Sudden reversal of tenure policy
The Federal Government recently reversed the tenure policy for Directors and Permanent Secretaries which was adopted six years ago. The reversal, which takes immediate effect, was contained in a circular signed by Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HOCSF) Mrs Winifred Ita. She directed all ministries, departments and agencies to comply forthwith. The policy, adopted by the late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s regime in 2010, imposed a maximum of two four-year tenures for Permanent Secretaries and one eight year stay for Directors.
Before the policy was introduced, mandatory retirement from service is for any officer who reaches the age of 60 years or 35 years of continuous service, whichever comes first. The tenure policy therefore introduced fresh exit conditions for such top level civil servants who have to leave on the basis of the tenure for their office, even if they had not reached 60 years of age nor clocked 35 years of continuous service.
At its introduction, government justified it as a panacea for eliminating the syndrome of officers’ career stagnation and of creating opportunities for advancement in the system following the ‘weeding out’ of ostensibly entrenched and ‘overstaying’ officers. Truly, with the exit of the ‘overstaying’ ones through the implementation of the policy, substantial mobility was recorded in the service. While several long serving and experienced officers were removed from office, several other fresh hands found accommodation in the service to contribute their quota to national development. The position of the government is buttressed by the scenario whereby with regular career ascendancy, it will take a university graduate an average of 27 years to proceed from Grade Level 08 through all the steps to 15. The average officer is therefore not likely to spend more than eight years at the top of the service either as a Director or Permanent Secretary before eventually retiring at 35 years of service.
However, its critics counter that its implementation effectively eroded a huge reserve of irreplaceable experience and skills that would have been available to the society if the affected officers were allowed to run their normal service span. Another area of attack on the policy was that it was launched without any legislative input and consequently had no law to back it up. It is on record that some of the affected officers even went to court to seek redress over what they saw as imposed pre-mature exit from their legitimate jobs.
The recent reversal of the policy by President Muhammadu Buhari has expectedly attracted public concern given the wide spread and long ranging implications of any effort to tamper with the nation’s public service structure. A key feature of public reaction has been the spate of condemnations trailing Buhari’s action on the grounds that it was done without inputs of the key stakeholders, especially the workers themselves. It is doubtful if the government had the benefit of inputs from all concerned before the tenure policy was reversed.
When this policy was adopted six years ago, it was denied the input of critical stake holders and this error led to significant crises, much of which is yet to abate. Government has hardly learnt lessons from that misstep; it is now reversing such an important policy, again without as much as consulting key stakeholders. It is indisputable that the government needs to reform the civil service and thereby facilitate the service delivery culture to drive its programmes. But it may end up shooting itself in the foot if it does not carry out wide studies and consultations before tinkering with service rules. Reversal of the tenure policy immediately elicited joy in some civil servants and sadness in others. Careful stakeholder input was therefore necessary to be able to do what is best, and we doubt if this happened, given the sudden nature of the policy’s reversal.