Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has stressed the adoption of citizens-centred reforms in public service as fundamental to democratic consolidation in the country.
   
Olaopa spoke yesterday in Abuja during the Nigeria Public Service Lecture to mark the United Nations Public Service Day, which was organised by the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR).
   
Speaking on the topic, “The Public Service in Challenging Times: Rethinking Praxis for More Inclusive and Innovative Reform,” Olaopa, who was the guest speaker, noted that public service reforms have not yielded expected results because they have failed to include the citizens who constitute the bedrock of democracy.
   
Consequently, he urged that future public service reforms should be citizen-centred to strengthen democracy.  Olaopa decried a situation where institutional reforms were driven by foreign models that do not reckon with the local environment, thereby paving the way for exclusion and constraining democracy. 
  
Against this background, he called for innovation rooted in a more participatory and inclusive process to the benefit of users and citizens, including public employees, especially those working in the frontline, private stakeholders and society at large.
   
According to him, “context-sensitive governance reforms that change and adjust the balance will be essential.

Public innovation can be spurred by creating national innovation systems that bring together relevant public and private actors in networks that facilitate coordination and knowledge exchange.
   
“It would increase the infusion of entrepreneurship and other core features of private firms, for example. It will entail tapping into local knowledge and interactions to generate new solutions to shared development challenges and therefore less reliance on pre-packaged imported models that are not subjected to decoupling and action research interrogation to elicit context-specific indices.
   
“Pooling together insights, skills and ideas in such a collaborative process as ‘collective intelligence’ has proved to be a more reliable methodology for problem-solving and at scale, especially when it is inclusive – when it creates space for people from all walks of life to make contributions.
   
He advised that institutional reforms should shift significantly from public service-focused to public governance domains, where innovative approaches would contribute to enhancing social inclusion, thus expanding the scope of civil service reforms multi-dimensionally. 
   
Olaope further urged a much more expansive focus on access to public services through digitisation and automation, which he said requires designing and redesigning services around users’ individual needs, and delivering them digitally, while closing the gap by simplifying local inhabitants’ interactions with the public sector.
   
Olaopa further urged enhancing the skills of public servants to improve the human-centricity of public services, saying that public policy aimed at social inclusion must introduce new methods and routines into the work of public servants.