Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has listed some ways retired permanent secretaries can contribute to governance and national development.
 
Olaopa, a retired permanent secretary, spoke yesterday when top officials of the Council of Retired Federal Permanent Secretaries (CORFEPS) paid him a courtesy visit in his office in Abuja.
  
The courtesy call was led by Mahmud Yayale Ahmed, who was at different times the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Secretary to the Government of the Federation, and Minister of Defence.
  
According to Olaopa, CORFEPS stands tall as the apex body of veterans of Nigeria’s bureaucracy.  He said he was proud of its continued efforts to deploy its “immense value as a reservoir of professional knowledge, experience and clout to championing significant conversations and interventions that are channelled at shaping the trajectory of our profession of public administration and the future of the civil service in Nigeria.”

 He added: “However, I make bold to say that, with the game-changing benefits of the Renewed Hope development strides of President Bola Tinubu that is unfolding with significant transformational impacts and potential, many more frontiers-shifting areas that CORFEPS will necessarily be required to take on have built up. I see a veritable ecosystem in which CORFEPS can position itself to deploy multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary expertise and network as part of the existing and overloaded complex network of national think tanks, to become a sounding board for second opinion to governments on development policy management and public administration reforms.”
  
Consequently, Olaopa urged that state-level Associations of retired Heads of Service and Permanent Secretaries should be brought into CORFEPS.
  
He, however, lamented that the public administration practice lacked a professional gatekeeping body since the National Association for Public Administration and Management (NAPAM) went moribund, a challenge to which “CORFEPS should provide a lead, with the HCSF and Chairman, FCSC serving as catalysts. I advise that we solicit and source technical assistance from our numerous international and national development partners and foundations to kick-start this process. If we can hire a sound expert Technical Lead to head the secretariat soon as the association comes upstream, it will sustain itself by leveraging the typical templates of similar bodies and its flagship activities.”
  
Olaopa hailed the CORFEPS, led by Ajiyan Katagum, whom he described as his indefatigable mentor and boss.