Why Nigeria was missing from 2019 global civil service ranking

Nigeria was not captured in the 2019 global International Civil Service Effectiveness (InCise) Index, due to absence of adequate data from its Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs), Operating Officer and Associate Dean of Administration at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, Calum Miller, has said.

Miller disclosed this recently in Abuja while presenting the InCise overview.

InCise index is a collaboration between the Blavatnik School of Government and the Institute for Government.

The project, which is supported by the United Kingdom Civil Service, and funded by the Open Society Foundations form the basis for benchmarking and assessing the performance of the public service globally.

Miller explained: “At the moment, Nigeria is not yet captured because some of the data we used for this global exercise is not available in the country’s MDAs, hence, we are here to train the civil servants on ways to generate the data that will qualify the country to be captured for the next round.”

Calum Miler, who doubles as the InCise project officer, further said if properly captured into the global index, Nigeria stands to know the level of performance and progress made by their civil service with regards to service delivery to the people.

He explained that “The current InCise Index covers 38 countries, and made its maiden publication in 2017, and currently applies 12 indicators in the assessment of the effectiveness of civil service.

“We are, therefore, here to deliberate with the civil servants, train them on ways to gather their data that will eventually qualify the country into the next global index.

“Although the InCise framework covers issues that are highly relevant for the civil service in Nigeria, such as merit-based appointment processes and ethnic composition, it neglects other pertinent issues such as performances in terms of service delivery outputs. The study tentatively suggests that the InCise team considers developing a second, more rudimentary civil index for Nigeria and other developing countries, using less fine-grained data on the civil service and data on service delivery.”

In her keynote address, the Acting Head of Service, Dr. Folashade Yemi Esan, said the Incise index has two key tools, which are designed to generally enhance governance and ensure improved service delivery.

“They include an accountability tool that allows citizens, government officials, and the politicians to establish clearly and concisely how well their civil service is performing; a performance improvement too, which enables senior decision-makers to see the countries which perform best in each area, and therefore, learn from them,” she stated.