The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has urged state civil service commissions to align with his strategic plan for optimal performance.

Olaopa made the call yesterday during the 44th Annual National Council of the Civil Service Commissions of the Federation, held in Umuahia, Abia State.

The strategic plan, the first of its kind in the FCSC’s 71-year history, is a five-year plan (2026-2030) aimed at reforming Nigeria’s civil service by enhancing merit-based recruitment, implementing performance-driven promotions, and leveraging digital transformation.

Its six pillars include strengthening institutional independence, introducing competitive digital recruitment, linking promotions to performance, automating Human Resources (HR), embedding ethical governance, and ensuring inclusivity and equity. The plan aims to professionalise the civil service, improve efficiency, and position it to support a $1 trillion economy.

According to Olaopa, the fundamental essence of the strategic plan is not only to restore the glory of the FCSC, in significant alignment with other national development frameworks, like the Vision 2050, the National Development Plan.

And especially the Renewed Hope Agenda, but also to institutionalise the vision for a capable, citizen-centred, and accountable civil service, and a mission to promote a merit-based, fair, and ethical workforce system founded on the core values of Integrity, Professionalism, Innovation, and Accountability (I-PIA).

He highlighted the key priority issues that ground the strategic significance of the FCSC Strategic Plan, which were invaluable for the critical deliberations of the 2025 council meeting.

To him, the constitutional mandate of the FCSC and other state civil service commissions is simple: the recruitment, appointment, promotion, and discipline of officers in the civil service at the federal and state levels.

According to him, this constitutional mandate makes the FCSC and the state civil service commissions the gatekeepers of the civil service, ensuring its merit-based performance, efficiency, and productivity.

Olaopa noted that the reason the FCSC was reconstituted, and why the NCSSC was revitalised, was simply because so much had gone wrong with the civil service system.

Olaopa said: “The current dysfunction, therefore, demands that the mandate of the CSC needs to be recovered. First, there is the urgency of recovering the legal and operational independence of the CSC through a proper and more detailed conceptualisation of the issues of public-spiritedness, professionalism, merit, and a competency-based human resource management system.”

He noted that this also includes their operational implications for serving as the theoretical launchpad for enabling equity, fairness, inclusivity, and diversity management, such as the federal character principle, as mandated by the Nigerian Constitution.