There is every conceivable reason to celebrate and properly situate the emergence and functional relevance of the Federal Capital Territory Civil Service Commission (FCT-CSC) in Nigeria’s administrative history, even if the significance of this is not obvious to any but an administrative historian or public administration researcher. In 2018, a legislative bill approving the establishment of the FCT-CSC was passed into law. Like the federal and state CSC, it was charged with the responsibility of the appointment, promotion, discipline and transfer of civil servants within the civil service system of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.

The eventual passing of this law has been long in the making, especially since the constitutional establishment of the Federal Civil Service Commission and the State Civil Service Commission raises the crucial issue of federal inclusivity and administrative effectiveness, especially for sub-national entity. But I am jumping ahead of my narrative already!

In 1976, an act legislating the establishment of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja was passed to law. There was also the establishment of the Federal Capital Territory Development Authority (FCTDA) to oversee the administrative necessities of not only transferring the federal capital from Lagos to Abuja, but also of administering municipal services while also articulating the Abuja master plan with the objective of infrastructural development.

Within the grand national vision, Abuja, more than Lagos, is meant to realise the federal vision of a centrally located and neutral geographical zone that could symbolically speak to Nigeria’s federal aspiration. My argument in this piece is that the significance of the creation of the FCT in 1976 has finally been realised with the establishment of the FCT-CSC as the frontline and constitutionally enabled administrative gate-keeping institution that will strengthen the subnational component in the collective desire for a change management dynamic that will enable the institutional reform of the civil service system in Nigeria. Abuja is the final plank in the overall systemic strategy to articulate a reform programme that captures the entirety of the Nigerian state and its administrative objectives.

Coming in as the newest CSC, after more than seven decades since the founding of the civil service commission in Nigeria, the FCT-CSC is not only enjoying the privileges of grand attention to the emergence of a public service within a territory enjoying a mini-state status. It is also coming at a time when there is an ongoing and renewed enthusiasm about launching and consolidating an institutional and administrative reform to backstop the dynamics of the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration.

And under the able leadership of my colleague, Engr. Emeka Ezeh, as the chairman, the FCT-CSC has fully capitalised on its newness to adopt and domesticate twenty-first century administrative and performance practices while also connecting with the FCSC’s strategic plan to exhibit itself as the poster CSC in the overall challenge of making Nigeria work through its civil and public service system as the institutional mechanism for grounding the performance of a developmental state in Nigeria.

The emergence of the FCT-CSC participates in the global significance of civil service commission in administrative history. The idea of the civil service commission owes its contemporary understanding to the consistent efforts of the British government and its civil service to keep iterating reform measures that would make the system increasingly more efficient and functional. In 1854, two important administrative developments—the Report on the Indian Civil Service and the Northcote-Trevelyan Report—were the results of an intense interrogation of the civil service system, and the urgent need to safeguard it against abnormal and unprofessional recruitment practices whose terrible consequences undermined the efficiency the British government, through its civil service, to cater for the needs of her citizens.

The two reports outline the structure of a framework that will ensure (i) recruitment would be through an open and competitive examination that will facilitate an entry requirement that guarantees a merit system; (ii) new recruits would require a generalist education that will enable inter-departmental staff transfers; (iii) recruitment would integrate new entrants into a hierarchical structure of grades from the most mechanical to the most intellectual; and (iv) promotion and career progression would be on the basis of merit and not patronage or preferment. These four premises became the basis for the establishment of the Civil Service Commission in the United Kingdom. And they consolidated the earlier practice in the United States, through the Pendleton Act of 1883, which not only undermine the American spoil system, but establishment of the significance of competitive examination as the criterion for ensuring entry into the civil service based on a meritocratic standard.

These are the global predecessors that ground the critical emergence of the FCT-CSC as a cogent dimension of the FCSC in Nigeria’s public administration. There are two fundamental reasons why the coming into reckoning of the FCT-CSC is a key feature in the annals of administrative and institutional engineering in Nigeria. First, establishing the FCT-CSC carries the overall burden of gate-keeping the professionalism and meritocracy of the civil service system in Nigeria. That objective cannot be achieved while leaving out a significant subnational part like Abuja. There are a lot of gaps and administrative impediments in MDAs that lack adequately and functional supervision from CSC that enable significant sharp practices and unprofessional relations that undermine the performance and productivity of the civil service. The political interference in the internal governance dynamics of the public service, the lack of a civil service commission, and the prebendal framework that creep into recruitment, all go to undermine the constitutional independence of the civil service. It enables certain corrupt tendencies, especially in the implementation of the federal character principle as a critical component of the diversity management praxis, that steadily chip away at the public spiritedness and the meritocratic basis of performance management in the civil service. Merit is often thrown away on the altar of political and administrative patronage.

To be continued tomorrow.

Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration.