Nigeria’s Civil Service Commissions, ‘Katsina declaration’ and reform implications

From November 25 to 28, 2024, the Katsina State government hosted the annual conference of the National Council for Civil Service Commissions (NCCSC). This is coming on the heel of a hiatus of over 10 years. This fact in itself immediately speaks to a significant issue in the ineffectiveness of the gatekeeping function of the Civil Service Commissions in Nigeria. If the body in charge of the gatekeepers has failed for over 10 years to adjudicate on their effectiveness or otherwise, it raises a cause for concern. However, the conference’s theme—“The Role of the Civil Service Commissions in Driving the Renewed Hope Agenda”—signals a readiness of the NCCSC to regain its constitutional function in regulating the affairs of the Civil Service Commissions in Nigeria as a means of getting the public service to function effectively as a mechanism for democratic governance and development effectiveness.

Apart from my keynote as the chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), three significant technical sessions were also facilitated by distinguished resource persons who are well-versed in the signifiers of the defining challenges that the public service faces from their different vantage points of expertise.

Professor Adeola Adenikinju is the president of the Nigerian Economic Society and had been involved in national planning designs, macro-economic policy change management and advisories for decades.

Mr Soji Apampa, the founder of the Convention on Business Integrity, had contributed to conversations and praxis in the building of national integrity systems as systemic bulwark in the anti-corruption campaign, and as an essential pillar in the values reorientation dimension to national cultural adjustment dynamic; and Prof. Abdullahi Shehu, a professor of Criminology, is the former Nigerian ambassador to the Russian Federation, has core expertise in capacity building on anti-corruption policies and mechanisms, promoting integrity as a vital component of governance and institutional reforms, and anti-money laundering and terrorism financing. Between the three of them, they highlighted several fundamental issues. First, there is the critical role that the civil servants must play in deploying transparency, accountability, professionalism and innovation in facilitating the efficient and effective implementation of the key priority areas of the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration.

In my keynote, I laid a fundamental emphasis on the transformation of the CSCs as the ultimate game changing agent that is committed to a renewed governance partnership with the government through the institutional reform of the public service. And the objective of this reform is to achieve the re-institution of a professionalised, competency-based, meritocratic, and efficient value institution in Nigeria through the effective monitoring of the constitutional gatekeeping mandate.

This demands that the CSCs be capacitated sufficiently to facilitate, in the shortest possible time, the emergence of a new generation of public managers who are patriotically committed to the reconstitution of the public service for effective and efficient service delivery in Nigeria. This will demand, within the framework of the renewed governance partnership, the establishment of performance contract with the employees of the MDAs, and a service compact with the communities of service and practice of public administration in Nigeria, as well as with the Nigerian citizenry. This compact will instigate the generation of flagship reform and service initiatives, change programmes, peer review platforms and learning events that will likely keep the various CSCs of the federation engaged all year round.

A brief historical excursion will throw into broad relief the emergence of the Civil Service Commission as the handmaiden of the British government in ensuring the institutional sanitation of the British civil service as the fulcrum of meritocratic efficiency. It will also firmly ground the significant relevance of the Katsina Declaration as a critical watershed in getting the CSCs to gatekeep the vocational significance of the civil service in making the Renewed Hope Agenda crucial for the betterment of Nigerians. Through its evolution from the ancient pharaonic Egyptian society to the monarchy in Britain, it had been difficult for public administration, or the appointment of public servants, to be divorced from the whims of the king or the emperor.

Indeed, the Crown deployed the civil service as a system of patronage that was, of course, determined by political consideration and ridden with corruption. It is a system that flouts the politics-administration distinction which is meant to separate between politics and administrative matter for a meritocratic administrative efficiency. However, by the time the Magna Carta had been crafted in the 13th century, there was already a growing need to separate politics and administration, and orient the status of the civil servants on the state and not the Crown.

Much later, and specifically in 1782, a series of economic reform programmes were initiated to effectively deal with the system of royal patronage and decrease the influence of the King on the legislature. Even though this reform had a political motive, its unintended consequence on administration was the emergence of an efficient and non-political civil service.

In other words, as the officials who were gradually removed from political activities became more non-political, they also increasingly became more permanent. It then became increasingly impossible for any of these administrators to lose their positions on political grounds. The early eighteenth-century Britain therefore began to see the gradual rise of non-party officials who remain in place when government changes. This led to the second reason that facilitated the separation between politics and administration. As administration was consolidating its autonomy, politics was equally becoming more complex for a minister to ever think of combining it with administrative activities.

It was at this period that the term “civil servants”, as opposed to the military servants deployed by the East India Company, was first used in India. By this time, it was already settled that a permanent civil service could only be secured by the establishment of a security of tenure for public servants. On the other side of the Atlantic in the United States, the Pendelton Act of 1883 was promulgated to undermine the spoil system which made political patronage the basis of recruitment into the service.

The Act recognised the significance of competitive examinations as the basis for ensuring merit in the recruitment of civil servants. It was founded on three specific objectives: (a) the use of competitive examinations for admission into public service; (b) provided job security for public employees; (c) prohibited political activity by the civil service; and (d) encouraged a non-partisan approach to an employee selection

However, by 1854 two very significant reform reports were submitted that would transform the administrative efficiency of the British civil service and redeem its status as a noble vocation. The Report on the Indian Civil Service and the Northcote-Trevelyan Report were both meant to safeguard the system against recruitment practices that will undermine the relevance and utility of the civil service for the British government.

The Report on the Indian Civil Service was meant to institute specific intellectual tests which will constitute the moral standard for cultivating unique qualities—“industry, self-denial, a taste for pleasure, not sensual, a laudable desire for honourable distinction, a still more laudable desire to obtain the approbation of friends and relations”—that will stand the civil servants out as public spirited and professional.

On the other hand, the Northcote-Trevelyan Report is even more revealing. In specific terms, the Report was based on four basic premises: Recruitment into the Civil Service should be by open competitive examinations which would be conducted by an independent Civil Service Board that would ensure that entry into the service would be entirely on the basis of merit.
To be continued tomorrow.
Olaopa is the chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.