Leadership The Civil Service Needs Urgent Reform By: Leadership Editors on September 13, 2013 - 2:29am Something is fundamentally wrong with a system that allows a civil servant to amass illicit wealth. The civil service is the engine room of every modern government and no country desirous of progress would allow a cog in its bureaucracy. But Nigeria simply doesn’t care! Its civil service has apparently taken in the cog of corruption. It is incapable of taking this country anywhere except to the abyss. And it certainly cannot drive the nation-building process we crave, even if the country, by happenstance, elects the most visionary of all Nigerians into public offices. It is a veritable reason why the ship of state is in spurt-and-start mode. It is not likely that all of the people in government, past and present, never had enough fire burning in their bellies to take this country to great heights. But that immovable bedrock of national development blueprint – the civil service – has simply failed to serve the Nigerian people as expected. Over the years, the civil service has apparently colluded with the largely vile elements that either shoot themselves into public office or got there through the ballot box to ruin the country. As revealed in several corruption trials, civil servants are the ones that show honest ministers, governors and local government chairmen the way to steal public funds. There have been stories of how public officials find themselves hitting a brick wall in civil servants when they want to implement people-oriented policies. The advantage the civil servants always have in going against reforms is that they stay around for decades while the government or officials they are supposed to serve last four years or less. Invariably, when things go wrong, elected officials are quickly blamed and no individual in the civil service suffers for any failure of government policy. Not by a fat chance can the country hope that corruption will simply fizzle out in the civil service. It safe to say that corruption has become calcified in the service; its conveyor belt of graft is only capable of churning out more corrupt civil servants. It makes sense for new recruits to please their crooked bosses rather than mere elected or appointed public officials while learning the ropes in ignoble shady practices and waiting for their time in the hierarchy to bleed public coffers dry. Many houses and even estates in Abuja today are owned by former or serving civil servants. The sources of such illicit wealth are not difficult to see: outright theft, award of overinflated contracts to proxy companies, award of contracts for non-existent projects but paying the “contractors” promptly, “ghost” workers and ghost pensioners, and more. We are not calling for implementation of the Steve Oronsaye report. That has been buried already. But any Nigerian leader that wishes to succeed must know one thing: the Nigerian civil service needs an extensive clear-out from the top to the bottom. The current system whereby a civil servant acquires assets worth N33 billion (like a pension thief now on trial) is not sustainable.
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 09:46:25 +0000
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