Mohammed Oluwatimileyin Taoheed reports,
Mr. Tunji Olaopa, a professor of Public Administration at the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru in Plateau State, has urged the Presidency to work on the reformation of the public service in Nigeria.
Olaopa stated that there is a need to re-strategise and re-do the public service and its basis to check the dysfunctions of the institutional and bureaucratic dynamics within which Nigeria’s public service system operates.
He made this known in Ado-Ekiti, the Ekiti State capital at an event organized by the Ekiti state government to jubilate this year’s African Public Service Day (APSD) and the retiring Head of Service, Mrs Peju Babafemi while presenting his lecture entitled: ‘Unfinished Business of Reform in Nigeria, Next level Public Service Reform Agenda.
Olaopa noted that ample steps had been made by successive governments to restructure the public service but were futile as a result of the nation’s inherent bureaucratic culture that promotes inefficiency and nepotism above meritocracy.
He alleged that there were evidence-based studies that had clearly confirmed that effective and efficient delivery of service which are the landmark of public service were adversely undermined by nepotism, incompetence and corruption amongst others.
Prof. Tunji bemoaned that the country’s civil service had been politicised along party affiliation whereas the civil servants are supposed to be non-partisan because they were trained in such a way to serve any party in power.
He continued that the thus negatively affect the country’s socio-economic growth and development because public service remained the institutional bulwark that ensures effective delivery of democratic dividends to the citizenry.
He added, ” The civil service in Nigeria is perhaps one of the few professions anywhere, where anything goes; where mediocre can infiltrate and find a place to stand. Largely because we have lost the essence of the public service as a vocation, a deep spiritual calling, a professional space where only those with the training, orientation, and discipline to create public value alone should be found.
“Many politicians in the corridor of power through omission or commission have politicised the country’s public service through reductionist thinking where civil servants are taken as boxes and lines in the organisational charts. In a craving to do damage control, various successive governments were quick to launch reforms, many of which compounded rather than ameliorate bureau-pathology.
He stressed that the federal and the state governments must take the bulls by the horns by going on a holistic reform to remake the nation’s public service and its basis with a view to igniting desired institutional transformation.
In her speech, Mrs Babafemi commended Governor Kayode Fayemi for daring all odds by appointing her the first female Head of Service in the state since its creation in 1996.
