Civil Service facing existential crisis, says Tunji Olaopa

Tnation’s Civil Service, which is the hub of internal administration in government, is faced with an existential crisis on many fronts, the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission ( FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has said.

Olaopa spoke, yesterday, when the Chairman of Yobe State Civil Service Commission, and officials of the Permanent Secretaries Commission, and the Ministry of Establishment and Training, in Abuja, paid him a courtesy call.

Olaopa warned of the current development where the Civil Service Commission was generally perceived by practitioners, policymakers, the public, in the literature of public administration today, and in discourse, as a relic of the growingly outdated Weberian bureaucratic model of public administration.

He lamented that stakeholders at the Commission, unfortunately, would go about their duties in a manner that validated this notion.

He said: “The Commission has wantonly compromised the philosophical construct of the first principle of its founding by the British in 1855, in the way it goes about its work, most especially in Nigeria. We have compromised merit not just on the altar of federal character diversity management praxis. We did in the way we submit our constitutional independence helplessness to the whims and caprices of our political lords and masters, largely because, as professionals, we have lost the capacity to speak truth to power as it was in Nigeria in the 1960s through to the mid- 70s.

“We have emasculated merit and replaced it with political patronage and an unreflective nepotism. The dynamic that this created, has inexorably destroyed the gatekeeping essence of the Commission’s constitutional mandate as the protector and defender of the merit system, and therefore as the institutional bulwark and guarantor of professionalism in policy and development management. It has also almost irreparably destroyed competency- based human resource management as an enabler of policy intelligence of a capable developmental state.

“Even the British, who transplanted the service commission concept, along with many countries in the Commonwealth of Nations, have brought creativity and innovations to bear in their public service people management practices and therefore, in how far they have gone in rethinking their service commissions. The global community of practice and service have created such a huge portfolio of smart, good and best practices that we late starters have no excuse to be so far left behind in being so un- innovative.”