Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has proffered a path to attaining viable mentorship in the civil service, insisting that mentorship must not always be top-down.

Speaking at the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (OHCSF) Sensitisation on Mentoring Market Place in Abuja yesterday, he said the event was another “significant component of the FCSSIP25 reform blueprint that signposts talent management, leadership pipelining and capacity development as reform imperatives.”

Highlighting the value of mentoring in any profession, Olaopa noted the need to recalibrate mentorship. He urged the adoption of reverse mentoring, which could narrow the skills gap between tech-savvy young civil servants and their seniors by having the former teach the latter how to navigate the intricacies of artificial intelligence (AI) for policy work and public administration.

He also urged the adoption of a framework that would encourage public-private partnerships (PPPs) to deepen staff exchange with the private sector and non-state institutions to accelerate skills acquisition, including the development of commercial skills, and the imperative need to mainstream good corporate governance principles into public governance codes.

However, he lamented that the profession of public administration and the civil service loses so much by letting the legacy of the administrative wisdom of vintage bureaucrats fritter away as they retire over the years.

Wondering whether the civil service had ever systematically built and managed a database of the vanishing skills of outstanding officers and mentors while they were still in service, to be leveraged when required, he decried the dearth of mentorship frameworks in the civil service.