When the new administration was inaugurated in 2023, HE President Bola Ahmed Tinubu laid out the basic underlying visions of the Renewed Hope Agenda. A significant iteration of that Agenda is the vision of Nigeria becoming a $1trn economy by 2030. This is a very noble vision that is consistent with the urgency of making Nigeria a great economy. It is a vision that could jumpstart the Renewed Hope Agenda into transforming the well-being of Nigerians. However, we also have to situate this vision within Nigeria’s governance and economic realities.

To get to where Nigeria really can begin to make a significant improvement in the lives of Nigerians, the Nigerian state needs to be an enabling and capable developmental state. However, the governance and economic realities on ground as at the 2023 commencement point, only reiterate how difficult but not impossible the vision of transforming the Nigerian economy is.

A developmental state depends on government effectiveness that is determined in terms of not only government’s regulatory efficiency but also on public sector accountability, and how well the government is able to adapt its comparative advantages to the dynamics of the global economy.

Unfortunately, Nigeria’s performance on the Government Effectiveness Index—a key dimension of the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI)—remains significantly below global norms. The 2023 performance is not salutary: on a scale ranging from –2.5 to +2.5, Nigeria’s score stood at –0.85 (up from –1.04 in 2022, but still far below the world average of approximately –0.04). This ranked Nigeria at 151 out of 193 countries.

To materialise this vision of a $1trn economy by 2030—just about five years away—we truly need more than statistical and econometric analysis. What is needed is a huge dose of institutional strategy that translate visions to realities. This is because Nigeria’s sub-optimal performance in the WGI and other significance economic and development indices reflects persistent institutional weaknesses in the form of (i) limited civil service professionalism, (ii) policy inconsistency and implementation bottlenecks, (iii) poor quality of public service delivery, and (iv) inadequate accountability and oversight mechanisms.

Most particularly, achieving the goal of a $1trn economy by 2030 requires that Nigeria must sustain an average annual real GDP growth rate of approximately 6–7 per cent, significantly higher than its historical average of 2.7 per cent over the past two decades. Achieving this requires removing key barriers to growth, including inadequate infrastructure, low productivity, fiscal leakages, and, most importantly, a human capital deficit in both the public and private sectors.

It is clear, from so many indications, that Nigeria has still not registered the developmental implication of Nigeria’s youth bulge—a demographic situation that currently places the median age of many Nigerians at 18.1 (meaning over half of the population, or 58 per cent, are under the age of 30). There is a connection between Nigeria’s low human capital index (currently at 38/100, compared to 92 in South Korea and 85 in Malaysia), and her labour productivity has been growing at a rather sluggish 0.9 per cent per annum, compared to the 3-4 per cent that defines the high-performing Asian economies.

This is the juncture at which the public service becomes a crucial partner in Nigeria’s development and governance efforts; a co-architect in jumpstarting the Renewed Hope Agenda. The civil service is the institutional context within which the human capital is transmuted into a workforce that generate the requisite dynamics Nigeria needs for an effective labour productivity. This urgently speaks to a new kind of civil service that is capability ready to reposition Nigeria’s development renaissance; a new kind of public servant that is committed, well-trained, accountable, digitally literate, economically aware, and possesses twenty-first century competences. And ultimately, it speaks to a Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) that is sufficiently reformed to reform the reform of the civil service system and reposition it for its mandated responsibility.

This is the very crux of the series of events that the FCSC has put in place to initiate a deep-seated strategic blueprint that articulates the structural basis of an efficient workforce to backstop Nigeria’s economic transformation. As soon as the 10th Commission was inaugurated on the 13th of December, 2023, it became very urgent to put in place a rapid institutional assessment to determine the state of the institution.

The repositioning plan that the rapid assessment yielded enabled us to clearly see the challenges of the FCSC from its inception till date. Thus, one and a half years into the tenure of the 10th Commission, we are now beginning to develop the sense, through diagnostic intelligence and insights, as to the direction the FCSC ought to be transformed into in more deeply structural and institutional terms.

This implies that the original repositioning plan the FCSC developed as a roadmap into understanding the current state of the institution was nothing more than a starting point—a product of largely desk assessment that is just the first step towards a more rigorous and systematic diagnosis rooted in research and intelligence.

Such a diagnosis will also be grounded in stakeholders contributions and buy-in. At the core of this deeper strategic plan is the question of what the civil service will look like, from the vantage point of the reform blueprint of the FCSC, if it is to constitute a veritable game changing strategic partner and engine room for realising the Renewed Hope Agenda.

It is therefore one of the good fortunes of the FCSCto take a significant clue that aligns it with the Federal Civil Service Strategy and Implementation (FCSSIP) currently being implemented by the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (OHCSF).

In such a critical collaboration that foregrounds complementary and shared vision and passion, the FCSC facilitates a strategic planning intelligence that enables it to rethink, deepen and consolidate its constitutional mandates.

In more concrete terms, the essence of the strategic plan—and the retreat (that just held)to put it together—is to set in motion a series of strategic processes that will transform the FCSC into the critical human resource management (HRM) expert advisory hub that the Federal Government of Nigeria can draw on.

The requires that the FCSC is compelled to take on the task of re-professionalising the civil service system though the reinvention, deepening and strengthening of the competency-based HRM practices in the federal civil service. The strategic process will then have to focus on several crucial institutional elements the system needs to reorient the reforms of the past decades.
To be continued tomorrow.
Prof. Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja.