programmes by vested interests benefiting from the current arrangement (ibid.). The BPSR would need to deepen its engagement with the MDAs from where inputs for its programmes should be derived not by the donor agencies.

The Problems of the Nigerian Federal Civil Service

What are these problems? What efforts were made and are being made to solve the problems? How and why did these problems become intractable? An attempt is made below to answer these questions from the standpoint of the ongoing reforms in the Nigerian federal civil service which have been targeted, presumably, at some of the following problems.

Erosion of Public Service Values

Such values as selflessness, integrity, loyalty, professionalism, transparency, accountability, discipline, neutrality, impartiality and patriotism have over the years been eroded in the Nigerian federal civil service. This problem was perceived to be at the heart of the decadence that almost pervaded the entire fabric of the country’s public service.¹ However, the loss of public service values could be seen as both the explanatory or causative variable of the problems in the service as well as a dependent variable, in which case it could be the resultant effect of other problems. In other words, the loss of values could be a symptom of other problems, thereby making the loss of values a consequence of other problems in the country’s civil service. A civil servant whose salary could barely guarantee his existence could be vulnerable to the lucrative and attractive appeals of corrupt practices and other anti-public service conducts.

There is a realisation on the part of the FCSC and the OHCSF that concrete steps have to be taken to sensitise all the civil servants on the essentials of public service ethos and values. It was this consideration that gave rise to the conduct of a number of induction workshops by these offices at different times for different categories of serving officers. These induction workshops were expected to alter the behavioural and attitudinal disposition of civil servants in a desirable way with the ultimate aim of institutionalising service ethos. However, that assumption was faulty. A one-off sensitisation programme with a very short duration of one week, regardless of the quality of its organisation, could only have an infinitesimal impact on the participants.

It is not enough to just organise workshops without taking complementary steps to ameliorate the sordid situations that predisposed these civil servants to anti-public service conducts.

Ageing Workforce

As a result of a combination of factors including falsification of records, alteration of birth records, indiscriminate transfer of personnel from state civil services and other services into the federal civil service with fictitious records, etc., the federal civil service is today over-populated with over aged personnel. When older people are refusing to exit the service, there would be no space for new and more vibrant entrants (Public Service Reform, 2005). This problem is an indication that records of serving officers are amenable to alteration and falsification. The possibility of indulging in such criminality could have entailed the inducement of relevant officers in charge of records by some dubious officers who desired to effect alteration of their service records in order to prolong their stay in the service. Falsification of records is a gross misconduct punishable with dismissal according to the public service rules (PSR) but the culprits have always had their way without anyone of them being visibly sanctioned to serve as a deterrent.²

In what could be considered as an official admission of the existence of the evil of records alteration, the OHCSF which has the responsibility to manage and preserve records of officers in the country’s civil service among other functions took steps in 2008 to implement records reform in the service (Abuja, Bureau of Public Service Reforms, 2014, p. 68). The records reform entailed the relocation of the records unit of the OHCSF to a separate building which was well equipped with requisite computer gadgets and information, communication technology (ICT) network systems to facilitate easy processing, storage and retrieval of staff data (ibid., 2014). However, because the records reform in question was not far reaching enough, having left out the need to analyse current staff records in order to fish out those who falsified or altered their records for necessary sanction, its achievements remain inconsequential.

Poor Succession Planning

The very indication of this entrenched problem is when serving officers’ career progressions are hindered by the reckless injection of transferees from other services into the federal civil service, with the unintended consequences of obstructing the upward movement of serving officers. The worst hit are serving officers in the directorate cadre who are often denied promotion on grounds of lack of vacancy, and this has been demoralising the affected officers to a very great extent.³ It should be noted that the inception of civil rule in 1999 came with its own challenges which included among others the progressive politicisation of appointments into the federal civil service by the politicians, particularly those in the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) at the federal level who feel a strong desire to give ‘democracy dividends’ to their constituents (Adegoroye, 2006). So great was the pressure on the FCSC—the executive body responsible for the appointment, promotion and discipline of all officers in the federal civil service—that the FCSC buckled under such harassments to bring in ill-prepared persons into leadership positions in the service in utter disregard of its own extant rules.

Apparently sensing the imminent revolt that its actions could incur from serving officers whose career progressions were being suppressed, the FCSC issued a circular in 2012 to the effect that ‘transfers into the Federal Civil Service have been put on hold indefinitely’ (CKN Nigeria, 2013). However, the circular in question was observed more in breaches, as the FCSC had since the issuance of it brought several officers into the federal civil service on directorate grades from other services including even the private sector without following the due process. Of course, the FCSC has often latched on some presidential directives as alibi for such indiscriminate transfer of personnel into the federal civil service. True, there was a presidential directive that states of the federation that lacked directors in the federal civil service should be encouraged to transfer such personnel from the identified states of the federation to the federal service in order to give credence to the federal character policy which is often applied to government bureaucracy at the federal level.⁴ However, in implementing the presidential directive, the FCSC has often compromised its rules with the implication that persons who lacked requisite qualifications and work experience are injected into the federal civil service solely on grounds of those persons’ political persuasions and connections without any consideration of their professional competences.

Weak or Inappropriate Organisational Structures

This problem has necessitated the creation of new structures from old ones or in some instances, the outright scrapping of unwanted structures. Recently, some parastatals were scrapped because they were viewed as unwanted duplication of already existing ones. Some other parastatals were merged with other ones in existence. New cadres have been created such as procurement officer cadre, while some departments including Reform Coordination Department, General Services Department and Special Duties’ Department were all newly created by the OHCSF. The objective of merging or scrapping duplicated parastatals was to curtail wastage of government funds by streamlining government expenditure profile.⁵ In addition, the scrapped parastatals were found to be of negligible benefit to the country’s economy. Some of them were even involved in jurisdictional tussle with other ones with similar functions.

It is remarkable that the decision to create some new departments was rooted in the desire to ensure that officers newly promoted to the post of director (administration) have functional schedules, and thus could be deployed to occupy those posts in ministries that were undergoing some reforms for which Reform Coordination Departments were so created by the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HOCSF) (Abuja, Bureau of Public Service Reforms, 2014, p. 31). Thus, only ministries with ongoing reform programmes had directors (reform coordination) deployed to them. Also these Reform Coordination Departments were expected to collaborate with the BPSR for their operations. While the procurement cadre and procurement department could be said to have acquired value and stability in the structure of the federal civil service over time, having come into existence since 2005, the Reform Coordination Department and the General Services Department which were recently created in March 2014 have no professional cadre of their own.

It has to be pointed out for instance that the deployment of reform directors to some ministries which led to the creation of reform coordination is not without its shortcomings. First, preceding the deployment, the affected officers were neither given any specialised training by the OHCSF nor by BPSR, a situation that makes them ill-prepared for the challenges of their new duty posts. Second, the deployment of reform directors disregarded the educational attainment and professional competence of the affected officers.⁶ Third, the nature and extent of the relationship that should exist between the BPSR and reform coordination department were not defined.

Unproductive Work Operations and Systems

The Nigerian federal civil service is not as productive as it ought to be because of some structural and cultural factors. Its overdependence on hierarchical structure of control has negative effects on creativity and productivity. There is no rig-proof system for assessing staff performance in the Nigerian federal civil service in which particularistic and subjective criteria hold sway in the evaluation of staff performance. The situation is such that on-job assessment does not, in any significant way, determine the promotability of serving officers, and this means that a good number of very productive, efficient and hardworking officers could stagnate on the same grade without promotion for years on grounds that they were assessed to have failed some promotion examination which their indolent, inefficient and unproductive colleagues had passed. The truth of the matter is that the so-called promotion examinations being conducted by the FCSC are subjective as they are ridden with all forms of corrupt practices including favouritism, nepotism, bribery and some other forms of particularistic considerations. For instance, the 2014 FCSC Promotion Examination for Directorate level Officers threw up a number of controversies regarding the credibility and integrity of its results.⁷

The pervasive belief that what you know is not as important as who you know in the determination of your career prospects in the Nigerian federal civil service is a disincentive for excellence and productivity. The reification of persons at the expense of processes and institutions is inhibiting operations in the service. Duties ought and should be assigned to officers with the requisite competences. In addition, adherence to hierarchy in the country’s civil service has robbed the civil service of the tremendous benefits of accessing bottom-up initiatives that could emanate from brilliant and highly creative officers in the lower rung of the ladder of authority. There is no current effort to identify and nurture gifted officers at whatever level of operation in the service with a view to encouraging them to actualise their potentials.

The Preponderance of ‘Ghost Workers’

The phenomenon of ‘ghost workers’ in the civil service was responsible for the huge wage bill in the country’s recurrent expenditure in periods preceding the fourth republic in 1999. This phenomenon entailed the injection of fictitious and non-existent persons in the personnel budgets of most government MDAs. To exhume the ghost workers and expunge them from the service, the government in 2001 directed the conduct of service-wide personnel screening and audit, which was centrally organised by the OHCSF. The exercise which involved the screening of personnel records of officers and required them to present the originals of their credentials spanned a period of almost 2 months. However, the exercise did not achieve its objective of expelling the ghost workers and fishing out unqualified officers or those with fictitious records. This was so because in the course of the exercise, some critical elements in the country alleged that the exercise was aimed at easing out officers from the northern parts of the country from the service.⁸ Thus, though the exercise was concluded, there was no follow-up action as no report on its findings was processed to the government by the OHCSF which was headed by Alhaji Mahmud Yayale Ahmed, a northerner from Bauchi state.

However, as the government that was in the saddle gained some confidence after having won a re-election in 2003, there was a renewed commitment to its programme of reforms in the public sector. Consequently, another method known as the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) which was aimed at plugging the loopholes in the payroll systems in the civil service and ensure the removal of ghost workers from the payroll systems in some pilot ministries, was introduced in 2005, and proved to be very effective and result oriented because all the ghost workers in the pilot ministries were unearthed and expunged from their payrolls (Abuja, Bureau of Public Service Reforms, 2014, pp. 66–67). Subsequently, the IPPIS was progressively extended to all other MDAs of government between 2007 and 2015.

Currently, all the emoluments of the MDAs are incorporated into the IPPIS, and it is unreasonable to contemplate the existence of ghost workers in any such centralised payroll. However, recently, the Minister of Finance asserted that some ghost workers had just been cleaned off the IPPIS, thereby saving government some enormous funds.⁹ That disclosure was rather an affirmation of the imperfection of the IPPIS mechanism. How did the ghost workers enter or infiltrate the IPPIS that was initially portrayed as a system that could not be compromised or corrupted? What is then the justification for the continued retention of the IPPIS platform? Why is it that no person has been prosecuted for the injection of ghost workers into the payroll since the phenomenon was uncovered? There are many unanswered questions. However, the obvious fact remains that the issue of corruption in the payroll system of the civil service is indeed one of the manifestations of the broader problem of malfeasance in the country’s public sector.

Lack of Accountability in Procurement, Budgeting and Accounting Systems and Procedures

Procurement Reforms

The problems of public procurement in Nigeria were at the root of poor or non-implementation of government projects at the different levels of governance. Contract inflation, inadequate estimation of contract cost, faulty evaluation of contractors’ bids, pervasion of contract tendering selection criteria, collusion and connivance with procurement officials, award of contracts to cronies, etc. were some of the problems that necessitated procurement reforms in the fourth republic. Novel initiatives which were spawned by procurement reforms included the enactment of Public Procurement Act, 2007, which made provisions for the establishment of the Bureau for Public Procurement (BPP) and the National Council for Public Procurement (NCPP) and the creation of procurement officers’ cadre in the civil service by the OHCSF, among others. However, while the BPP, which originated from the Bureau for Price Monitoring and Intelligence Unit (BPMIU), which in turn was domiciled at inception in the presidency has become entrenched and well established, the NCPP is yet to take off 8 years after the Public Procurement Act was enacted.

There is the belief that NCPP which is to be chaired by the president has not been inaugurated since 2007 when the Public Procurement Act was enacted because the Federal Executive Council (FEC) which is also headed by the president has continued to function as a contract-awarding institution in addition to being the highest policy-making organ of the executive arm at the federal level in the country. True, NCPP ought to be the contract-awarding body in consonance with the provisions of the Public Procurement Act, while the FEC should only concern itself with policy issues and decision making, aimed at providing enabling environment for the overall good governance of the country.¹⁰

It is unfortunate that in spite of procurement reforms, there are still malpractices in the public procurement system in the country’s public service. These include contract splitting by the approving authority to beat the approval threshold for contract awards, divulging of sensitive information to bidders, contractors’ collusion or connivance with procurement officers, inflation of contracts, bid rigging, etc. The highly responsive regime of sanctions would curb the propensity of the operatives to corrupt the procurement process.

Budgeting Reforms

With regard to budgeting, there have been tremendous efforts at reforming the budgeting processes and system with a view to correcting the ills observed in the erstwhile budgeting system. Such ills included poor budget implementation, lack of financial resources for budget execution, unrealistic budgeting, lack of accurate data on the country’s revenue profile, etc. The new approach to budgeting places emphasis on matching planned government expenditure with government revenue and situating them within the medium-term sector strategy (MTSS) of the government in which the medium-term expenditure framework (MTEF) is correlated with the medium-term revenue framework (MTRF). Funding ceiling is assigned to every MDA by the Budget Office of the Federation (BOF) based on certain clearly defined priorities and considerations which the MTSS could have highlighted, and thus, no MDA is expected to overshoot the assigned funding ceiling (Federal Civil Service Commission, 2009).

The budgeting reforms have not in any way provided safeguards against non-implementation of the approved appropriation. While the reforms have made the processes more all encompassing, there is abundance of evidence that the extensive nature of the stages involved is implicated in the delays often witnessed before the eventual passage of the annual budget. In addition, there is the problem of the Ministry of Finance’s deliberate withholding of appropriations, which ought to be disbursed to the MDAs for capital projects, a situation that has become a yearly financial calamity since the introduction of the new budgeting system.

Accounting System Reforms

The accounting system reforms constitute a subset of the whole gamut of reforms known as ‘Government Integrated Financial Management Information System’ (GIFMIS) which was designed for implementation in the entire financial system of the country’s public service. These reforms encapsulate budget management reforms, cash management reforms and treasury single account system, new classification system and public accountability, adoption of international public sector accounting standards, accounting transaction, recording and reporting system (ATRRS) and modernisation of the internal audit system and human resources development of personnel in the financial system through the promotion and restructuring of the Federal Treasury Academy (FTR) (http://www.gifmis.gov.ng/gifmis).

There is no doubt that the implementation of these series of reform initiatives which commenced in 2002 has impacted the financial system of the country’s public service in some significant ways. First, the new systems have helped to speed up accounting processes. Second, some loopholes that were exploited by unscrupulous elements for illicit accumulation of financial resources have been plugged. Third, there is increased deployment and utilisation of computer technology that has facilitated improvement in intra- and inter-system networking in the MDAs. Fourth, the reforms have helped to anchor government’s cashless policy to a very great extent within the public service and the economy as a whole.

However, there is a misconception of the capacity of the systems implanted by the GIFMIS reforms in the service. The systems, contrary to the belief of its proponents, are not impervious to corrupt practices. There had been instances of wrong transfers of funds and allied dubious transactions which have led to huge financial losses. This development confirms the imperfections of process reforms which were solely anchored on the computerisation of the systems without systematised programme for complementary attitudinal reorientation of the personnel operating the systems. In addition, the general perception that the sanction regime in the civil service is weak and ineffective seems to be an incentive for willful and brazen violation of the financial regulations as well as the PSR.

Absence of Systematic Training

This problem is responsible for capacity gaps in most MDAs. The need for building staff capacity cannot be overemphasised in contemporary times when knowledge capital drives operations of organisations. The growing complexity of organisational methods and procedure means that staffers have no option for improving on their performance other than resolving to expose themselves to the new ways of doing things. This trend underlines the importance of ensuring that the Nigerian federal civil service proactively responds to the training needs of its officers to enable them fit properly into the new operational requirements of their schedules. It is on record that since the inception of the fourth republic in 1999, there was only one service-wide centralised induction programme which was held in 2002 to expose all serving officers to the new reality of operating in a democratic environment.

Just as the OHCSF has been unable to organise service-wide training programmes, as regularly as necessary since 2002, so also have most MDAs found it difficult to carryout requisite training for their staffers. The ready alibi for not training staff is the claim by MDAs that they lack funds, while in most cases such excuses are untenable as they are unjustifiable. There is no MDA that does not receive yearly allocation of training funds for staff development and capacity building. The funds for staff training and capacity building are in the recurrent expenditure vote of the annual appropriation of each MDA. The problem is not so much that of paucity of funds or lack of funds but of willful and criminal diversion of the training funds into other uses by the accounting officers.¹¹ This illegal diversion of funds from the original vote head into another vote head is in violation of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2007 which ought to attract sanctions from the National Assembly. In all of these, lack of relevant training for staff remains the predisposing factor for the poor quality and low level of service delivery in the Nigerian federal civil service (Omiyale, 2006; see also Fapohunda, 2012).

Poor Conditions of Service and Low Remuneration

This is a recurring problem of the Nigerian federal civil service, but it is not peculiar to Nigeria. There is the impression that most African countries seemed to have lost the capacity to pay for a high-quality civil service due to the poverty that ravages their economies, the structure of politics and administration, globalisation and wrong-headed reform programmes (Olowu, 2010, p. 642). To say low remuneration still remains an important issue in the Nigerian federal civil service in contemporary times does not mean that steps had not been taken in the past to address the problem. In 2003, after a prolonged negotiation with the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) and other allied trade unions, the government agreed to increase salaries of workers in the public service generally, and it was done (‘Presidential Committee’, 2005). In addition, the Shonekan Presidential Committee on the Consolidation of Emoluments in the Public Sector which was set up on 1 November 2005 clearly recommended an increase in salary by 25 per cent and an annual increase of 10 per cent with cost of living adjustments over a period of 10 years, subject, however, to ability to pay (ibid., 2005). However, the government rejected Shonekan Committee’s recommendation and implemented instead a 15 per cent pay increase in 2007. The government did not also accept the timeframe proposed by the committee for future negotiations with workers’ unions on pay increase (‘Presidential Committee’, 2007). The implication is that wage reviews remained unstructured, thus indicating that government’s unrestrained power to effect wage increases with or without due reference to the inputs of workers’ unions.

It is noteworthy that since 2007, there has not been any wage review though an effort was made in 2012 to commence the negotiation process with the inauguration of a 12-member committee which was headed by the Head of Civil Service of the Federation (Daily Post, 2012). However, since its inauguration, the committee which seemingly has gone into extinction did not achieve anything and has not submitted any report. There is a growing sense among civil servants that the Nigerian government may have become disinterested in workers’ conditions of service including incessant agitations for salary or wage increase.

The federal government needs to bridge the relativity gaps among the divergent salary structures. While 80 per cent of government workers especially in the civil service earn a pittance, staffers in such agencies as Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and government parastatals in the country’s oil and gas industry including Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), among others, are receiving humongous emoluments which are unjustifiable (Idris, 2011).¹²

Incompetent Leadership

Leadership recruitment in the civil service is problematic, and there seems to be no solution in sight until drastic steps are taken to restructure both the OHCSF and FCSC. These two institutions have become highly politicised and have become overtime opposed, through their conduct, to the core values of the service they hypocritically profess. Through the twin evils of indiscriminate transfer of inexperienced personnel from other services into the federal civil service, and the promotion of officers to higher positions beyond their levels of competence for reasons unrelated to merit, the OHCSF and FCSC have continued to erode the time-honoured principle of professionalism, and by so doing, erecting a leadership structure that would culminate in the implosion of the civil service. There had been reported cases of politicians influencing these two institutions in the civil service to promote, upgrade or ‘properly place’ their cronies to higher levels far above their contemporaries and even superiors. It is the prevalence and indeed the frequency of these malpractices that has continued to recreate incompetent and uninspiring leadership across the MDAs in the country’s public service.¹³

Inadequate Deployment of Information and Communication Technology in the Service

The federal government has since the establishment of Galaxy Backbone Limited (GBL) in 2006 invested enormous resources in ICT in its quest to pursue a coordinated and harmonised approach to ICT acquisition, operation and use in the public sector (http://www.galaxybackbone.com.ng/about-us/f). Through its platform which was built in 2007, the GBL currently connects about 4,000 locations across the country including 350 federal government’s MDAs (ibid.). As an agency of government being supervised by the Federal Ministry of Communications Technology, the GBL was assigned the following functions:

Build and operate a single nationwide IP broadband network to provide network services to all federal government MDAs and institutions.

Be the provider of shared ICT infrastructure, applications and services to all federal government MDAs and institutions, for example, manage government datacenters and databases, directory services, national information repositories, IP-telephony and other solutions.

Set standards and guidelines for government MDAs in the acquisition and acceptable usage of ICT infrastructure, applications and services across federal government MDAs and institutions.

Be the provider of technical support to the Ministry of Communication Technology for end-to-end quality assurance of ICT projects and capacity building for ICT professionals in government (http://www.galaxybackbone.com.ng/about-us/f).

Obviously, there is the visible presence of GBL in all the MDAs as steps are being taken to expand the use of ICT infrastructure to ease intra- and inter-ministry communications. Old ICT gadgets were replaced with new and evidently modern ones. However, the level and degree of achievements of the GBL seem very low when viewed against the backdrop of the cost of implementation and the time spent. Till date, the ICT infrastructure in the MDAs could still not support inter-ministry communications contrary to the job specification. The websites of most MDAs are primitive and are not regularly updated because they have not adjusted to the rising demand for an ‘open’ communication, which digital media promote (Iyatse, 2015).

A more fundamental problem is that ownership of the ICT infrastructure by the user agency was not encouraged by the GBL which sidelined the ICT officers domiciled there. What the GBL ought to have done was to have trained and built up the capacity of the relevant officers in the user agency or ministry on the maintenance and preservation of the installed infrastructure. After 8 years of GBL’s take-off, all the MDAs still have ‘computerisation’ as an item voted for in their capital budgets contrary to the expected centralisation of such procurement under the GBL. This trend creates room for misappropriation of funds by the executive arm of government, perhaps, in connivance with the legislature.

Poor Culture of Innovation and Change

The civil service has been run over the years as an institution that appears impervious to change and innovation. It is this attitudinal disposition that shuts the door against the introduction of new regulations and rules or revision of old rules in the light of their obvious irrelevance. Some provisions of the PSR which, understandably, were a reflection of the dominant influences of the military era but which at the end of that era in 1999 when democratic rule was restored, ought to have been expunged outright from the PSR, are still retained even after the PSR had been reviewed four times (i.e., in 2000, 2004, 2007 and 2008). To drive home this point, some of the problematic provisions in the PSR (Federal Government Printer, 2009) and the reasons why they should be deleted are presented hereunder.

Oath of Secrecy—Rule 030415

‘It shall be the duty of every Permanent Secretary/Head of Extra-Ministerial Office to ensure that all officers,…who have access to classified or restricted papers have signed the Oath of Secrecy in the appropriate form …’

This rule seems to have outlived its relevance in the light of its non-application over the years. In actual fact, it could be safely argued that the government has stopped the production of the oath of secrecy forms, perhaps, since the commencement of democratic rule.

Unauthorised Disclosure of Official Information—Rule 030416

‘Every officer is subject to the Official Secrets Act (Cap. 335) and is prohibited from disclosing to any person ……… any article, note, document or information entrusted to him/her in confidence by any person holding office under any Government in the Federal Republic of Nigeria, ….’

This rule prohibits the disclosure of government’s official secrets which were so much during the military era. However, with the emergence of democracy and its relative transparency borne out of its representativeness, such so-called official secrets are the subjects of vibrant and open public discourse in the public domain. Moreover, in May 2011, the Nigerian government signed into law the Freedom of Information Bill, thereby making Nigeria the second country in West Africa to have a Freedom of Information (FOI) law (IFEX, 2012).^{The FOI Act empowers Nigerians to request for any information concerning government’s actions and activities, to unearth facts, battle corruption and hold officials and institutions of government accountable (Ajulo, 2011).}

Publication and Public Utterances—Rule 030421

‘Except in pursuance of his/her official duties, no officer shall, whether on duty or on leave of absence: act as editor of a journal, publish in any publication, speak in public or grant any interview on a political or administrative matter…’

This provision is offensive to the spirit and letters of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. According to Section 39(1) of the Constitution which says: ‘Every person shall be entitled to freedom of expression, including freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart ideas and information without interference’, and subsection(2) which says: ‘…every person shall be entitled to own, establish and operate any medium for the dissemination of information, ideas and opinions’ (Federal Republic of Nigeria, 2011), it is clear that the PSR provision under reference cannot be reasonably justified in Nigeria’s current constitutional and democratic era, and therefore should be deleted.

Outsourcing of Certain Services and Programmes

The belief that public service is inefficient in the delivery of certain services and projects has led to the transfer of such services and projects to the private sector. This policy which is known as outsourcing is hinged on the understanding that government could even plug loopholes of corruption which were being exploited by unscrupulous civil servants whose major concern was not service delivery but profiteering.

However, despite the good intention of the policy of outsourcing, its unintended consequences have beclouded its perceived benefits, as the policy is implicated in the evidently visible inactivity that currently pervades most of the MDAs in Nigeria’s federal civil service. The argument that outsourcing saves the government huge financial resources that would have been lost to civil servants’ inefficiency has been found to be untrue. In actual fact, government spends more to get results from private concessionaire, consultants and commissionaire, thereby raising the question whether or not if the civil servants were given similar condition, they would not have performed better. Currently, in some MDAs, private consultants are contracted to design programmes and projects, write reports of official events and to even draft speeches for the ministers at enormous cost to government. These are functions that could easily be performed by officers of the Departments of Planning, Research and Statistics, and Human Resource Management of any ministry at very minimal cost to government.

Growing Marginalisation of the Administrative Cadre

The administrative officers cadre which was the prominent leadership cadre in the country’s federal civil service has been adorned with inglorious pariah status and sidelined as a result of some developments that took place since the emergence of civil rule in 1999. These developments included the unilateral cooptation of private sector professionals into leadership roles in the public service, and their subsequent appointment as permanent secretaries, thereby setting the stage for the liberalisation of the position of permanent secretary, a development that culminated in the appointment of permanent secretaries from professional officers cadre in the public service in violation of the established tradition of appointing permanent secretaries from directors in the administrative officers cadre, with backgrounds in humanities and social sciences (Adegoroye, 2013). In the recent statistics which shows that out of the 40 permanent secretaries in the federal civil service, only three are from the administrative officers cadre, while the rest are from professional officers cadre, there is every indication that it is much easier for directors of finance and accounts under the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation (AGF) to be appointed as permanent secretaries, while administrative officers are finding it even difficult to be promoted to the post of director (administration) (ibid., 2013).

Haphazard Deployment of Personnel

Deployment of personnel in the federal civil service does not accord with any known well-thoughtout policy but done in disorderly manner. There had been allegations of corruption surrounding staff deployment which the different pools coordinate. Currently, in the OHCSF, the Department of Career Management Office (CMO) is responsible for the deployment of administrative officers to the MDAs. However, in carrying out this function, the department is not guided by the qualifications and competences of the officers it deploys to the MDAs. The OHCSF does not have any reliable data on all the staff under its pool, and that explains why when an administrative officer with a good background in economics was needed in the Ministry of Finance to handle the country’s trade negotiations, an administrative officer that studied history was deployed to that schedule—a case of a round peg in a square hole. Yet, there are so many good graduates of economics and other related specialists who are in the administrative officers cadre in the service, but who will never be deployed to schedules of their competences because of the defective deployment policy of the OHCSF. This is the way staff deployment in the service has been, and there is no visible effort aimed at correcting it.

Promotion Examination: An Unreliable Performance Assessment Mechanism

The Nigerian federal civil service is overly dependent on written examination for the determination of officers’ eligibility for promotion. This dependence on examination resulted from the extreme pervasion that was evident in the use of the Annual Performance Evaluation Report (APER) which in the past was a sufficient mode for assessing officers for promotion. The APER was considered weak and subjective, and very open to all forms of manipulations. However, the promotion option is not any better because it has become over time corrupted by the pervasive fraudulent influences in the Nigerian society. There were reports that some candidates paid N5 million each in bribe to relevant officials of the FCSC to be promoted to the post of director (administration) (CKN Nigeria, 2013). Lack of transparency and vacancy constraints have both conspired to create an environment of uncertainty around the FCSC promotion examination for directorate cadre officers, thereby making serving officers in the directorate cadre to be desperate in their quest for promotion.

Concluding Remarks: Prospects of Achieving the Reforms

There is still hope of redemption for the Nigerian federal civil service because of the following hope-inducing factors which could positively impact on the implementation of needed reforms.

The Emergence of a New Administration

It is remarkable that since 1999 that the fourth republic commenced, an opposition party—All Progressives Congress (APC) emerged victorious in the 28 March 2015 presidential election, having defeated the ruling PDP and has been governing at the federal level since 29 May 2015. There is a lot of expectation that the new administration being populist and progressive in sentiment could bring about significant change in the public service in a desirable way. The new administration has not left anyone in doubt about its commitment to reposition the country’s public service. As part of measures by the new administration to reduce redundancy in the public service and curb waste of public resources, President Buhari is working on reducing the number of federal ministries which currently stands at 28 (Okwe, 2015). The administration has also expressed its readiness to undertake a review of Nigerian foreign missions to determine those that are really essential (see Premium Times, 2015). Other policies espoused include the treasury single accounting system aimed at plugging loopholes for funds diversion, zero-budgeting system which is a clear departure from the envelope budgeting system and the recent directive to the Ministry of Defence to produce a plan for the establishment of a modest military industrial complex for the local production of weapons to meet the requirements of the country’s armed forces (see The Citizen, 2015).

These measures are indications that the new administration is set to address the real and potential challenges that the declining crude oil price which currently sells for US$44.92 at the global market pose for the country’s finances. With regard to the federal civil service, the reform agenda of the new administration would require a revision of the National Strategy for Public Service Reform (NSPSR) to allow for the injection of the policy thrust of the Buhari administration. The onus of ensuring quality leadership of the civil service is on the President; a President gets the civil service he deserves (Adamolekun, 2015).

Growing Culture of Resistance and Progressive Agitation

The fallout of democratisation in the country is the rising culture of resistance and agitation borne out of the citizens’ improved access to civic and political education. The citizenry has become more aware and alive to its responsibility than it was previously the case in Nigeria. Also the civil servants are themselves not impervious to all these influences, and have thus become more sensitised on their rights and on how the civil service ought to function in a democracy. This development provides a veritable platform for the anticipated holistic reforms which the new administration would do well to embark upon.

Civil Service Reform as a Global Obligation

Nigeria is a constituent of the global society in which the civil services of other countries are undergoing reforms for improved service delivery. This realisation makes it incumbent upon Nigeria to reform her public service because it is a proper and appropriate step to take because the Nigerian federal civil service reform is a phenomenon that gains its steam from globalisation. To do anything contrary to the demands of globalisation is to swim against its forceful and virulent tide with all its attendant repercussions.

The Supportive Role of Donor Agencies

The ongoing reforms in the public service have been receiving support from donor agencies including the UK—DFID and the European Union (EU). Specifically, the EU has expressed continued support for the implementation of public service reforms in Nigeria by continuing its programme of support known as EU-Support to Federal Government Reforms (SUFEGOR) (Otaru, 2015).

The Power of the Ballot

The recently held general election in the country which has been assessed as free and fair by both national and international observers is an indication that the votes of the Nigerian electorate now count, and by extension, the ballot has become an instrument for changing an unwanted government in the country devoid of rigging. This development can only have a positive effect on the new government which came into power through the sanctity of the electioneering process, and thus would be required to consciously pursue result-oriented reforms and eschew impunity. This new consciousness, expectedly, is spurred by the realisation that governmental non-performance will not be rewarded with electoral victory.

Footnotes

Notes

References

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Mayowaak, Directors pay ₦5million for promotion in Federal Civil Service. Retrieved 12 Sepetmeber 2015 from http://www.nairaland.com/1546466/directors-pay-n5million-promotion-federal (see also Goke Adegoroye, Restoring Good Governance in Nigeria: The Civil Service Pathway (Lagos, Kachifo Limited, 2015) p. 53, p. 69).

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