Government rules out bogus training allowances for civil servants

The Head of Service of the Federation (HOS), Mrs. Winifred Ekanem, Oyo-Ita, has enjoined civil servants to brace up for better capacity training programmes that would empower them to revive the economy.

She opined that civil service and the economy have a direct connection, saying any country that has a strong and vibrant economy, must equally have top-quality civil service that is vibrant, innovative, effective, and efficient.

According to her, if Nigeria is desirous of improving the economy, the government needs to focus on training and building the capacity of civil servants across the board.

Oyo-Ita said this recently in Abuja while declaring open a two-day retreat for top management staff of the Office of the Head of the Service of the Federation.

She explained that the purpose of the retreat was to familiarise civil servants with the vision 2017-2020 Federal Civil Service Strategy and Implementation Plan, especially as it relates to capacity development, training in digitisation, data, and analytics, culture, innovation, performance management, capacity building, and talents.

The HOS also noted that the era of bogus training allowances for civil servants are over, stressing, “if you look critically into the on-going reforms, you will discover that training costs have been reduced drastically.

Those who think training is only meant for collection of bogus Basic Travelling Allowances (BTAs), would be disappointed because the government no longer has money to share.”

She explained that as part of efforts to manage available resources for compulsory training for the civil servants across Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), her office has decided not to use foreign consultants and resource persons, hence it has begun the training of top officials of the Manpower Development Institute (MDI) that would help train staff.

She added: “We are now building the MDI to be strong and have the capacity to develop and entrench innovations, efficiency, effectiveness and work and commitment in the civil service. This is an opportunity to let them understand what is expected of them and their board to be up in their game to transform the civil service through training.”
 
In a presentation titled, “An overview of the 2017-2020 Federal Civil Service Strategy and implementation Plan,” the Special Assistant, Technical to the HOS, Dr Gideon Adogbo, said the objective of the training is to achieve culture change across the service, build a knowledge, effusive work environment, institutionalise structured mandatory continuous training to build competence of civil servants, and to strengthen the civil service through institutionalisation of career and performance management system among others.