BY LANRE OGUNDIPE
THERE is a peculiar irony in taking charge of a machine you have spent years operating. You know where it moves efficiently. You know where it slows down. You know which doors open easily, which ones require persuasion and which ones appear permanently locked. You also know the people who operate the levers.
That is the advantage Abel Olumuyiwa Enitan brings to the office of Head of the Civil Service of the Federation.
It is also the burden.
The first task should be to identify precisely where the federal bureaucracy loses time, money and responsibility. Every major process should have an owner. Every significant government programme should have measurable outcomes. Every prolonged delay should have an identifiable explanation. Every institution should be able to demonstrate why it exists, what it does and what Nigerians would lose if it disappeared.
President Bola Tinubu has handed Enitan responsibility for the federal civil service at a moment when government can no longer afford the luxury of administrative sluggishness. The new Head of Service assumed office on August 27, succeeding Didi Esther Walson Jack, who retired after reaching the statutory retirement age. Enitan is the most senior Permanent Secretary in the Federal Civil Service and has spent seven years and seven months at that level, with postings that include Police Affairs, Humanitarian Affairs, the Office of the Vice President and Education.
He therefore knows the system from the inside.
That is the real test of this appointment.
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There is an understandable tendency whenever a new head of an institution arrives to speak about continuity, reform, innovation, professionalism and efficiency. Those words are all desirable. They are also among the most frequently used words in Nigerian officialdom, often with very little change visible at the point where government meets the citizen.
The federal civil service does not suffer from a shortage of reform vocabulary.
It suffers from an implementation problem.
Nigeria has produced committees, circulars, guidelines, transformation programmes, performance frameworks and digital initiatives for years. Yet the citizen confronting a government office can still encounter delay, duplication, unexplained discretion and a bureaucratic culture in which responsibility sometimes becomes so dispersed that nobody can be held clearly accountable for failure.
This is the machinery Enitan has inherited.
And it is precisely because he knows it so well that the standard applied to him should be higher.
An outsider can blame ignorance when a reform fails. An insider cannot.
Enitan knows the permanent secretaries. He understands the administrative hierarchy. He knows how files move, where approvals become bottlenecks and how institutional caution can sometimes disguise unwillingness to make decisions. He knows the difference between a regulation that protects public interest and a procedure that survives simply because nobody has summoned the courage to remove it.
That knowledge should now be converted into action.
The first mistake would be to assume that reform means creating another reform programme.
It does not.
The first task should be to identify precisely where the federal bureaucracy loses time, money and responsibility. Every major process should have an owner. Every significant government programme should have measurable outcomes. Every prolonged delay should have an identifiable explanation. Every institution should be able to demonstrate why it exists, what it does and what Nigerians would lose if it disappeared.
The new administration of the civil service should therefore identify processes that can be eliminated altogether before spending money digitising them. The objective should be fewer steps, fewer discretionary points, clearer responsibility and faster delivery.
That may sound elementary.
It is not.
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A bureaucracy becomes powerful when responsibility becomes difficult to trace. When a citizen is sent from one desk to another, each officer can truthfully claim that another person has the next responsibility. By the time the matter reaches its conclusion, if it reaches one at all, nobody appears to have failed.
That is how administrative failure becomes institutionalised.
The new Head of Service should attack that culture directly.
A Permanent Secretary should know what his ministry is expected to deliver. Directors should know what they are responsible for. Officers should understand the standards against which their performance is judged. Where targets are missed, the system should distinguish between failure caused by inadequate resources, failure caused by bad policy and failure caused by negligence.
At present, bureaucracy can sometimes treat all three as the same thing.
They are not.
There is also a more uncomfortable issue that must be confronted: the relationship between public service and patronage.
A professional civil service cannot function properly where officers believe that competence is secondary to connection. The most dangerous consequence is not simply that one deserving officer is overlooked for promotion. The deeper damage occurs when an entire workforce learns that performance is not necessarily the safest route to advancement.
Once that lesson becomes embedded, initiative declines.
People protect themselves. They stop taking responsibility. They wait for instructions. They avoid decisions. They learn to survive the system rather than improve it.
That is how institutional mediocrity becomes self sustaining.
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The Head of Service therefore has to make merit more than a slogan. Career progression should be demonstrably connected to competence, integrity, delivery and professional conduct. Officers who perform should see the benefit. Those who repeatedly fail should not be protected indefinitely by the comfort of seniority.
This is not a call for indiscriminate punishment.
It is a call for consequence.
The same principle must apply to public expenditure.
Nigeria is asking citizens to endure difficult economic reforms while government insists that scarce resources must be deployed more carefully. That argument becomes difficult to sustain when the machinery through which public money is spent remains unnecessarily expensive, duplicative or opaque.
The civil service cannot be separated from the fiscal crisis.
Every redundant process has a cost. Every duplicated function has a cost. Every unnecessary approval has a cost. Every delayed procurement has a cost. Every abandoned programme has a cost. Every institution that continues to exist without a convincing public purpose has a cost.
And ultimately, somebody pays.
The temptation in government is to measure expenditure by how much has been released rather than by what has been achieved. That is an administrative distortion that needs to change.
The question should not simply be whether a ministry spent its allocation.
The question should be what Nigerians received for the money.
This is where digital reform deserves more serious treatment. Technology can make government faster, more transparent and easier to navigate. But digitalisation should not become another cosmetic reform in which an inefficient paper process is simply transferred onto a computer screen.
Putting a bad procedure online does not make it good.
It merely makes the inefficiency digital.
The new administration of the civil service should therefore identify processes that can be eliminated altogether before spending money digitising them. The objective should be fewer steps, fewer discretionary points, clearer responsibility and faster delivery.
There is another reform that Enitan must approach with particular care: the relationship between the political executive and the professional bureaucracy.
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The civil service serves the government of the day. That does not mean it should become an extension of the political machinery of the party in power.
Ministers have political mandates. Permanent Secretaries have professional responsibilities. Ministers determine policy within the authority of government. Career officials are expected to provide competent advice and execute lawful decisions.
The distinction is essential.
A Permanent Secretary who merely tells a political superior what he wants to hear is not demonstrating loyalty to government. He may actually be weakening it. Government needs officials capable of explaining the consequences of a decision, warning against administrative or financial risks and offering workable alternatives.
Professional independence is not rebellion.
It is part of good government.
Enitan should therefore build a culture in which competent professional advice is not punished simply because it is inconvenient.
But the civil service itself must also accept that neutrality does not mean immunity.
Public servants are custodians of public authority. They cannot hide behind bureaucratic procedure when their decisions produce avoidable harm. Nor should institutional seniority become a shield against accountability.
The same applies to procurement.
There is little value in proclaiming transparency while allowing processes to remain so opaque that the public cannot reasonably determine how major decisions were reached. Procurement rules exist to protect public resources, but rules can also become complicated enough to create room for discretion and delay.
The objective should be simple: protect the public purse without creating a bureaucratic maze that rewards those who know how to navigate it.
This brings us back to Enitan’s peculiar advantage.
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He has been inside the system long enough to understand its strengths and its evasions.
The Nigerian civil service does not need another season of impressive language about transformation. It needs consequences. It needs speed where speed is justified, restraint where restraint is necessary, accountability where failure occurs and professionalism where political pressure becomes excessive. Most of all, it needs to remember whom the entire machinery exists to serve. Not the Permanent Secretary. Not the minister, nor the political class. The citizen that is the only constituency that cannot retire from the consequences of government.
He should use that knowledge ruthlessly, but fairly.
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He should know which reforms are worth protecting from his predecessor’s tenure and which ones require modification. Continuity should not mean preserving weaknesses merely because they are inherited. Change should not mean discarding useful reforms simply because a new person occupies the office.
Good administration has no partisan ownership.
If something works, keep it.
If something does not work, fix it.
If something has become redundant, remove it.
If somebody is responsible for persistent failure, hold that person accountable.
The civil service also needs to recover the dignity of public service itself.
There is a danger that the language of reform becomes so obsessed with efficiency, technology and performance indicators that the moral purpose of government disappears from view. A civil servant is not merely processing files. He is exercising authority on behalf of the Nigerian state.
That responsibility should mean something.
The officer processing a pension is dealing with somebody’s livelihood. The officer responsible for a school programme is affecting children’s futures. The official handling business approvals is influencing whether an entrepreneur can employ people. The administrator responsible for health procurement may determine whether equipment reaches a hospital in time.
Bureaucracy is never merely paperwork.
There are human consequences at the end of every file.
This is why the ultimate measure of Enitan’s tenure should not be the number of meetings he holds, circulars he signs or reform initiatives he launches. It should be whether the citizen encounters a government that is easier to understand, faster to access, harder to manipulate and more certain in delivering what it promises.
That is a demanding standard.
It should be.
The Federal Government is asking Nigerians to make sacrifices in the belief that a more productive and disciplined state will emerge from the reforms now underway. The civil service is the machinery through which much of that promise must eventually be delivered.
If the machinery remains clogged, the promise will remain theoretical.
Enitan should therefore resist the comfortable temptation to become merely another custodian of the existing order. His years inside the system should not make him protective of its weaknesses. They should make him better equipped to confront them.
He knows where the labyrinth begins.
He knows where it bends.
He knows which corridors lead nowhere.
Now he must demonstrate that he has the authority, courage and administrative imagination to remove the unnecessary walls.
The Nigerian civil service does not need another season of impressive language about transformation. It needs consequences. It needs speed where speed is justified, restraint where restraint is necessary, accountability where failure occurs and professionalism where political pressure becomes excessive. Most of all, it needs to remember whom the entire machinery exists to serve. Not the Permanent Secretary. Not the minister, nor the political class. The citizen that is the only constituency that cannot retire from the consequences of government.
Enitan has inherited the machine. He also knows the machine.
Now Nigerians will be watching to see whether he merely keeps it running, or finally makes it work.
Ogundipe, public affairs analyst and former President Nigeria and Africa Union of Journalists, writes this column every Monday.
