Using 'law' to prevent change
Recent debate in the media, following Dr. Chudi Nwike’s report on corruption in the civil service masks a deeper malaise. There are several things wrong with our civil service and corruption is only one of them.
Imagine you have just been appointed a minister. Nigeria is lucky to have you, a technocrat from the private sector with the relevant experience for that particular ministry. You start full of lofty but realistic plans; maybe you have even written a couple of papers on reforming this sector or worked as a consultant providing expertise to governments at home and abroad. Six months later nothing has happened. One year later still nothing has happened. Why?
Many things happen to people when they assume leadership positions but one particular and consistent thing which ensues to most well meaning Ministers in Nigeria is the ‘civil service’. Apparently a common tactic of civil servants to destabilise a new minister is to bombard them with useless information and all sorts of imaginary or exaggerated emergencies. Of course when you start running around trying to douse phantom fires and get a grip on the convoluted rules and procedures, you begin to loose focus of your goal. All this while, the most relevant information is kept from you by these career civil servants who are supposed to be there to provide administrative support in the implementation of the Ministry’s strategy.
For too long we have presumed that leadership was the major problem in Nigeria. Fortunately, a Presidency characterised by an absence of leadership is allowing us to focus on where our problems lie. We, the ‘followership’ are a clog in the wheel of development. Everyone knows a civil servant – our fathers, mothers, siblings and friends are all in the civil service…and these are the same people who are holding us back.
This problem, of course, is something we should be well acquainted with from the Udoji Commission’s recommendations in 1974, to the Onosode Report of 1981, to the Dotun Phillips-led work in 1988 and, more recently with the public service reform work of el-Rufai, we have been repeatedly told that the federal and state civil service is fundamentally politicized, corrupt, demoralized, inefficient and pays scant regard to notions of service delivery.
The common factor over the years, as soldiers come and soldiers go; PDP comes and NPN goes, is a woeful civil service remarkably resistant to change.
The Civil Service
Civil servants are traditionally considered as neutral bastions of administrative efficiency meant to provide support to governments. The idea is to maintain a level of permanence and expertise in any political system so that despite the changes in government or government ideology, stability in implementation remains. All over the world however, the civil service has become the butt of jokes about mediocrity and the use of bureaucracy in the worst sense of the word to obstinately resist change.
As bad as the civil service is generally considered to be, Nigeria must have one of the worst in the world. There are several things wrong with our civil service and corruption is only one of them. In 2005, as el-Rufai attempted to kick start the reform of the public service using the FCT Ministry as a pilot case he listed the problems of the civil service as: poor service delivery, bloated service with duplication of functions, manual processes, poor compensation, inadequate skills and absence of training. I think we can add another one: attitudinal and functional bankruptcy.
Because only attitudinal and functional bankruptcy would explain the years of civil servants systematically scuttling all attempts to make things work in Nigeria. Every time a discussion about civil service reform starts, the civil service preservation army begins its tactical manoeuvres to ensure things stay the same. They constantly raise concerns over Murtala Mohammed’s attempts in the 70s to whittle the civil service: it resulted in the corruption we see today because those who were compulsorily retired were not prepared. In other words, civil servants now help themselves to public funds because they can be retired at any time. While this may to some extent be true, a more systemic problem exists: the rules that guide civil service operation often serve to entrench the dysfunction that prevails. One case in point: the civil service rules make it almost impossible to fire a civil servant even when a minister finds the person incompetent or deliberately obstructive.
According to a member of the service ‘civil servants cannot be sacked’. ‘First the person needs to have at least four queries (which obviously cannot all happen within a week). After four queries, the issue goes to the Head of Service for an investigative and hearing process which can take months and even then the civil servant does not leave the service but is redeployed to another ministry and…even worse, you have no say on who replaces the civil servant you have just managed to get rid off.’ Section 171 of the 1999 Constitution specifically provides that only the President can appoint or remove civil servants ranking from permanent secretaries and above. An anecdote which might be more indicative to emphasise what is wrong with the civil service as opposed to being the truth is that a head chef in the staff canteen of one of the ministries which moved to Abuja was left behind in Lagos. Despite years of doing nothing in Lagos, he gradually rose to the grade of a director and was then posted to the Ministry of Justice…hopefully to the canteen.
Conclusion
The reason why a strong and efficient civil service is so important is because when we have a bad government or ‘no government’ as it seems like in the case of our current Servant Sleeper, then the business of managing the day to day governance of the country will continue. Ironically, these masters of self preservation have set up another civil service agency: the Bureau of Public Service Reform with an impressive website and a long list of achievements including the establishment of EFCC, ICPC, and budget and financial management reform. However the review of the Service in 2002 posted on the BPSR website, indicates that some of the issues were: (i) an aging population with 60% at 40 years old and above; (ii) 70% of the staff are unskilled (iii) a prevalence of “ghost” workers and (iv) 60% of Federal Government spending deployed to servicing this bureaucracy.
None of the listed achievements of reform so far have tackled these issues and Section 171(3) of the Constitution compounds the problem by insisting that the Head of the Civil Service must be appointed from the civil service pool. If over 70% of the civil servants are unskilled then what are the probabilities that the Head of Service will be fit for purpose?
While we struggle to get good leaders elected we also need to work harder to ensure these leaders have the support they need to succeed. We need to totally overhaul our civil service and rewrite the rules that underpin it.
