By Olusade Adesola

What began on July 11, 2026 as an open letter from Dr Goke Adegoroye to President Bola Tinubu has blossomed into one of the most consequential debates on the Nigerian federal bureaucracy in recent years. Dr Adegoroye warned of a downward trend in leadership effectiveness at the apex of the civil service and urged that the office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HCSF), the government’s chief human resources authority, be entrusted to officers with extensive administrative experience, institutional memory and mastery of the Public Service Rules.
 
Retired Permanent Secretary David Adejo Andrew responded that the era when administrative generalists constituted the exclusive reservoir of top leadership has given way, globally and at home, to competency-based selection in which strategic capability, integrity and adaptability count far more than professional origin.
 
Since then, the elders have spoken. Dr Bukar Usman, former Permanent Secretary in the Presidency, submits that the generalist-professional rivalry was settled as far back as the Udoji Commission of 1972: at senior levels, every civil servant becomes a manager, and what ultimately matters is performance, integrity and sound judgment.

Former Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Mahmud Yayale Ahmed takes a conciliatory but firm position as he asserted that professional background should not determine eligibility, yet management and administrative experience remain indispensable. He recalled that, in his time, officers on Grade Level 14 and above were centrally managed by the Office of the HCSF precisely to prepare them for senior leadership.

And Professor Tunji Olaopa, Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, expectedly offered a scholarly framing yet: tracing the “cult of the generalists” from the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 through the Gorsuch, Newns, Fulton and Udoji reforms, he concludes that arguing for either camp is in bad taste and that every organisation requires both, and every officer aspiring to top leadership must be made to acquire both core specialist and generalist competencies through deliberate leadership pipelining.
 
Dr Adegoroye has further clarified that his intervention was never an advocacy for any cadre, but a call for competence, institutional memory and integrity. Tellingly, he poses a question that turns the searchlight inward: if the administrative class has weakened, who bears responsibility for developing its leadership pipeline? Career management of senior civil servants, after all, rests with the Office of the Head of the Civil Service.
 
Given the current state of the service, restricting the office of the HCSF to officers of the Administrative Cadre is a tall ambition. The point is captured in Lord Denning’s celebrated judgment in Panorama Developments (Guildford) Ltd v Fidelis Furnishing Fabrics Ltd [1971] 2 QB 711, where a company sought to disown its company secretary’s contracts on the ground that he was a mere clerk.

Denning ruled: “But the times have changed. A company secretary is a much more important person nowadays than he was in 1887… He is no longer a mere clerk.” Professional officers who have scaled the rigorous hurdles of written assessment, ICT proficiency and oral interview to attain the rank of Permanent Secretary have earned their place. Times have changed; it would be inappropriate to bar them from the highest office of the service. On this, Usman’s invocation of Udoji and Olaopa’s rejection of the adversarial dichotomy are decisive.
 
Lamentation is not a strategy, or nostalgia a reform plan. There is a Yoruba adage: “A múkùn-ún wón ní kí erù re wo; ó sì dáhùn pé, ‘Òkè l’enwò, ebere láti ìsàlè.” when the hunchback was asked to adjust his load, he replied, “The obstruction is at the top; start from the bottom.” Root causes, not symptoms, must be confronted.
 
The roots of the cadre’s weak competitiveness are traceable. At the point of entry, professional courses demand five Ordinary Level credits including English and Mathematics; many of the social science and humanities courses that largely feed the Administrative Cadre admit on softer terms, leaving quantitative and analytical capabilities underdeveloped, precisely the capabilities that examination-based selection rewards.

In mid-career, professionals face mandatory capability gates: accountants must become chartered, engineers must be COREN-registered, doctors and pharmacists must pass consultancy examinations. For administrative officers, the only recurring intellectual test is the periodic promotion examination, after which many bid farewell to study until the next cycle. Institutionally, in-service training has degenerated into welfare. Add to this the fragmentation, well noted by Adejo, of once-integrated administrative functions into narrow silos that deny today’s officers the broad exposure their predecessors enjoyed, and the outcome is unsurprising.

The cure is already on paper: Pillars I and II of FCSSIP 25
The arguments and counter-arguments have brilliantly diagnosed the ailment, the declining fortunes of officers of the Administrative Cadre in the contest for appointment as Permanent Secretaries and, by implication, ascension to the office of HCSF. What is largely missing is a clearly defined pathway of initiatives to reverse that decline. This is where the debate should now move. The FCSSIP 25 contains within its first two pillars a credible pathway that the discourse should now be focused on.
 
Pillar I: Capability building and talent management provides for the redesign and relaunch of the SMAT-P and LEAD-P training modules and, crucially, the identification and nurturing of a LEAD-P Presidential Cohort as the next generation of service leaders. The SMAT-P and LEAD-P programmes were initiated by the former Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Alhaji Danladi Kifasi (2014-2015). Successive FCSSIPs have reinvigorated and energised them, evolving them into a structured pathway for leadership development. Conscientiously implemented, this pillar would reorientate the service from cadre entitlement to capability, offering every officer, generalist or professional, the strategic development opportunities to prove competence on merit. It is, in substance, the modern equivalent of the central management of GL14-and-above officers that Yayale Ahmed recalls from his tenure, and of the “leadership pipelining” and “regulatory gate-keeping” that Olaopa prescribes.
 
Pillar II: Institutionalisation of performance management would establish clear work objectives, performance agreements and cyclical feedback, generating empirical metrics of performance across the service. Diligently implemented, such metrics could in time substantially replace less objective selection instruments, address concerns on the credibility of the selection process, and address at its root the dominance of any single cadre in appointments, including at the point of renewing the tenure of serving Permanent Secretaries, where little use is presently made of such evidence.
 
The tragedy, therefore, is not the absence of a pathway but the lack of conscientious implementation. With FCSSIP 25 now closed and a successor plan for 2026–2030 at an advanced stage of approval, an important recommendation this debate should crystallise is that the incoming HCSF, whatever their cadre of origin, must be held accountable for the rigorous, measurable delivery of these two pillars.
 
On the other hand, the performance of Permanent Secretaries must be judged against the overbearing influence of some Ministers, few of whom would accept the rules-based counsel of their Permanent Secretaries.

History offers the counter-example of the golden generation of Ahmed Joda, who, as a wartime Permanent Secretary, crossed swords with the very officer who later became Head of State, yet was neither removed nor diminished; and of Allison Ayida, whose candid public critiques of military governance did not stop the Murtala regime from elevating him to Secretary to the Government and Head of Service.

Candour was rewarded then; today, a Permanent Secretary is redeployed whenever a Minister coughs or perceives his advice as adverse. It is telling that when some Ministers face anti-corruption prosecution, the Permanent Secretaries who served under them are not in the dock.
 
The desired change must therefore be top-down, which is the enduring truth of Professor Ladipo Adamolekun’s aphorism, cited on all sides of this debate: “a president gets the civil service he deserves.” The President can dignify the bureaucracy by meeting periodically with his Permanent Secretaries to feel the pulse of the service at first hand, and by insisting that heads of parastatals respect the established reporting lines through the Permanent Secretary.

Conclusion
The Adegoroye–Adejo exchange, now enriched by Usman, Yayale Ahmed, and Olaopa, has served the nation well. But diagnosis has run its course. The debate’s missing element is a clear pathway to restore the competitiveness of the Administrative Cadre without dismantling merit, and that pathway is not to be invented; it is to be implemented. Pillars I and II of FCSSIP 25, faithfully carried into FCSSIP 2026–2030 with presidential backing and measurable accountability, would build the leadership pipeline that all sides desire. The goal is not the triumph of generalists over professionals, or vice versa; it is a Federal Civil Service in which the best-prepared officer, from whatever cadre, can rise and lead.

Adesola, is a retired federal Permanent Secretary.