BY LANRE OGUNDIPE
EVERY change at the top of Nigeria’s civil service carries significance far beyond the ceremony of handing over files and exchanging official courtesies. President Bola Tinubu has appointed Abel Olumuyiwa Enitan as the new Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, effective August 27, succeeding Didi Esther Walson Jack on her retirement.
The appointment deserves attention for a reason larger than the identity of the man taking over. Nigeria needs to know what the new Head of Service intends to do with an institution that has become indispensable to the running of the country and, at the same time, one of the places where government can lose momentum without anyone appearing to be responsible.
A civil servant who sees competence rewarded has an incentive to improve. One who sees influence, connections or favour determine advancement receives a different lesson. That lesson eventually reaches the citizen in the quality of the service he receives.
Presidents change. Ministers come and go. Political priorities shift. The permanent bureaucracy remains. It keeps records, processes decisions, administers rules and translates political directives into programmes that citizens are eventually expected to experience.
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That makes the Head of Service considerably more than the manager of a large workforce. The office sits close to the engine room of government.
Enitan is not an outsider entering an unfamiliar system. He is the most senior Permanent Secretary in the Federal Civil Service and has served in several important areas of government, including Police Affairs, Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, the Office of the Vice President and Education. That experience gives him a useful understanding of how the federal machinery works, where it performs and where it routinely stalls.
Experience will help. It will not be enough.
Nigeria has built layers of procedure, hierarchy and administrative caution around government business. A presidential directive can be announced with urgency in Abuja and reach the implementation desk months later. By then, attention has shifted, funding has become complicated, responsibilities have blurred and another priority has taken over.
That is how policy dies quietly.
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No scandal is required. Delay can do it. Endless consultation can do it. Poor coordination can do it. Fear of taking responsibility can do it.
The new Head of Service therefore has a job that goes beyond producing another reform document. He needs to make responsibility visible inside the bureaucracy.
When a major government programme fails, Nigerians should be able to identify the institution responsible for it and the officials charged with delivering it. A ministry should not become a shelter for collective anonymity. Directors should not disappear behind procedure when implementation fails. Officers who perform should have reason to believe that performance matters.
This is where merit has to become more than an official expression.
A civil servant who sees competence rewarded has an incentive to improve. One who sees influence, connections or favour determine advancement receives a different lesson. That lesson eventually reaches the citizen in the quality of the service he receives.
The country’s financial position makes this problem even more urgent. Nigeria cannot afford a bureaucracy that consumes scarce resources without producing corresponding public value. Existing agencies need to justify their continued relevance. Overlapping responsibilities need to be confronted. Procedures that serve no useful purpose need to disappear.
Digitalisation deserves the same honesty.
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Putting an inefficient procedure online does not make it efficient.
It only makes the inefficiency digital.
A citizen should not have to navigate the same bureaucratic maze through a computer that he previously navigated through paper files and physical offices. Technology should remove obstacles. It should not give old obstacles a modern interface.
Nigeria has had enough government that looks busy. The new Head of Service must help build a government that delivers.
The Head of Service should also examine the culture of approvals. How many desks must a decision pass before somebody is willing to sign it? How long should a routine government transaction take? Who has the authority to make the decision? Who answers when it does not happen?
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These are ordinary administrative questions. In Nigeria they can become surprisingly difficult questions to answer.
There is an equally important question about the relationship between political leadership and the career bureaucracy.
The civil service serves the government in power. It should not become the machinery of the governing party.
Ministers have political mandates. Career officials have professional responsibilities. A healthy system requires both to understand their separate roles. A minister should be able to determine policy. A Permanent Secretary should be able to explain what that policy will require administratively, including the problems that may arise in implementation.
A bureaucracy that learns to tell political leaders only what they want to hear eventually becomes useless to government itself.
Professional advice is sometimes valuable precisely because it is inconvenient.
That is one reason the Head of Service must protect the professional character of the civil service. Administrative neutrality is not a luxury. It is part of the institution’s usefulness.
The incoming administration also has something to preserve. Didi Walson Jack leaves after a tenure during which reforms and innovations were pursued within the Federal Civil Service. Enitan should not fall into the familiar Nigerian habit of treating every succession as permission to discard whatever the predecessor achieved simply because a new occupant has arrived.
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Good reform should survive its author.
Enitan does not need to prove his arrival by announcing that everything must now be different. The better test is whether the machinery becomes demonstrably better.
Can decisions move faster?
Can unnecessary approvals disappear?
Can ministries coordinate without protecting bureaucratic territories?
Can career progression become more transparent?
Can an officer who repeatedly fails be made to answer for that failure?
Can a competent officer advance because of competence rather than connections?
These are the questions that will matter.
The citizen has little interest in the language of administrative transformation. He wants the passport when it is due. He wants his pension paid. He wants a government school that functions. He wants a business registration completed without unnecessary delay. He wants public institutions to do what they were established to do.
That is where civil service reform leaves the conference room and enters ordinary life.
The Head of Service cannot determine every presidential policy. He cannot control every minister. He cannot repair every weakness in every ministry. He can, however, influence the administrative culture through which government decisions are executed.
He can insist that responsibility is clear. He can defend professional standards. He can challenge waste. He can press for simpler procedures. He can demand that technology serve the citizen rather than the bureaucracy. He can make performance matter.
That is a considerable responsibility.
Nigeria is already asking citizens to endure difficult economic reforms on the expectation that a more productive and efficient state will emerge from them. That expectation will eventually be judged by what government actually delivers.
Government cannot keep asking Nigerians for patience while its machinery takes forever to make decisions.
The civil service has institutional memory. It has accumulated procedures. It has experienced officers. It has reform programmes. What it needs now is the discipline to distinguish institutional continuity from institutional inertia.
Memory is valuable. Inertia is not.
Enitan knows the machinery. He has spent years inside it. Now he must make it move.
Nigeria has had enough government that looks busy. The new Head of Service must help build a government that delivers.
Ogundipe, public affairs analyst and former President Nigeria and Africa Union of Journalists, writes this column every Monday.
