(Being Presentation at the International Civil Service Conference – ICSC 2026 – Organized by the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation and held at Eagle’s Square, Abuja on 20-21 May, 2026)
When it was established in 1954 as the Public Service Commission, and rechristened in 1979, the Civil Service Commission (CSC) emerged as a statutory institution constitutionally mandated to appoint, promote and discipline civil servants at the federal and state levels of the government. This mandate first emerged from the Third Schedule of the 1979 Constitution. In the 1999 Constitution, as amended, section 153 established the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) as a federal executive body, among others. Section 158 grounds its power to “make appointments or to exercise disciplinary control” over civil servants. And section 170 articulates the power of the FCSC to “delegate any of the powers confer on it by the Constitution.” Overall therefore, and with attention to its constitutional mandate, the FCSC is then tasked with the responsibility of (a) developing a general guideline and framework for appointment, promotion and discipline (APD), (b) monitoring and regulating the line ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) in the exercise of the human resource management functions within their remit, and (c) serving as the appellate body for all petitions with regards to APD in the civil service.
This narrative speaks to the fundamental function of the CSC as the constitutional guardian of the merit system in the civil service system in Nigeria. This emerged from the institutional foundation inherited from the British civil service, and specifically the reform initiated by the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1884 which mandated that the civil service must source for and recruit young persons based on their education, merit and capacities to discharge their duties. Merit therefore becomes, for the writers of the Report, the foundation by which the recruited civil servants will “feel that their promotion and future prospects depend entirely on the industry and ability with which they discharge their duties, … that with superior powers they may rationally hope to attain the highest prices in the service, if they prove decidedly incompetent or incurably indolent, they must expect to be removed from it.” Thus, promotion and professional mobility will only be based on merit rather than “on the ground of preferment, patronage, purchase or simple length of service.”
To achieve this mandate, the CSC must therefore be independent institutionally, hence free of all and every political interference in the exercise of its duties and responsibilities. This possibility of the CSC living up to its constitutional responsibilities was demonstrated in the 1960s to the ‘70s, regarded as the glorious era of the public administration and the civil service in Nigeria. For example, the civil service of that era safeguarded meritocracy as an inviolable ground for upholding public service values and codes of ethics. This was replicated all through the British Commonwealth of Nations that reproduced merit as a collective standard which prescribed a template founded on a minimum educational qualifications, qualifying examinations and interviews and general performance at the entry level.
Unfortunately, however, that period could not sustain its trajectory of excellence as the consolidation of the bureaucratic culture—what I have christened “bureau-pathology”—crept in to undermine the merit-based performance and productivity system that had shown commendable presence and raised the civil services of the regions to their ultimate functional and optimal modes. Over six decades of administrative history and civil service institutional experiences point at how excessive politicization, over-bloated workforce, poor funding, uncritical downsizing, cost of governance, wrong-headed administrative reforms, system breakdown, and so on, undermined the internal management controls of the bureaucracy, and gradually weakened the capacity of the system to gatekeep its values as a vocation, a profession and a management system.
By the time the 10th Commission was inaugurated in 2023, it was time to critically confront and engage some dimensions of the deficiencies and deficits of the civil service system, and rebrand it as a reformed entity with the capability readiness to backstop the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration. In its bid to articulate the Strategic Plan that grounds the institutional reform, the FCSC put in place a rapid institutional assessment which further demonstrated the extent to which the institution of the civil service had degenerated in its systemic failures to pursue its APD mandate. Most significantly, the FCSC lacks an effective and efficient organizational structure and staffing policy which prevents it from calling on the requisite competences to function professionally. There is also a systemic laxity in the gatekeeping capacity demonstrated by a lack of clear strategy and guideline for implementing not only the merit standard for recruitment, but also mainstreaming it into the federal character principle as a complement of the HR functions in the civil service. This was aptly demonstrated by the FCSC Secretariat and its low institutional capability to facilitate the constitutional mandate of the Commission. It is a secretariat peopled by a corps of generalist officers who lacked specialist competences, expertise and self-motivation; a capability deficit compounded by low digital infrastructure and poor funding.
Let me illustrate one of the cogent challenges with the meritocracy system in terms of annual directorate level promotion exercise and its impact on the overall health of the civil service system. Ordinarily, promotion in the civil service is handled within a framework that balances merit, seniority, experience and performance. This would be a framework that connects merit and performance with promotion and upward mobility in the system. Unfortunately, however, merit is attenuated in the form of competitive examinations, computer-based testing and oral interviews alone. In other words, and more often than not, the examinations and interviews test the officer’s knowledge of public service rules, administrative procedures, and broad policy knowledge as a touchstone to baseline competence and expertise. And performance is left to the outrightly subjective assessment of the annual performance evaluation report (APER), which is often founded on flawed judgment and inflated scoring. This has significant implication for the understanding of merit. The APER assessment framework mediates a pathological situation in the workplace dynamic where what officers have actually contributed or accomplished, or have the capabilities and competences to achieve do not count for performance and promotion. While there is a significant place for the knowledge of public service rules and procedures, they only serve to denote the theoretical aptitude of officers, or what is known, and not what is done in terms of demonstrated capabilities, contributions to organizational performance and productivity, and service delivery efficiency. The APER, with its subjective assessment form, does not allow for the measurement of emotional intelligence, strength of character and personal integrity, workplace productivity and also the capacity to manage teams.
To move beyond APER and connecting with the significance of promotion for performance and productivity in the civil service workplace, we must not just think of transcending the APER assessment metric. Rather, we must predicate the new assessment approach on the need to entirely rethink the operating system of the civil service system away from its “I-am-directed” command and control managerial orientation by which the system still functions. What is required is a new system foregrounded on a result-based performance management that focuses on outcomes, outputs, and connects knowledge, performance, productivity and promotion. This transition points to the urgency of a civil service theory of change, and a change management programme that institutionally reform the civil service for more effective and efficient performance and productivity.
At the FCSC, the adopted theory of change is founded on two basic and fundamental operations. The first is to ground the founding vocational values of the civil service as a merit-based profession and management system that speak to ethical discipline, transparency, accountability, spirituality and a deep sense of public-spiritedness and patriotism. All these values demand genuine and focused guidelines that not only mainstream the values for entry level recruitment but also into the federal character policy. The second leg of the theory of change is located in enabling the FCSC Secretariat as a truly functional and efficient locus of gatekeeping that deploys strategic HRM competences and digital technologies to offset its ponderous and paper-based operations. This has the potentials to transform it into a swift and automated user-centric and user-friendly system that facilitate, for example, a seamless online recruitment portal with a dashboard that coordinate the Commission’s operations and services into a single location accessible anywhere in the world.
This vision of the Secretariat also demands, as a matter of urgency, a level of culture and attitudinal change in terms of the membership of the FCSC. If integrity, credibility, accountability and public-spiritedness are critical to the understanding of the gatekeeping responsibility of the FCSC, then this implies that governance and staffing the Commission require the utmost transparency. The criteria must be based on a proven track record of professionalism and personal integrity. It goes without saying also that the capacity of the FCSC to gatekeep the civil service merit system must be proportional to the adequate funding it receives to carry out its core operations, functions, projects and programmes. It also goes without saying that to be above board in gatekeeping, the system requires that the management and staff must be properly incentivized to help them rise above the temptation of bureaucratic corruption.
To properly gatekeep the value-based profession of the civil service, the FCSC needs to balance the administrative complexity that connects meritocracy and professionalism, the condition of workplace service, and keeping the system flexible and efficient. Gatekeeping merit and professionalism will not matter if new talents, scarce skills, and high-end experts and professionals do not find the government as the employer of choice. This is even worse if the civil service becomes a place where talents use as a springboard to the private sector. This would have been after they have been further trained and capacitated, meaning the government keeps losing money and skills to the private sector. To stem the brain drain requires that government must intentionally attract new recruit through competitive wage, incentive and remunerations structures and packages that align earning with labor market realities. This means that the government must rebrand itself in ways that connects its workplace values and vocational structure with the motivation, preferences, values, job security and patriotic connection with the need to further the public good. This is the first and most crucial step in achieving a merit-based recruitment exercise.
This is then followed by a rigorous entry-level recruitment exercise that ensures that assessment and criteria for selection are linked to critical specialization and specific tasks that MDAs required. There must also be sufficient transparency that demonstrate how the CSCs articulate their recruitment criteria, assessment and recommendations in ways that generate trust in the system. This speaks to how the civil service handles recruitment practices and the challenge of workplace bloating. For example, there is a need to reflect on and rethink the dysfunctional practice of freezing recruitment and controlling the wage bill and staff number in reaction to budgetary constraint. A better approach is to connect those recruitment freezes to some job profiles that would automatically become redundant in the face of technological innovation which will attract its own skills to specific value job description. Short-term performance contract could also be adopted to cancel out lifetime career commitments. All this must be targeted at not only undermining a bloated workforce, but also reducing the cost of governance challenge.
To conclude, the CSC at both the federal and state level is saddled with a historic responsibility, as the custodian of merit and professionalism, to buckle up its capacities to reform its secretariat in readiness for the challenge of transforming the civil service system. The success of the Renewed Hope Agenda depends on the CSCs getting the basics right in their task of gatekeeping merit and professionalism that transform the civil service into a meritocratic, value-based and efficient institution.
