The Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has expressed support for the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HCSF), Mrs. Didi Esther Walson-Jack, over the disagreement with the President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Joe Ajaero, on the neutrality of civil servants in politics.

Walson-Jack had said at a quarterly Stakeholders and Citizens Engagement Interactive Session that there was the need to safeguard the political neutrality of the civil servants in accordance with their responsibility to any government of the day.

In response, Ajaero had argued that both the 1999 Constitution and the 2003 Supreme Court judgment in INEC vs Musa and Others foreground the right of civil servants, like all other Nigerians, not just to be card-carrying party members, but to also be involved in all other political activities.

In a statement on Friday, Olaopa recalled that “in response to the Supreme Court judgment, which reiterates the constitutional provision allowing any citizen of Nigeria to participate in politics, the HCSF argues that the constitutional provision (when conflated with the subordinate provision of the public service rule) permits civil servants the fundamental right to privately support any party of their choice without being drawn into the murky space of high-stake political activities.”

He noted that both the HCSF and the NLC president pointed at the Supreme Court support for the provision of Section 40 of the Nigerian Constitution, which states that every person shall be entitled to assemble freely and associate with other persons, and in particular he/she may form or belong to any political party, trade union or any other association for the protection of his/her interests.

He, however, noted that the HCSF insisted that civil servants, while adhering to this constitutional provision, must keep in mind the fundamental significance of the Public Service Rule (PSR), which defines and constrains the administrative behaviour of civil servants.

Section 4 of the PSR defines serious misconduct as “a specific act of very serious wrongdoing and improper behaviour which is inimical to the image of the service and which can be investigated and if proven, may lead to dismissal. ”

The PSR then goes on to situate engaging in partisan politics as an act of serious misconduct.

Asking if the PSR then undermines the constitutional stipulation, Olaopa said “there was no easy way to mediate this discourse.”

“The two sides of the debate are cogent in the understanding of how the political status of a civil servant must be construed. The entire political order of the Nigerian State is anchored on the constitutional provisions which are the final arbiter on any legal issues concerning the government and the citizens of Nigeria. And the Supreme Court, in its 2003 ruling on INEC vs Musa and Others, did well to uphold Section 40 of the 1999 Constitution,” he said.

Olaopa argued that the Supreme Court judgment which grounds the provision of the 1999 Constitution on partisan political engagement of Nigerians cannot be the final answer on the matter.

“And this position is far from being counterintuitive, coming from the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission. This is my argument. The constitutional order of the Nigerian state cannot answer to all realities, economic, political, socio-cultural, administrative, and even governance. The Nigerian state has weathered all sorts of circumstances that had to be handled through legal pragmatism. Thus, while the constitution is fundamentally right, at the most general level of the fundamental, to state that every Nigerian has the right to be political and to hold political views and participate in politics, the said constitution cannot legislate at the level of the concrete on what is best for the civil service system as both an administrative system and a profession in its own right. That has to be handled with an administrative wisdom and legality that would not undermine the constitutional order. It is at this level that stakeholders in the administrative framework can decide what is best for the system to be,” he said.

For him, the administrative stability, professional status and performance capability of the civil servant to deliver her utmost in terms of articulating and implementing policies is anchored on the ability of the civil servant to remain neutral in political activities and engagements.

According to him, at the base of this disagreement between the HCSF and the NLC is the most fundamental dichotomy that inaugurated the public administration.

“This is the politics-administration distinction which insists that politicians and civil servants have different remits in their connection with the running of a state. While politicians are saddled with the design and formulation of policies that service the social contract, the civil servants are concerned only with the implementation of these policies. And each party’s task is so specified that each needs not collaborate or interfere with each other’s responsibilities.”

He observed that this dichotomy is not so easily explained and outlined, explaining that this is because it is simply a theoretical construct that different administrative traditions, approaches and contexts could interpret differently.

“This is because there is a complex framework of relationship between administration and politics, or between civil servants and politicians. Max Weber notes that a civil servant can either live for politics or live from politics. And both are not mutually exclusive. According to him, ‘Whoever lives for politics makes it his life,’ in the inward sense. He either enjoys the naked possession of the power he exercises, or he nourishes his inward equilibrium and self-esteem with the consciousness of giving meaning to his life by serving a ‘cause’ .

Probably every serious person who lives for a cause also lives from this cause,” he added.

Olaopa said that the Awolowo-Adebo administrative model emerged from Nigeria’s inheritance of the apolitical British civil service system, which according to him, is common across all Commonwealth countries.

He said that the British civil service system was designed to be thoroughly impartial.

“Civil servants are trained to serve the government of the day with utmost impartiality regardless of whatever political opinions or views they hold,” he said.

The system, he stressed, gives room for special advisers who are specially appointed, hold temporary positions and are exempted from the rule of impartiality in their duty to provide political advice and direction to ministers.

“This was the framework of the politics-administration distinction that gave Nigeria the golden age of the civil service in the immediate post-independence period. Unfortunately, one of the traumatic fallouts of the military incursion into Nigerian politics is the terrible distortion of Nigerian governance, political and administrative coherence. When the Babangida administration began its Public Service Reform agenda, there was already on board the reform to transit Nigeria’s governmental structure to presidentialism. The Dotun Philips study group that preceded this reform framework was tasked with the objective of a professionalised civil service circumscribed by a managerial philosophy and grafted into the institutional context of presidentialism. Unfortunately, with the promulgation of Decree 43 by the Babangida administration, the objective of professionalising the civil service system was jeopardised with the politicising of the position of the permanent secretary, which was then re-designated as the Director-General,” he said.