IN bureaucratic circles in Abuja these days, the joyous compliments of the Yuletide and the New Year is quietly but quickly being overtaken by the rapidly increasing momentum of the jostle by top bureaucrats to get the attention of those who have the listening ears of the President. This is because a new Head of the Civil Service of the Federation is due to be appointed, as the current occupant of the post is due to retire in March 2013 on attainment of the civil service mandatory retirement age of 60 years.

Section 171 of the Constitution, under Chapter VI Part 1D The Public Service of the Federation, vests in the President the power to appoint persons to hold or act in the offices and to remove persons so appointed from any such office as are listed therein, namely: Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Ambassador, High Commissioner or other Principal Representative of Nigeria abroad, Permanent Secretary in any Ministry or Head of any Extra-Ministerial Department of the Government of the Federation (i.e. Director General; Executive Secretary etc); and any office on the personal staff of the President (e.g. Chief of Staff; Special Adviser; Senior Special Assistant etc).

Of all the offices listed above, the only offices to which the President can claim full responsibility, in terms of its appointment, are those of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) and his own personal staff, namely: Chief of Staff, Special Adviser etc. Not so for the other offices, like Permanent Secretary (PS) where the process of both screening and recommendation weighs heavily in favour of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HCSF), or Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of parastatals where the odds for the recommendation of candidates are very much in favour of the Minister of the respective supervising Ministries. In the appointment of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, the President and the system are made to rely solely, on the recommendation of the outgoing HCSF.

Section 171 further states in sub-section (3) that “an appointment to the office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation shall not be made except from among Permanent Secretaries or equivalent rank in the civil service of the Federation or of a State”.

The mainstream civil service, which the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation controls, is made up of only 140,000 officers. This represents a mere 18 per cent of the Federal Public Service, considering that career officers in the National Assembly, the Judiciary, the  Armed Forces, Police, para-military and security agencies, the Parastatals and Government Corporations etc are outside the control of the HCSF. One might be tempted to ask why so much big deal is attached to the office.

It is big deal because the mainstream civil service is Nigeria’s equivalent of the elite service. It is from there that the government appoints Permanent Secretaries as chief policy advisers, accounting officers and chief operating officers to Ministers; and it is also from there that Directors are appointed by the Federal Civil Service Commission to head Departments of Ministries. The success of a Ministry and its parastatals in delivering on their mandates is dependent on both the quality of advice and the effectiveness of the coordination provided by these mainstream Directors and the Permanent Secretary under the direction of the Minister.

In order to appreciate the gravity of the pervading subjectivity and personal bias that can go (and indeed have been going) into the recommendation made to the President by the holder of the post of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, we need to examine and hold out in perspective the process of appointment into top positions in the Judiciary:

Within the Judiciary, appointment into the offices of Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice of the Supreme Court (JSC), President Court of Appeal (JCA), Chief Judge of the Federal High Court (CJ-FHC), Judge of the Federal High Court (JFHC), Chairmen and Members of Code of Conduct Tribunal, are vested in the President, subject to confirmation by the Senate in respect of CJN; JSC; PCA & CJ-FHC, on the recommendation of the National Judicial Council, based on the nomination advice of the Federal Judicial Service Commission.

By way of comparison, I list hereunder the composition of the National Judicial Service Commission and the Federal Civil Service Commission, as provided in the Constitution:

• The Federal Judicial Service Commission (FJSC) comprises: The Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) as Chairman; President Court of Appeal; Attorney General of the Federation; Chief Judge of the Federal High Court; two people from a list of four from the NBA with at least 15 years post call to Bar experience; and two other persons, not being legal practitioners, but in the opinion of the President are of unquestionable integrity.

• The Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) comprises: A Chairman; and not more than 15 other members ‘who shall, in the opinion of the President be persons of unquestionable integrity and sound judgment’ (Practice shows that they are appointed mostly from retired Directors and Perm Secretaries of States and Federal Civil Services).

As could be seen above, the FCSC in composition does not enjoy the diversity and comprehensive representation that has been built into the FJSC to be expected to demonstrate the level of objectivity that will be the outcome of exercises of the type conducted by the FJSC. Indeed, in terms of performance, the experience in the last 10 years is that the weight of decisions by the FCSC had rested largely with (or more appropriately, been wrestled by) the Chairman and quite a number of the decisions/actions taken by the FCSC had raised concerns on the integrity of the Commission and caused serious human resource management problems for the main stream Civil Service. It would therefore amount to an invitation to a bureaucratic suicide to canvass that the Federal Civil Service Commission be made to play, for the Civil Service, the role currently being played by the Federal Judicial Service Commission for the Judiciary.

The process adopted so far to come up with recommendations for the appointment of Permanent Secretaries, is one where the sitting HCSF constitutes a team, comprising serving and retired Perm Secretaries and representatives of the FCSC, to screen eligible Directors through competitive written and oral examination. This was the process instituted and perfected by Nigeria’s longest serving Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Mahmud Yayale Ahmed, and it has up, till now, enabled the sitting HCSF to have an upper hand in determining who gets appointed as Perm Sec. The process of recommending the successor HCSF is by far more opaque as it does not enjoy any formal input from any quarters but rests solely with the out-going HCSF to submit to the President a list of three candidates from which the President is expected to appoint one!

It could be argued that, judging by the quality of quite a number of the recent appointments to top bureaucratic positions, such a process (high-jacked delegation of Presidential powers described above) has indeed, indirectly helped the President by serving as the necessary buffer against politicians and other outside forces whose strong influences on the President are, often times, driven by parochial rather than patriotic motives. While that is true, one cannot but observe also that the continued adoption of the process by successive Heads of the Civil Service of the Federation has in recent years thrown up negative manifestations of bureaucratic inbreeding, as exemplified not only in the professional and personal biases but the compromise of institutional integrity in the choice of Perm Secretaries and successor HCSF by the sitting HCSF.

The act of error that started the politicisation of the post of HCSF was committed in June 1999 by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who for some curious and unexplained reason decided to use the position for the geo-political/ regional balancing of the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF). As at May 30, 1999, the HCSF as well as the Chief of Staff to the President (COS-P) were Category 5 offices in contrast to the SGF, Ministers and the Chairman FCSC who were on Category 6 on the extant salary scale of the National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission (NSIWC). By way of comparison, Permanent Secretaries were on Category 4. In other words, the HCSF was a grade below the SGF and only a grade above the Perm Secretaries, his erstwhile peers. It was therefore out of context to use the appointment of the HCSF to balance the position of the SGF. By norm, the seniority of the SGF could be justified on the strength that, except in the last case, an SGF was traditionally chosen from among retired Perm Secretaries. Since an HCSF is normally appointed from among serving Perm Secretaries there can be no debate as to who is technically/professionally senior, because the HCSF would have, at one time, been a junior officer to the SGF during his service days. Unfortunately, that singular act of equalisation of the office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation with that of the SGF has, till today, taken out both the official and moral basis for any leverage on seniority and deeper knowledge of the service that the SGF may be expected to exert in his official relationship with the HCSF for the management of public service issues. We need not be reminded that the current disposition, in which the expected deeper knowledge of the civil service by a sitting SGF was not adjudged a critical requirement, may have compounded the problem by transforming the HCSF to the supreme authority in both the interpretation of public service rules and the management of the public service.

After President Obasanjo had appointed Chief U.J. Ekaette, a Southerner (from Akwa-Ibom, South-South zone) as SGF in 1999, he decided that the HCSF had to be chosen from the North and the lot fell on Mr. Abu Obe (from Benue, North Central zone).  As it turned out, the balance that President Obasanjo intended in the bureaucracy did not quite materialize. The fact that the position of the Chairman FCSC was being occupied by a northerner in the person of Ambassador Galtimari (from Borno, North-East zone) and that another Northerner, in the person of General Abdullahi Mohammed (from Kwara State, North Central zone) had been appointed the Chief of Staff to the President did not feature in the equation.

Indeed, the North was able to keep both positions of Chairman FCSC & HCSF over the next 12 years (1999-2011) with the North-East zone, in particular, enjoying the fortune of occupying both seats for seven years). It was generally felt that the President should have considered filling the post of HCSF on the basis of proven tripod qualities of seniority, competence and integrity to encourage the newly re-established office to continue to grow in stature and integrity.

The Judiciary on the other hand was able to maintain its tradition of seniority and this has sustained its succession till date. Indeed, at one point, both the head of the National Assembly i.e. the Senate President who is the number 3 citizen in the land and the head of the Judiciary i.e. the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) who is the effective number 4 man in the land were from the same State (Benue).  It is a pleasant relief that no one thought of using the Judiciary top position to balance that of the Senate. The Bureaucracy should have been left alone to retain its own order of seniority just like the judiciary. The CJN is a career-based position in the Judiciary just as the HCSF in the Bureaucracy.

Despite this error, it needs to be stressed however, that within the ring-fencing of the geo-political zoning of the occupier of the post of the HCSF, to counter-balance the SGF, President Obasanjo’s appointees for the post were still from among the most senior Perm Secretaries service-wide.

Subsequent application of geo-political zoning of the post ended up shutting out the most senior Perm Secretaries, and each successive holder of the office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (OHCSF) had to come into the post with varying degree of credibility, in terms of the tripod qualities of seniority, competence and integrity.  These three qualities usually manifest, not only in the challenges faced but correspondingly in the effectiveness of the official authority exerted by each holder of the office to respond to those challenges.  For example, a system that by-passes Permanent Secretaries of 8-12 years standing to appoint one of barely two years standing, who at one time was a Deputy Director under one of these senior colleagues, should expect that it might take a little time for both groups to come to terms with their reversed roles. Similarly, when the choice of Head of the Civil Service of the Federation is made from Permanent Secretaries with very limited administrative background and experience, having spent virtually their entire career in their professional ministries, the system should expect that the learning curve of such an appointee would be a long gentle gradient, notwithstanding the weight of the support from colleagues. There can be no room for any integrity baggage, real or perceived, with regard to the records of those aspiring to be appointed Head of the Civil Service of the Federation. If, for example, it is public knowledge that the official age of an appointee is many years below his/her natural age, or that he/she is not entitled to one of the qualifications listed in his/her records, the courage to take the correct decision on those who falsify their records is at the mercy of those who might flag such a record on the appointee’s face as a subtle blackmail. Same for those known to have used their official position on previous desks to amass wealth and/or commit other irregularities, as well as those whose mode of entry, regularisation and ascendancy in the service had generated some resentment among colleagues.

Perhaps no other issue in the history of the Nigerian civil service has challenged the authority of the office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation and raised questions on the integrity of the bureaucracy top office as the pension saga. How do we explain a situation where a Deputy Director serving as Chairman of a Pension Task Force, set up by the HCSF, would refuse to respond to directives of the sitting HCSF, talk less of the supervising Perm Secretary?

In terms of assessment of leadership effectiveness in the bureaucracy, the past six years has been a mixed-grill. From the courageous heights of instituting in 2009 the tenure policy to correct an age-long problem that was responsible for the mainstream civil service succession crisis, the service veered off in 2011 to enmesh its leadership in the mind-bugling pension corruption saga; today, what we have is a service leadership that seems quite at peace with himself in the face of intractable/elusive solution to the pension saga and the many outstanding and emerging service issues, including even posting instructions and circulars issued under his signature that are routinely ignored. There is no doubt that if the bureaucracy is to be assisted to rise up to the challenge of upholding public trust and serving as the effective engine of governance we must begin by removing the recurring decimal in the erosion of its institutional integrity.

Four months ago, as part of my task as the Chairman of the Osun State Public Service Transformation Team, after we had assessed and recommended candidates for appointment as Perm Secretaries through highly competitive written tests and oral interaction, the Governor further charged us with the responsibility of recommending the best three candidates for the position of the Head of the Civil Service of the State.  There was however a caveat; The Governor wanted the effective participation of all management level officers (i.e. GL 14 and above) to ensure service-wide acceptability. The Team consisted of the pioneer Secretary to the Government of the State, a former Head of Service of the State, a retired Perm Sec from Lagos State, and the Director - General of the Yoruba Academy, among others; and I should stress that I am not an indigene of Osun but of Ondo State. Our challenge was how to adopt and apply election, the universally acclaimed democratic instrument of political choice, to produce the leadership of the bureaucracy that is expected to be imbued with all the qualities that are associated with the best of the civil service tradition, including insulation from partisan politics.  What we did was to design a set of 20 quality traits that could assist the generality of the officers to assess the Perm Secretaries for leadership, integrity and incorruptibility. The 20 traits were:

1. Appearance & Neatness (whether the Candidate is usually well-groomed and normally dresses neatly and properly);

2. Overall Personality & Carriage (in terms of the confidence exuded)

3. Oral Communication Ability;

4. Written Communication Ability;

5. Punctuality & Time Management (Punctuality at work and efficient utilization of time to achieve targets)

6. Efficiency in funds management  (ability to achieve more with less);

7. Ability to Mentor/Groom Subordinates;

8. Firmness in taking and abiding by correct decisions;

9. Firmness in applying sanctions;

10. Courage in upholding the Rules (Public Service Rules & Financial Regulations);

11. Drive & Determination (ability to achieve results and set targets in assigned duties);

12. Reliability Under Pressure (sustenance of physical and emotional balance under pressure);

13. Tact in Handling Sensitive Issues;

14. Honesty (e.g. in official records relating to Date of Birth, First Appointment, claims of qualifications and academic titles);

15. Courage to Uphold What is Right and Defend the Service;

16. Consistency in Doing and Abiding with What is Right;

17. Service-wide / Public Perception about the officer’s immunity to corrupt inducement;

18. Service-wide / Public Perception about the officer’s Wealth (whether the officer’s wealth Is No more than OR Much Below OR Far Above what can be explained by his/her official earnings);

19. Service-wide / Public Perception about the Officer in terms of ownership of privately-owned Properties and Businesses such as: Estate Buildings, Hotels, Super Markets, Schools and Farmlands, etc; and

20. Service-wide / Public Perception about the officer in terms of ownership and utilisation of personally- owned or cronies- owned companies to execute Government contract(s).

The Civil Servants were separated into two groups: the eligible contenders’ group, comprising the 26 Perm Secretaries in the mainstream civil service (i.e. excluding the three Permanent Secretaries in the Local Government Service and the three Tutors General of the Teaching Service Commission); and the non-eligible officers group, made up of GL 14 to 17 officers and General Managers of agencies. The two groups were, one after the other, taken through a Leadership and Integrity presentation, to let them appreciate why those 20 qualities were important.  In the meantime, a matrix of Candidates versus Quality Traits was prepared, with the 26 names on the vertical axis and the 20 qualities on the lateral axis. The 26 eligible Permanent Secretaries were instructed to each take themselves out of the equation and to score the other 25 Permanent Secretaries in every one of those 20 qualities. The other officers were simply made to score each of the 26 officers across the 20 quality traits.  The scores were collated overnight in readiness for the gathering of Political appointees and Public Servants summoned by the Governor the following day. At the gathering, all GL 14 and above officers were made to bear in mind the 20 traits they had assessed the previous day and to each identify and write down on their ballot paper the name of the one Perm Secretary from the 26 eligible candidates who they could swear before God was the best candidate for the position of Head of the Civil Service of Osun. Incidentally, the results of both objective assessments (the Peer Assessment by the 26 Permanent Secretaries, and the Assessment by the Management level officers) as well as the guided subjective assessment of Ballot Vote produced largely similar results.  The names of the three highest scoring candidates were presented to the Governor, who immediately went ahead to publicly announce the Candidate with the highest score/vote as the new Head of the Civil Service of Osun.

The question one might want to ask is this:  if the Federal Government had adopted the Osun model, by requesting Directorate level officers as well as the Permanent Secretaries themselves to assess the eligible 40 Federal Permanent Secretaries on the basis of those 20 qualities, would the outcome have been the same in all instances in the last six years?

An analysis of the Federal Permanent Secretaries appointed, especially in the last six years, can reveal, not only the challenges of the varying degree of credibility in competence and integrity but the personality and professional biases of the sitting HCSF. At the Conference on The Nigerian Public Service, organized by the Presidential Committee on the Review of the Reform Processes in the Nigerian Public Service, under the theme “The Nigerian Public Service: Challenges and Opportunities” in Abuja from November 29–December 1, 2011, a former HCSF now Hon. Minister of Land, Housing and Urban Development, Ms. Amal Pepple, openly criticised the inability of her successors to sustain the maturity requirement of three years’ experience on the post of Director, prescribed during her tenure as screening eligibility for consideration  for the post of Permanent Secretary, and to result  to recommending  for  the President’s approval  the appointment of officers who were awaiting deployment  on their newly  announced promotion  grade of Director!

What she was trying to point out is whether we can entrust a Ministry with about eight Departments to an officer who is yet to prove that he/she can manage a Department; and that, of course, includes Directors in professional Ministries like Foreign Affairs, Education and Health which have GL 17 officers that are not necessarily Directors of mandate departments. That is not to say that we have not found situations where the submissions and performance of certain Deputy Directors were superior to those of their Directors.

What is needed is an objective, transparent and credible approach to bring out such officers. In reality, unlike in the case of HCSF where the constitution explicitly states that the “appointment shall not be made except from among permanent secretaries of the Federation or of a State”, there is nothing in the constitution restricting the eligibility grade level for the appointment of Perm Secretary to the grade of Director.

There is currently an emerging cold war within the top directorate level officers of the civil service with regard to the professional colour of appointees to the position of Permanent Secretary. The subtle leverage of confidence enjoyed during the Yayale era in the appointment of Permanent Secretary by Directors in the Administrative Officer cadre, with background in the Humanities and Social Sciences has given way to the dominance of Directors from the Professional Officer cadre, especially Accountants, Foreign Service officers, Engineers, Scientists, Doctors and Lawyers.  These are officers whose career paths traditionally lead to such pinnacle offices as Accountant-General of the Federation, Ambassador, Surveyor-General and Solicitor-General of the Federation, as the case may be. In addition, transferees are having a field day in the appointment of Permanent Secretaries to the disadvantage of officers who started their career in the mainstream civil service.

Perhaps nothing could have demonstrated this trend better than the exercise carried out by the current HCSF in October 2012. Five Permanent Secretaries were appointed, out which four were professionals (a Dental Surgeon, an Accountant and two Foreign Service officers); and none from the Administrative cadre that are by far more seasoned in Human Resource Management (HRM) and general administration issues. A breakdown of the 40 Permanent Secretaries on post service-wide as at December, 2012 shows: 15 Scientists (including Engineers, Pharmacists) seven Accountants; five Foreign Service Officers; three Lawyers; three Medical Doctors. In other words, over 82 per cent of our Permanent Secretaries are from the Professional Officer cadre. This shows that products of the Administrative Officers’ cadre (with background in the Humanities and Social Sciences) that used to see the top bureaucracy office of Perm Sec as their exclusive preserve are becoming extinct among Federal Permanent Secretaries. On the other hand, even though the office of Accountant General of the Federation (AGF) is lower in rank to that of Permanent Secretary, in recent years it has become much easier for Directors working under the AGF to be appointed Perm Sec. Indeed, today there is no single officer from the Administrative Officers cadre in the rank of Federal Permanent Secretaries from the crop of officers who started their career on direct recruitment on GL 08 in the Federal Civil Service. The transferees and professionals have taken over, even at the level of Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, a position, which, incidentally, has in the last six years seen an Engineer, an Accountant and a Scientist among the five occupants.

If one may ask: how much of the current public perception and documented complaints of political office holders on the quality of Permanent Secretaries and Directors is explained by this trend? I am not saying that there had not been instances where some of these professionals and transferees had been as effective, if not better than their counterparts from the traditional Administrative officers’ cadre; after all by my background and entry into the public service I was myself, both a professional officer and a transferee. But those officers were not only exceptional, most of them had converted to administrative officers and indeed, some of them had held top management positions as CEOs of government agencies before their appointment as Permanent Secretaries, albeit through competitive written and oral assessment.

The Way Forward

Considering the magnitude and ramification of the political pressures that are exerted on the bureaucracy these days by political office holders with political ambitions and the National Assembly under its usual subterfuge of oversight, it has become an imperative of national urgency for the President to strengthen the bureaucracy to enable it play its expected role of upholding public trust and serving as the effective engine of governance. To start with, the current system of screening and recommending Permanent Secretaries and Head of the Civil Service of the Federation to the President for appointment would need to be overhauled. There is the additional problem of lack of recognised coordinating office for the CEOs of Parastatals and Agencies, as well as the absence of a central HR office for the arbitration of complaints arising from appointments, promotion and discipline for the career public servants in Parastatals and Agencies. The general notion that the OSGF is responsible for such matters is neither supported by extant Guidelines in the Assignment of Responsibilities issued to political office holders nor by any visible administrative set up in the OSGF.  The way out is to appreciate and be guided by the full intent of the Constitution in Section 130 (1) & (2), which prescribes: “There shall be for the Federation a President. The President shall be the Head of State; the Chief Executive of the Federation; and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federation.”

Implicit in the above quoted constitutional provision is the fact that, not only is the President the Head of Government and Commander-in- Chief (Head) of the Armed Forces, as Chief Executive of the Federation, the President is also the de facto Head of the Bureaucracy. Therefore, it needs to be observed that if the President can be assisted in his function as Commander-in- Chief by the National Defence Council and the Nigeria Police Council both of which he chairs, and as Head of State by the National Judicial Council, the absence of a similar council for the Public Service to assist the President as the Chief Executive of the Federation is a grave omission of the Constitution. This is particularly so because of the inherent deficiencies and personal bias vulnerabilities of the occupiers of the twin posts of Chairman FCSC and HCSF, as highlighted above.

The common saying is that “like begets like”; and basic Genetics teaches that, even with parent stock that has strong genetic composition, continuous and sustained inbreeding is bound to lead to increasingly lower quality populations across succeeding generations until an improved species or strain is introduced. By the same token, bureaucratic leadership succession screening and assessment, through an inbreeding process that is not immune to professional and personal biases as well as tendencies to compromise institutional integrity, is prone to producing, for the civil service, leaders of questionable quality and integrity. This understanding is probably why President Obasanjo had to direct in 2004 that integrity tests must thenceforth be a critical element in the assessment of candidates for higher positions in the civil service; and further directed in 2006, that the screening and assessment processes that precede the actual recommendation of candidates for appointment as Permanent Secretaries should be handled by independent bodies. The pathway to removing the recurring decimal in the erosion of institutional integrity within the bureaucracy lies with instituting a credible platform for protecting the integrity of the recommendation process for the appointment of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation.

The ultimate goal is to seek for an Act to establish the Nigeria Public Service Council. Such a Council can be serviced by the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR) as the Secretariat, in the same way that the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) is Secretariat of the National Council on Privatization. It is instructive to note that the Presidential Committee on the Restructuring and Rationalization of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies, chaired by Mr. Steve Oronsaye, has already recommended that the BPSR be domiciled in the State House. The proposed Nigeria Public Service Council should comprise:  A Minister in the Presidency, under the official title of Minister of Public Service, who must be a person of impeccable integrity with vast public service experience, to represent  the President, as Chairman, SGF, HCSF, Chairman FCSC, Chairman Police Service, Commission (observer status)

?Chairman of the Boards of Customs, Prisons, Immigration, and Civil Defence Corps  (observer status); and two such other persons of unquestionable integrity and sound political judgement as the President may choose, at least one of whom shall be a representative of the Council of Retired Federal Permanent Secretaries (CORFEPS), as full-time Commissioners in the Council.

It is obvious that a Nigeria Public Service Council with the above composition, charged with cross-public service issues requiring harmonisation and inter-service relationship, would be in the position to make, among others, more objective and quality recommendations to the President in respect of appointment of Perm Secs and HCSF than what currently exist. In addition, the proposed Public Service Council will be in the best position to handle cases of CEOs of Parastatals and Agencies, for which there is presently no recognised coordinating office, as well as the arbitration of complaints arising from appointments, promotion and discipline for the career public servants in Parastatals and Agencies.

In the meantime, pending the establishment of such a Council, and to address the current requirement of the appointment of the next Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, the President can constitute a joint committee of the Council of Retired Federal Permanent Secretaries (CORFEPS), the HCSF, Chairman FCSC & the SGF, under the Chairmanship of the President of CORFEPS, Chief Phillip Asiodu, with the mandate to adopt the Peer (Permanent Secretaries) And Subordinates’  Assessment model described above ( with slight modification, using GL 17 officers only because of the size) to conduct an objective screening and assessment of all Permanent Secretaries who still have at least 2-3 years in service in the geo-political region expected to produce the HCSF. The top five candidates that emerge from such an exercise could then be made to go through an Interactive Session with the Panel on their vision and how they intend to run the service, to enable the Panel come up with the top three candidates as their recommendation, from which the President would pick the next HCSF, based on the current imperative of the North-East zone ring-fencing of the position.

The essence of the recommendation and processes advocated above is to assist the President to exercise the presidential powers intended in Section 171 of the Constitution with greater credibility through the appointment of persons whose personal integrity will complement the institutional integrity of the office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, as both the radar and the backbone for Permanent Secretaries and Directorate level officers, in their response to the pressure demands of their respective offices.  There can be no doubt that such a process will send the right signals to the entire service as to the direction the administration of President Jonathan is now heading in terms of curbing corruption and restoring the service to its original values of upholding public trust, promoting professionalism and efficiency and protecting institutional integrity. For the President, a golden opportunity beacons and the federal bureaucracy and indeed, the entire nation are waiting.

• Dr. Goke Adegoroye, the Chairman/CEO Governance & Sustainable Development Initiatives (GSDI) Limited, Abuja, is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary and pioneer Director General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms.