By Godwin Onyeacholem
 |
Head of Civil Service of the Federation, Alhaji Isa Sali
|
In the uncontainable urge for agitated minds to continuously
reflect on the state of affairs, it is necessary to briefly pause, once again,
to review the impact of the public sector, more commonly known as the civil
service, in the largely self-imposed crisis of underdevelopment hobbling
post-colonial Nigeria. Please take note: this is by no means a tendentious
evaluation of the civil service. Rather, it’s a detached undertaking inclined
at best toward rendering a factual assessment of a critical segment of
government relative to where we are today as a country.
For the benefit of those still confused, who may be thinking
that only those who work in the Ministries are civil servants, it is important
to emphasise that any employee of state-owned institutions – be it Ministries,
Departments, Agencies, Councils, Research Institutes, Corporations, Commissions
or any government-controlled establishment of whatever arcane nomenclature – is
a civil servant; and therefore a worker in the public sector (civil service).
In its heyday, the Nigerian civil service was the poster
child of robust bureaucracy, a sort of metaphorical heirloom
honed in the best tradition of
Victorian thoroughness and rigour, and handed down to honest, but inexperienced
local administrators by the British colonial masters. It was an efficient and
functional structure; a reasonably admired establishment and a fruitful hunting
ground for job seekers inspired by productive forerunners to build a career
under the wings of government. If the middle class enjoyed its best run at that
time and became a decisive catalyst in those early stages of the country’s
development, there would not be any fulmination against the civil service
stepping forward to take a larger share of the credit.
It was under this stirring atmosphere, suffused with
alluring nostalgia of the 60s and 70s, that one grew up in one of the
“government quarters” scattered around Yaba, a throbbing Lagos suburb, to know
a father who woke up every working day to exhibit a quiet sense of purpose and
the compelling seriousness that captured the dignity of labour in an era the
phrase truly had meaning. And then a mother, who demonstrated the fierce
diligence and clerical dedication that embedded public service and earned it silent
acclamation in those good old days.
Cumulatively, both offered well over five decades of
selfless service in government offices, and before the patriarch’s final
departure, they repeatedly singled out that period as the golden years of their
lives, in spite of the measly pension. They had nothing to show for having
worked in the civil service other than the calm satisfaction of being actively involved
at the time of its consummation, and then the random goodwill gesture that came
as a token of appreciation.
There was no estate to point at as personal property in the
city, no tens of acres of land to show off, no mansions in the country home to
call their own, no 4-star hotel anywhere to cause not a little swagger, no
fleet of cars and buses to boast of, no super market or shopping malls to gloat
over and no petrol stations to produce the excessive arrogance of oil magnates.
And it was not just about one’s parents. The civil servants
of old evinced discipline. Looking around the quarters then, one noticed an
overpowering air of self-restraint – the type that goes with acceptance of
responsibilities and certainty of integrity. All manner of exotic automobiles didn't clog up a sizable portion of the space in the quarters and in the
offices. It was an age the Nigerian story was sweet to tell.
Hardly can anybody say the same of today’s civil service,
whose steady decline began with the destruction of values engineered by errant
political leaders and their counterparts in military uniforms. My friend and
colleague, Chido Onumah, sketched the decay in government offices in one of his
latest articles. And civil servants should thank him for limiting the
deterioration to “channel flipping”, “ghost workers” and turning office premises
into huge bazaars. The rot goes deeper than that. Truth is, Nigeria’s civil
service is dead. That institution no longer serves anyone outside those charged
with the responsibility of running it.
Unlike what obtained in the past (and one actually refers to
the glorious past), the civil service ethic, with its evident overarching
kernel of service to the public, has been completely abandoned and its place taken
over by a pernicious culture that has no other description beyond self-serving.
The typical civil servant of these days is not just lazy, but also
irrepressibly corrupt. A brief stopover in any government department, federal
or state, will suffice. There is no passion to do the job. The staff just sit
idly or hop from one office to another, blathering away the whole day. Records
are poorly kept, that is when they are kept at all, and so an interminable
search for letters and files is a normal, everyday story.
Files pile up untreated sometimes for as long as four weeks
on the bosses’ desk without anyone being struck by conscience, or awakened to
the fact that such habitual act of undeviating slothfulness amounts to a huge
disservice to the country. And then any attempt by an assertive outsider to
point out the anomaly, if not dismissed by an outright contemptuous silence, gets
the standard reply of Na so government
work be o!
Given this kind of attitude, it’s no surprise that programmes
and projects rarely get implemented; while something as normal as requests for approvals
for useful projects that ought to take no more than one week to wrap up take
almost eternity, if it manages to overcome the obstacles of narrow-minded
bureaucrats.
As a result of the bankruptcy of its public institutions,
Nigeria remains the only country in the world where it takes unduly long time
to conclude paperwork on any issue. In a bid to reverse this negative identity,
former president Olusegun Obasanjo established a service delivery watchdog
called SERVICOM with a marching order to every government establishment to set
up a branch of its own. The idea is to restore efficiency by fast-tracking services
in all government offices.
Typical of the administration, the scheme was launched with
fanfare. Then the public was charged to send observations and complaints regarding
service delivery to this body. But it turned out to be a futile effort, as the
unraveling of the civil service, in the face of widespread prodigality of the
political class, assumed a more disturbing dimension even with Obasanjo still
in office. In no time as expected, SERVICOM more or less disappeared from the
radar of public governance.
In furtherance of this relentless sectoral degeneration, a
simple, straightforward exercise of staff promotion has been added to the
growing list of victims. No longer is it a secret that promotions are for sale
in the civil service. Workers on different levels are routinely called out for
interviews or examinations for promotion, but in the end, performance almost
always does not determine who gets promoted. It is always those who are able to
pay some specified amount of money that get lifted to the next levels.
The bigger shame is that members of the Federal Civil Service
Commission and the Head of Service and his lieutenants know that Deputy
Directors, Assistant Directors and others down the line offer bribes in order
to gain promotion, but they have refused to do anything to stop the ugly
practice because they are said to be receiving remittances from some group of
workers called schedule officers. Deputy Directors and Assistant Directors pay
as much as N1m and more to be promoted.
No doubt the impulse for paying that much can’t be divorced
from the assurance of recouping what was paid, thanks to the ongoing massive
corruption in the system. Evidence of this is the scandalous material wealth
being displayed by many public officers. In spite of the regular complaints of
lack of funds, civil servants ride the most expensive cars in the market and
buy mansions, build estates, shopping malls and acquire all kinds of property
across cities.
On a regular basis Ministries, departments and parastatals
budget money for seminars and workshops, but the big guns end up diverting the
cash into their pockets. For them, there is usually enough to steal. Under the
guise of holding meetings, they dip their hands into the office purse and share
public funds behind closed doors. This orchestrated stealing goes on virtually
every week, and only the generous ones among them extend the loot to other
junior staff.
There is no question that a civil service like this one has
only helped to preserve the country’s stagnation. The way to turn things around
is not to embark on mass sack of workers as recommended by the governor of
Central Bank of Nigeria Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. Instead, Nigerians should insist that
the current civil service serves no useful purpose and, therefore, a new,
strictly enforced orientation for the workforce in public institutions is
urgently required.
Godwin Onyeacholem, a journalist can be reached at gonyeacholem@gmail.com; www.giraffemagazine.com.ng
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