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.
Saharareporters.com
Tiwa Banks, an upcoming artiste who sang ‘Olenle’, has been severally stabbed by her landlord’s son.
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