The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has called for a renewal of Nigeria’s public service ethos, urging civil servants to embrace public-spiritedness and ethical accountability.

He said lessons from the life of the late American judge, Frank Caprio, should guide reforms in Nigeria’s civil service.
In a tribute on Saturday, Olaopa described Caprio, who recently passed away, as an exemplar of what a public servant should represent.
He stressed that Caprio’s conduct in office highlighted the importance of humaneness, professionalism, and ethical standards in delivering government services.

“To ask the question of who a public or civil servant is, is therefore to get the very heart of the essence of the institutional reform of the public service in Nigeria,” Olaopa said. “All over the world, the public servant is the person the public sees. She is the embodiment of the government’s social contract with the people.”

He lamented that Nigeria’s inability to guarantee effective service delivery was due not only to institutional dysfunction but also to the negative image of public servants, many of whom fail to uphold their duty to citizens.

“The citizens saw Judge Frank Caprio. They see the Nigerian policeman at countless roadblocks. Or the Nigerian custom officials at the Seme Border. Or the medical personnel who is more religious than humane. Or the high court judge who is more materialistic than justice demands,” he said.

Olaopa argued that civil service must be treated as a vocation rather than a career for personal enrichment. Drawing a parallel with the biblical Levites, he said: “Public service is more than a job or a means of earning a living. It is a spiritual calling. Service is a mode of selflessness. It asks the public servant to draw spiritual fulfilment from the dedication and commitment to rendering service to others.”

He added that true service demands sacrifice and deferred gratification rather than “primitive accumulation.”

He added, “You do not serve the public to become obscenely wealthy. Indeed, public spiritedness insists that the public servant and officials must be held within a framework of personal and public accountability that requires that the official must be held responsible for her duties to the public.”

The FCSC Chairman emphasized that professionalism, competence, and ethical codes such as accountability, transparency, neutrality, and probity were indispensable to reforming Nigeria’s public institutions.

He said this was the enduring legacy of Judge Caprio, whose example should inspire a new generation of Nigerian civil servants.
“We need the like of Judge Frank Caprio to restore the soul of public administration as the basis for bringing democratic governance alive,” Olaopa noted.