One of the highlights of the Obasanjo disaster was the reform programmes that the administration embarked upon, in its last days, the government of that day sought to reform everything, and sadly with each passing day, revelations only show the several pockets that were reformed.

My take in this essay, I want to look at the supposedly public service reform, for two reasons: one because the public service is the engine room of the government and secondly the workability of government and its productivity is largely a function of how well it performs or how it under-performs.

The public service refers to all organs of government that exist as part of machinery for implementing policy decisions and delivering services that are of value to the citizens. The Obasanjo era attempted through several paper nice projects to reform it, but by and large, the question is, how successful have those efforts been?

The public service in Nigeria is largely known as the civil service, consisting of the line ministries and extra-ministerial agencies. We have the enlarged public bureaucracy, where everything goes, the likes of former NEPA, the Police, Judiciary and plenty more.

From when the service was dominated by the Europeans during the colonial era till today the service has undergone several evolutions, both positively and negatively. The days of the super perm secretary to the era of Director-Generals, career civil servants, and thieving political servants.

We saw the progressive decay, as the military played a swing-swing with the civil service, and some of us are living witness to how the oil boom led to an unprecedented growth without an adequate capacity or policy to match the increased responsibilities that came on.

We equally watched as Human resource management incapability and inconsistencies led to rapid decline. There were also the incessant conflicts between cadres, little emphasis on results, counterproductive separation of authority from responsibilities at the top of the hierarchy.

The Obasanjo reform was in conceptual terms meant to be a deliberate and planned change. But without going far, the fact is that the reform as an intervention has failed to produce any fundamental change in any way. We have not seen any quantitative short term improvements.

The structure, operations, systems and procedures in the civil service has not seen any change. The Reform which was supposed to be a long term plan, here it is a quick fix, a random injection and infusion of concepts by government cronies.

In crafting the reform, the government forgot that the basic tool for achieving any desired change is the people, and rather than address it, we toy with the common knowledge that the civil service that should be a veritable instrument of national cohesion and socio-economic development has over the years gradually become a tool of ethnic parapoism, political geometry, and a dog eat dog parlour that cannot contribute to the well being of the nation.

We cannot run away from the plain truth that our public and the civil service in its entirety are defective and deficient.

From the Tudor Davies Commission of 1945 which largely looked at wages and general conditions of service to the Harragin Salary Review of 1946 which divided the service into two, senior and junior. Then we had the Gorsuch Commission of 1951 that noted the lack of a middle cadre and created 5 more cadres. The Hewn Committee in 1959 proposed the integration of Ministries and defined roles for permanent secretaries.

Mbanefo Salaries and Wages in 1959 reviewed salaries and then the Morgan Commission in 1963 for the first time on regional and geographical basis introduced a minimum wage. The Edward Grading Team in 1966 examined anomalies in the grading of posts, and to proposed uniform salaries for officers that perform identical duties.

The Adebo Salaries and wages Commission looked at the role of the public service, structure, conditions of service; and training arrangements. It proposed the establishment of a Public Service Review Commission.

Till date no commission was as meticulous as the Udoji Commission of 1972 but all it achieved largely stayed on paper, the Dotun Philips Commission of 1988 is largely seen as a time waste exercise, and the Ayida Review Panel recommended the all that the Dotun Philips panel did be reversed in 1995.

Despite all these efforts, and a seemingly glowing past the Public service today still remain s a caricature of itself. It has grown to become a breeding ground for corruption, and all forms of graft and corrupt practices.

The system suffers from general economic fallout, infrastructural decay, and institutional kwashikor. The structure breeds high unemployment as everybody refuses to age and retire, excruciating debt overhang, a high service cost, poor management.

Erosion of public confidence is high, a crisis of confidence because government through a failure in governance has not done much. As much as on paper Obasanjo may and I insist may have had a good dream, but all that came with his government is gradually becoming a nightmare with all the money that was pumped in, and the creation of the Bureau for Public Enterprise and other such agencies, it has all passed for blabadash.

The worst from the best or vice versa is that we have retrenched in the name of down, right, and up, left sizing. We have pushed people into the labour market, no plans and still a redundant civil service where the perception of corruption everyday rather than reduce grows in giant strides.

What is baffling is that we have the resources, the manpower, and yet we are not able to move the Public service in any positive direction. The integral parts of the reform shave largely remained a mirage. A failed pay reform, a failed public expenditure management reform, with the best of intentions the SERVICOM thing is still crawling.

A large thieving called monetization which has in its wake left more problems than solutions, as it has providing for what I call direct stealing by those at the top echelon of the service.

The pension reform is also at the incubation stage and has not erased any doubt that in the service, its better to steal the much you can, because when you are out of the service, you are on your own.

Files still miss anyhow and reappear based on the type of note produced, public utilities work based on pay as you go, and that is for the ones that are still working. The serviced is still home to various kinds, typologies and classifications of fraud.

The on-going probes whether they bear the expected fruits or not have shown that the tiger cannot change its spots and we may call them carnivores, the cat, leopard, and cheetah are all different in a way if not many.

The way and manner the present administration has faulted the Obasanjo era also speaks volume. It is one thing to fault a plan; another thing to have a remedy, there is not only a go-slow traffic of government activity, but a halt in the wheel of governance. The gospel of rule and law is one that cannot be over-emphasized especially given the abuse and ridicule that Obasanjo turned the law into.

However we need people to ensure that that goal is achieved, a viable civil service is one of the few paths towards getting it right. We need to embark on a national re-orientation, our value systems need to change or else. The bottom-line is that reforms are not working, they could work, but there is a lack of will.

We need more than a seven point agenda; we need the civil service, the bureaucracy to start working. We need to restore confidence in the system, and this is not something that we should pay lip service to, it is a task that needs to be embarked upon. The reforms need to be reformed or we can as well continue our naked dance.

Robot  Villager

# 1 From when the service was dominated by the Europeans during the colonial era till today the service ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 16.05.2008 23:25