The unintended consequence of the 1975 purging of the system is even more debilitating—the institutionalisation of bureaucratic decay and corruption. Civil servants who witnessed the terrible trauma of the downsising immediately read in between the line and came to the uncomfortable conclusion that the system cannot be trusted. A culture of fear, silence and insecurity emerged that set the civil servants against the system that could traumatise those who have given their lives to serving the public diligently and with commitment.

The tenure that used to be trusted has become a source of pragmatic thinking that engendered an ethical problem which undermine the basis of the very concept of public service. In other words, rather than deferring gratification, civil and public servants are now compelled to seek for instant gratification that enable them to secure their future at the expense of the public they are meant to serve.

The civil service purge was a unique one in the annals of Nigerian administrative history. There has never been anything like it after, even when it sadly, has ever since become a culture of governance. This statement is not complimentary. It simply also implies that the Nigerian civil service system has not recovered from the massive erosion of the integrity of the system. Several predicaments of the system can be traced back to this singular moment of a badly implemented policy.

One, the ethical framework guiding the operation of public service values was terribly eroded in ways that enthrone bureaucratic corruption arising from the vice of instant gratification. Two, the purge destabilised the internal management control mechanisms around which civil and public servants circumscribe to be more effective and efficient in the performance of their responsibilities. Thus, there was a virtual abandonment of the rule of law; rules and procedures on which the system itself rests. And this is all the more, until today, in spite of the extensive framework of modernisation through digitisation and computerisation of the system.

Three, the pay and compensation system had become increasing disarticulated from institutional performance especially from the 1980s. Wages, in other words, have remained stagnant even in the face of extreme economic downturns and recessions. This deficiency undermined the human resources management dynamics of the civil service. First, there was a massive draining of talents and expertise away from the public to the private sector. Second, those remaining in the system began to look for coping mechanism that directly undermine institutional structures and processes: the manipulation of travel allowances and per diems, connivance with contractors, outright theft of public assets, and alteration of date of birth to guarantee prolonged tenure.

All these constitute a symptom of the fear of the unknown that sudden and unplanned retirement seem to imply
for civil servants.

The fourth predicament of the civil service system derives from the non-professionalisation of the MDAs’ departments of planning, research and statistics as the hub of planning and policy analysis. This systemic failure was reinforced by the absence of a culture of town-and-gown policy-research synergy which has the potential of institutionalising and facilitating the development of policy intelligence and strategic thinking in development management. Lastly, the purge disrupted the key element of esprit de corps which is necessary as a fundamental factor in the emergence of a community of service and practice which sustains the civil service profession.

The most fundamental lesson to learn in all is simple: what institutional reform initiatives are required to extricate the civil service system from the albatross of the 1975 purge? In other words, how does a commitment to administrative reforms transform the civil service beyond the limitations of 1975? There are several reform options and frameworks that have to come into play in the urgent need to redeem the institutional integrity and functionality of the system. The obvious starting point for such a reform is the need for a fundamental reassessment of the role of the state and governments, and the implications that this reassessment has for the structure, functions and operations of MDAs.

This makes it imperative to articulate a more development-oriented federation through the restructuring of the Nigerian federalism as a framework for macro-institutional governance reform. Such a restructuring challenges us to deeply rethink the politics-administration and policy-implementation powerplay to be able to achieve a more development-friendly partnership between politicians and policymakers in the best tradition of performance management that is grounded on a re-professionalised civil service as the foundation for a developmental state in Nigeria.

The system also has to rethink the urgency of radically improving its own organisational intelligence quotient through (a) a re-professionalisation and reskilling programme that increases the capacity of the system for policy intelligence, and (b) the creation of a senior executive service (SES) that embodies the best that the system can offer in terms of the core competence the civil service requires to match Nigeria through the VUCA—vulnerable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—policy environment of the twenty-first century. Here, we must defer to Bob Garratt’s thesis that in administration, the fish always gets rotten from the head first.

Thus, if the head is reconstituted to become healthy, then the administrative body becomes optimally efficient. This theory enables us to compensate for Nigeria’s overreliance on external policy experts and consultants for technical supports as a means of undermining the system’s capacity deficit. Here, I am compelled to suggest the reinvention of the tradition of the super permanent secretary. This is solely from the perspective of the policy intelligence and managerial acumen the tradition brought to bear on Nigeria’s administrative and governance context.

The next significant reform direction demands the restoration of a competency-based human resource management that is aligned to strong performance management and talent management system. This requires that the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) undergoes a serious institutional reform itself to be able to serve as the gatekeeping mechanism that prevents the wrong people from gaining entry into the service, while putting critical matrices in place for scouting, recruiting, incentivising, retaining and promoting the best talents. This also requires a serious commitment to a vision of industrial relations that ensures that the government and labour unions are connected not by adversarial but developmental industrial relations.

The Nigerian civil service system has got to leave behind the terrible systemic trauma of the 1975 purge and reinvent itself through a thoroughgoing institutional rehabilitation that restore the capacity readiness of the bureaucracy as the fundamental pathway to national development.
Concluded.

Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration, Abuja.