Recommends ways to flush out chalatans
Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission ((FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, yesterday, lamented that the federal civil service has been degraded to such an extent that people applying to join it do so for other reasons than the desire for professionalism.
To change the trend, he stated the need to flush out those he described as charlatans, impostors and opportunists from the Nigeria’s civil service.
According to Olaopa, at the core of such a rescue mission is the need to re-professonalise the service and reverse its diminishing status.
Olaopa spoke during a meeting with the Deputy President, African Association for Public Administration and Management (AAPAM), Mr Dada Joseph Olugbenga, at the commission in Abuja.
Stressing the need for professionalism in the federal civil service, Olaopa said: “It is professionalism that will reverse the increasingly diminishing status of this vocation that we have signed up to as our career, profession and calling.
“In this regard, I have been a civil servant all my life, and I am ever so proud to reference and revere such administrative icons of the profession as the Simeon Adebos, the Udojis, Abdul-Aziz Attah, Ayide, Asiodu, Ahmed Joda, among others, as mentors.
“I was an insider and I know the steady but dogged efforts of colleagues over the last decades (including those in the saddle), to redeem the profession that they have dedicated their lives to.”
He said the question that should be answered is: “How far in the reform direction has the service gone or is capable of getting?”
He lamented that the civil service jobs were most often the last on any serious professional’s preference list and stressed the need to keep this question in focus, until “we get a handle on solution framework of answers to finally reposition the profession beyond the rhetoric of it.
According to Olaopa, the redemption of the civil service cannot be left to chance, and to the current corps of service leadership alone.
“The onus of responsibility, therefore, falls on those critical mass of professionals – public/civil servants, scholars/academics, development practitioners, among others with the leadership and central coordination nodal points taking the lead in jumpstarting required movement to arrest the sabotage of the service and restore its professionalism,” he said.
