By Victor Mayomi

Recently, Dr. Goke Adegoroye penned a letter to the president in which he advised him on the need to deepen the on-going reforms of the public service, and be intentional in selecting the next Head of the Civil Service of the Federation. Following a rejoinder to the said letter, and another perspective on the matter by two retired permanent secretaries, as well as the intervention of our bosses and elders in the system, namely Mahmud Yayale Ahmed (former Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, ex-Minister of Defence and Secretary to the Government of the Federation) and Dr. Bukar Hassan, (one of the most senior and revered retired federal permanent secretaries), thus two of the finest minds and accomplished bureaucrats that the nation has produced in recent decades, it was widely expected that the crossfire would automatically cease.

Regrettably, another salvo was fired in The Guardian on July 31, 2026 entitled ‘the HCSF debate: the missing pathway”, in which a retired permanent secretary went on a tirade against the admin cadre by presenting its members as being incompetent to compete with professionals for the highest office in the federal civil service.

To justify his tirade and bias, he stated that: ‘at the point of entry, professional courses demand five ordinary level credits including English and Mathematics; many of the social science and humanities courses that largely feed the administrative cadre admit on softer terms leaving their quantitative and analytical capabilities underdeveloped; precisely that examination-based selection rewards’. He further stated that. ‘In mid-career, professionals face mandatory capability gates: accountants must become chartered, engineers must be coren- registed, doctors and pharmacists must passs consultancy examinations. For administrative officers, the only recurring intellectual test is the periodic examination, after which many bid farewell to study until the next cycle.”

The Federal Civil service is to be pitied for these reckless and unwarranted statements by a retired permanent secretary. It underscores the incremental degeneration of the service over the years in addition to questioning the capability of those appointed into the commanding heights of the civil service. His diatribe seems to fall within the negative perception of generalists by some deluded minds, as stated by Yehezkel Dror in his Paper ‘Specialists vs Generalists- A Miss Question (1968) “ as a (bunch of) bungling amateur intolerant of knowledge, proud of his irrelevant literati background and self-confident in his idiosyncratic judgement, while specialists are regarded as ‘the pioneers of science in government, who will substitute reliable facts and explicit algorithms for fallible human intuition, if only undisturbed by politics and similar anachronistic carryovers from the pre-scientific epoch’’. Dror regards the comparison as ineffectual and self-defeating “by reducing a multiplicity of attributes into two patterns, assuming there is some necessary internal relationship which excludes (or at least reduces the probability of) other combinations’’.

It is worth noting that the retired permanent secretary must have been a late entrant into the civil service who probably did not know the trajectory of the admin cadre from which the leading lights in the service, famously referred to in Nigeria as super permanent secretaries, emerged in the golden age of the service, from 1966 through 1975, namely Alison Ayida, Ahmed Joda, Philip Asiodu, Ibrahim Damcida, Chief Ime Ebong, Alhaji Abdul Aziz Atta, and a host of others who succeeded them as exemplary bureaucrats.

They served diligently, selflessly, honourably, ethically and sacrificially and passed the torch of service excellence to the next generation of officers within the cadre who brought order, discipline, courage, predictability and ingenuity to the system. In addition, they effectively served as its gatekeepers until the service was unduly politicised and lost its bearing in the latter years.

Unknown to the retired permanent secretary, the admin cadre was the elite cadre in the past, and the most competitive to gain entry to through a rigorous and competitive examination from which the brightest and the best in the country were selected for appointment and deployment to the most strategic and intellectually-demanding schedules in the federal civil service. Regrettably, over the years, the cadre was ambushed, assaulted and degraded with the flooding of politically exposed transferees from the states who were imposed on their more experienced in-serving seniors. Like interlopers and intruders, they took over the commanding heights of the service and damaged it with their incompetence, greed, rascality and lawlessness. The professional class was not spared either in this massive degradation of the federal civil service through the reckless transfer of candidates, especially from non-scheduled services, to the core service.

To conclude that officers in the administrative cadre lack quantitative and analytical skills is both ridiculous and laughable. It betrays a poor understanding of the essence of the cadre and its multidisciplinary nature. It is also insulting to infer that officers in the administrative cadre are inadequate in capacity by restricting themselves to periodic examinations for self-improvement, only to bid farewell to study after the conclusion of each examination. I am a proud member of the cadre with academic honours, distinction and recognition at the first and second degree levels who did intellectual work throughout my over three decades in the service before my retirement in 2020.

I traversed through the system and saw many of my colleagues in the admin cadre who were exceptionally productive, resourceful, deep in knowledge, purposeful and goal-oriented who served our beloved nation brilliantly with their finest intellect and vigour. It is therefore, demeaning to reduce admin officers to stagnant, close-minded and complacent individuals who are set in their own ways and have refused to embark on the much-needed expedition of self-discovery and continuous learning to enable them to serve at the highest level of the federal civil service.

As to the inability of admin officers to pass analytical and quantitative examinations, it is a well-established fact that promotion examinations in the federal civil service are a huge joke. There is nothing challenging or intellectually stimulating in them. Over the years, money is exchanged for marks in a corrupt system that has pervaded the system for decades. It is even more ridiculous that directors are subjected to examinations to determine their suitability for appointment as permanent secretaries in a rigged system in which the outcome is pre-determined.

I recall one of our Capam conferences held in an Asian county at which we tried to showcase our model of appointment of permanent secretaries as a good practice. We were told in uncertain terms at the forum that it was crude and belittling, bearing in mind that examination was too narrow an index to be used to appoint officers to such a high-level position in the architecture of government. Indeed at a commonwealth secretariat programme which I attended earlier in Wellington, New Zealand, shortly after the Bureau of Public Service Reforms was established in 2004, as one of its foundation staff and technical assistant to its Director-General, we were informed of the inappropriateness of conducting promotion examinations for senior leaders in the civil service, in view of the institutionalization of a host of emerging performance management systems in the respective services of member-states of the commonwealth to foster a more merit-based and performance-oriented promotion system in place of our politically- influenced and cash and carry model.

In my interface with Martins Oloja, erstwhile managing director of ‘The Guardian Newspapers, he wondered why a simple AI search could not have established the appropriateness of appointing the next Head of the Civil Service from the administrative cadre. Prompted by him, I conducted a simple search that validated Dr. Adegoroye’s recommendation to the president. It goes thus: “for the office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation or of a State: broad administrative experience remains especially valuable because the role requires stewardship of the entire civil service rather than a single profession.” It concluded as follows: “for the choice between competent candidates for the selection of the Head of the Civil Service: a highly experienced generalist would usually be the stronger choice. And for the post of Permanent Secretary; it inferred that a generalist often has an advantage in coordinating complex ministries, but an outstanding specialist with proven administrative, financial and leadership experience can equally be effective.”

In a sense, the question before the president, as aptly put by Lev Kaye, in his paper on “Generalists and Specialists: Who Owns the Future”, LinkedIn Pulse ( 2014), is to determine who is more valuable to his administration as the number one federal civil servant: either someone who can wear multiple hats or someone who’s very talented at one thing? Kaye resolves it by recommending a hybrid of either a generalizing-specialist or a specializing- generalist. The rounded and hybrid figure the country is waiting for falls within the well-articulated eight (8) eligibility criteria proposed by Dr. Adegoroye to the president to determine the appointment of the next Head of the Civil Service.

They are as follows, namely: strong understanding of the mandate of OHCSF, full grasp of, and capacity to enforce the PSR, FR , Procurement laws, etc, commitment and capacity to conceive and implement meaningful reforms, institutional memory(entailing years of experience in the federal system, especially in key centres or sectors of government), human resource capacity, including ability to use the federal civil service management committee to resolve service-wide issues, character and personal integrity, courage to stand firm in the face of undue politicl interference and capacity to respond to and resolve emerging challenges in the public service before they become mighty problems.

Of course, the final decision rests with the president. He cannot be wrong by adopting these criteria for the appointment of the new head. Our prayer is that he will be intentional and choose courageously and wisely, given his audacity, courage and propensity to make big decisions, as a virtue that he is abundantly blessed with, as a significant and impactful leader.

• Mayomi- public analyst, retired director and pioneer staff of Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR)