In a rapidly changing world that is becoming as complex as it is interesting, public administration and the public service have been confronted with the fundamental challenge of not just keeping up with the interesting developments especially in technologies and workplace dynamics.
They are also tasked with preempting unforeseen challenges arising from functioning in a world of acute polycrisis. All over the world, public service systems are always in a modernizing mode that constantly sees to the structural and institutional reform of the workplace and its human resource function. This is especially the case because of the charge of performance and productivity that determines the utility and optimal relevance of the system.
A country depends on the public service and its workplace capacity readiness to deliver on its mandate of performance and productivity. This translates into the capacity of the public service system to enhance the developmental capability of the state through achieving, among other things, democratic service delivery to the citizens.
Institutional reform, given these complex dynamics, becomes therefore a most significant endeavor that requires the collaborative networks of individual, governmental, nongovernmental and nonstate actors and agencies. Over the years, the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM) has defined itself as an organization that has intentionally committed itself to the many ramifications of engaging with the institutional reform of the civil service system in Nigeria.
This is one critical reason why every edition of its international conference remains a significant event within the larger space of administrative and governance reforms in Nigeria. The 58th conference runs under the theme “Repositioning for Value and Impact.” When we connect with the theme of the 57th 2025 conference—Reimagining the New World of Work,” we see an organization that has consistently interfaced with the global administrative environment and the realities of human resource function and management in the Nigerian context.
It becomes quite easy to see how the CIPM becomes a very critical institutional reform partner with the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) – and by extension the Federal civil service – in the trenches of revitalizing the public service workplace in Nigeria. Since the inauguration of the 10th Commission in December 2023, the FCSC has been running with the objective spelt out clearly by the President: to “competently facilitate the transformation, reorientation and digitization of the federal bureaucracy to enable, and not stifle, growth and enhance private sector participation in the development of the Nigerian economy, in full adherence to the Renewed Hope agenda.”
This objective is not only founded on the constitutional mandate of the FCSC, it also recognize the Commission’s role as the gatekeeping mechanism for transforming the professional status of the federal civil service. That is a gatekeeping role that is being reconceived to benefit immensely from critical collaboration of the sort provided by the CIPM and other partners in the reform business.
The public service was inherited as a value-based institution that was dedicated to the implementation of the policy designs of the government towards the end of good governance. Unfortunately, however, and as one of the migrated structures in Nigeria, the public service system arrived Nigeria without its value basis.
In other words, Nigeria (and many other African states) inherited the system as a bare structural edifice that was not deconstructed in terms of its core values and the extent to which this connects to a democratic ethos the citizens need to enjoy the good life. It was therefore very easy for the public service to become acutely bureaucratic and therefore debilitated.
The presence of what I have called bureau-pathological features—over-bloated workspace, generalist orientation, disarticulated pay and compensation incentive structure, breakdown of the internal control mechanism, weakened public values and its associated codes of ethics; the system’s accountability framework inclusive, low technology penetration, etc.—immensely contributed to how the civil service eventually degenerated into a bureaucratic paradigm that services the statist character of the Nigeria state.
In other words, this bureaucratic paradigm not only strengthens the power of the civil service in relations to other institutions, but it also compromises its neutrality, anonymity and impartiality through its use as a means of political intervention in the economy and society.
Restoring the value orientation of the public service therefore becomes a significant reform initiative that is connected with the overall task of modernizing its structures, processes and procedures. Improving operations requires making them faster via flexible ways of, say, budgeting, managing, accounting and delivering service. In this sense, public management is transformed into a strategic framework for getting the work done.
Such a strategic framework is therefore founded on the management of a dynamic workforce to make the public service what it ought to be. To reposition the civil service therefore involves moving the public service workplace and its HR functions towards a more professionalized and strategic HRM within framework oriented to the vision of restoring competency-based HR function and management.
Since the HR function is cogent in achieving performance and productivity, there is no doubt that the professionalization of the HR functions is fundamental to transforming the workplace. However, the core public manager-professionals need to know that to do this, human resource management can no longer be restricted as the exclusive responsibility of HR departments. Line managers and other managerial executives now require people management skills and competence to facilitate effectiveness and efficiency. This also relocates the HR function from the back to the front office within framework of strategic partnership with management.
And rethinking the HR function implies a significant level of reform. For instance, at the basic level, it is no longer productive to treat HR in terms of personnel management, and its preoccupation with the passive role of privileging rules, regulations and procedures rather than developing and pursuing policies in manners that extract performance results and productivity bargains from people and from the processes.
This automatically affects the current practice of staff performance evaluation and appraisal which is very vague about what is being assessed and rewarded, or even how appraisal should be directed towards performance assessment and competences, rather than as a mere subjective protocol.
Next, to become the ultimate change agents in the reform of the public service, the HR manager is not only expected to facilitate the establishment of a new HR model that will harness the performance and productive capacities of the workforce. They are also essentially required to deepen the skills and competences with regard to risk management in ways that instigate action research as a component of management cum operation research and organisation development (OD) in the MDAs.
This will also enable the HR to institute a learning culture that challenges the bureaucratic status quo, and helps it champions specific cultural transformations directed at translating desirable culture and public service values into public managers behaviour.
All the above considerations have significant implications for the understanding of the workplace and its HR dynamics. What I consider to be the most urgent workplace consideration in the face of the daunting flux of transformations of the nature of work is what we can call the people-issue. This is the issue of how persons and personnel remain the focus of whatever reforms, changes and adjustment that information, data, knowledge and technologies are forcing on the reconstitution and reimagining of the civil service system, the nature of the work and of the workplace.
The other dimension of this people-issue is how the public service workplace is regenerated—through the challenges enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic—to mainstream into its operations, technologies and new managerial procedures and processes that shift the paradigms in terms of redefining citizens engagement by placing the citizens-as-customers at the centre of service delivery designs and its value-chain. This is a development that many advanced economies already integrated into their public sector optimal functions and now take for granted.
Rethinking the civil service workplace as a value-driven and optimally impactful site requires focusing the change management dynamics towards answering several questions:
- What are the key actions needed to ensure a better match between HR requirements and available employee?
- How can we ensure that the department has highly skilled employees in the future in order to address changing needs?
- How can the FCSC and partners like the CIPM work with line ministries/ agencies to attract employees with the right competences for deployment to critical areas in the department?
- What is required to create the right professional environment that could help to breed a new generation of public managers with professional and confidence to demand and give excellent services?
- How can the oversupply of employee in certain areas of the department be re-directed to address other areas with shortages?
- If training and retraining the oversupply is not an option, how can these employees be phased out?
- How can under-representation of designated groups/cadre of ethnic groups be addressed professionally (in view of Federal Character), with due regard given to merit?
- How can the productivity of current employees be consistently improved, monitored and evaluated as basis for interventions?
These key questions could serve as the instigator for modelling distinct strategic reform action framework broken into reform stages that could transform the HR functions of the civil service system. The first stage will correspond to the ongoing Personnel Audit and Skills Gap Analysis (PASGA) project, which provides an unprecedented opportunity for the strengthening of the manpower requirements of the federal civil service and the imperative need for a reevaluated and upgraded service-wide job roles. This personnel audit would however be consolidated by the establishment of a centralized human resource information database that is similar to the current Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) for monitoring workforce recruitment and maintenance (against the scourge of ghost workers, fake employment, abuse of FCSC delegated powers by MDAs, for instance). The second stage is driven by the imperative of identifying competency frameworks that will be the basis of professionalizing the HR function of the workplace. This comes from proactively designing and executing of merit-based recruitment exercises through, for example, the deployment of digital instruments and procedures.
The third stage corresponds to the operationalization of the performance management system that, for instance, works with key performance indicators rather than the generic annual performance review, while critically transforming the compensation package to draw a critical mass of talented workforce with scarce skills that are badly required to recalibrate the organizational IQ of the service. This is also enabled significantly by the PASGA project in terms of the way the audit reveals the skills and competence gaps in the HR dynamic that will drive the meritocratic recruitment efforts.
The critical expertise of organizations like the CIPM becomes crucial in the last stage that demands the establishment of a cadre of HR professionals that is mandated to work with a public value charter that guides the measurement and evaluation of performance and productivity.
It becomes very clear that the CIM conference and its theme of value-driven institutional impact speaks enormously to the direction that global administrative and HR practices are headed in the twenty-first century. It also significantly positions the CIPM itself as a foresighted organization that stands shoulder to shoulder with the FCSC in delineating critical reform direction, change management and structural action frameworks that the civil service system requires as a matter of urgency in transforming the civil service into a world class institution for achieving a formidable democratic governance in Nigeria.
By
Prof. Tunji Olaopa
Chairman
Federal Civil Service Commission &
Professor of Public Administration
Abuja
(Being Speech Delivered as Special Guest at the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria – CIPM – 58th International Conference in Abuja on Tuesday, 22nd of September, 2026)
