Re: Let The Perm Secs Return

Sir: President Muhammadu Buhari’s latest typically pregnant comment on the topical issue of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) federal cabinet does suggest that the very thought of appointing ministers gets the president’s knickers in a twist. Buhari seemingly fights shy of a cabinet devoid of permanent secretaries; he had said as much during his recent trip to France, albeit not in as many words. This is probably just as well.

As someone who has been involved in federal governments at the highest level since 1975 when permanent secretaries were curiously banned from attending executive council meetings, Buhari should have a first-hand knowledge of the disastrous impact of that most ill-advised ban.

Prior to the mid-1975 change in federal government, permanent secretaries had attended executive council meetings as bona fide technical heads of ministries and other government agencies; they thus submitted memoranda independent of the political heads (ministers) of their respective ministries and agencies. Their participation in council deliberations, by general accounts, had been adjudged significant in stabilising government’s expenditure/revenue profile. According to the then federal commissioner (minister) of finance, it was the creative genius of civil servants that has enabled Nigeria to successfully prosecute the 1967-70 civil war without resorting to external borrowing.

Buhari’s perceived feet-dragging on ministerial appointments, and his apparent new-found love for permanent secretaries could well stem from the pangs of remorse he should feel for being a part of a system that denied Nigeria the invaluable counsel of her seasoned technocrats in the formulation of crucial national policies in the previous 40 years. It was particularly interesting for me to see a high-ranking personnel of a military regime that had prematurely terminated the careers of countless civil servants look past his new political colleagues and appoint an old-generation civil servant, octogenarian Alhaji Ahmed Joda, to head a purely political committee National Transition Committee. The lesson is not lost on Buhari: permanent secretaries should be an inseparable part of the highest decision making organ of government; all the more so for a fledgling nation like Nigeria.

I have never entertained even on iota of misgiving that Nigeria’s major recurrent socio-economic problems are deeply rooted in that 1975 ban on permanent secretaries (see my earlier article, entitled “Let the permanent secretaries return,” published in The Guardian of February, 21st 2015, http://guardian.ng/2015/02/let-the-permanent-secretaries-return). As shown in the article, the decision to ban permanent secretaries from attending executive council meetings was informed less from national considerations than trivial personal sentiments. That illogical ban, as many illustrious Nigerians have since variously expressed, for all intents and purposes broke the backbone of Nigeria’s civil service, and I dare say, created the space for unbridled corruption as we know it today.

It is not an accident of history that Nigeria recorded her first set of billionaires hot on the heels of that ban on permanent secretaries. This is why any meaningful attempt to combat Nigeria’s monstrous corruption must necessarily start with reverting the federal executive council (FEC) to the pre-1975 composition; so let the permanent secretaries return to the executive council chambers no sooner than the APC federal cabinet is finally put in place.

• Afam Nkemdiche, Abuja.