Significance of FCT Civil Service Commission in Nigeria’s Administrative History

By Tunji Olaopa

There is every conceivable reason to celebrate and properly situate the emergence and functional relevance of the Federal Capital Territory Civil Service Commission (FCT-CSC) in Nigeria’s administrative history, even if the significance of this is not obvious to any but an administrative historian or public administration researcher. In 2018, a legislative bill approving the establishment of the FCT-CSC was passed into law. Like the federal and state CSC, it was charged with the responsibility of the appointment, promotion, discipline and transfer of civil servants within the civil service system of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The eventual passing of this law has been long in the making, especially since the constitutional establishment of the Federal Civil Service Commission and the State Civil Service Commission raises the crucial issue of federal inclusivity and administrative effectiveness, especially for sub-national entity. But I am jumping ahead of my narrative already!
In 1976, an act legislating the establishment of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja was passed to law. There was also the establishment of the Federal Capital Territory Development Authority (FCTDA) to oversee the administrative necessities of not only transferring the federal capital from Lagos to Abuja, but also of administering municipal services while also articulating the Abuja master plan with the objective of infrastructural development. Within the grand national vision, Abuja, more than Lagos, is meant to realize the federal vision of a centrally located and neutral geographical zone that could symbolically speak to Nigeria’s federal aspiration. My argument in this piece is that the significance of the creation of the FCT in 1976 has finally been realized with the establishment of the FCT-CSC as the frontline and constitutionally enabled administrative gatekeeping institution that will strengthen the subnational component in the collective desire for a change management dynamic that will enable the institutional reform of the civil service system in Nigeria. Abuja is the final plank in the overall systemic strategy to articulate a reform programme that captures the entirety of the Nigerian state and its administrative objectives.
Coming in as the newest CSC, after more than seven decades since the founding of the civil service commission in Nigeria, the FCT-CSC is not only enjoying the privileges of grand attention to the emergence of a public service within a territory enjoying a mini-state status. It is also coming at a time when there is an ongoing and renewed enthusiasm about launching and consolidating an institutional and administrative reform to backstop the dynamics of the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration. And under the able leadership of my colleague, Engr. Emeka Ezeh, as the Chairman, the FCT-CSC has fully capitalized on its newness to adopt and domesticate twenty-first century administrative and performance practices while also connecting with the FCSC’s strategic plan to exhibit itself as the poster CSC in the overall challenge of making Nigeria work through its civil and public service system as the institutional mechanism for grounding the performance of a developmental state in Nigeria.
The emergence of the FCT-CSC participates in the global significance of civil service commission in administrative history. The idea of the civil service commission owes its contemporary understanding to the consistent efforts of the British government and its civil service to keep iterating reform measures that would make the system increasingly more efficient and functional. In 1854, two important administrative developments—the Report on the Indian Civil Service and the Northcote-Trevelyan Report—were the results of an intense interrogation of the civil service system, and the urgent need to safeguard it against abnormal and unprofessional recruitment practices whose terrible consequences undermined the efficiency the British government, through its civil service, to cater for the needs of her citizens.
The two reports outline the structure of a framework that will ensure (i) recruitment would be through an open and competitive examination that will facilitate an entry requirement that guarantees a merit system; (ii) new recruits would require a generalist education that will enable inter-departmental staff transfers; (iii) recruitment would integrate new entrants into a hierarchical structure of grades from the most mechanical to the most intellectual; and (iv) promotion and career progression would be on the basis of merit and not patronage or preferment. These four premises became the basis for the establishment of the Civil Service Commission in the United Kingdom. And they consolidated the earlier practice in the United States, through the Pendleton Act of 1883, which not only undermine the American spoil system, but the establishment of the significance of competitive examination as the criterion for ensuring entry into the civil service based on a meritocratic standard.
These are the global predecessors that ground the critical emergence of the FCT-CSC as a cogent dimension of the FCSC in Nigeria’s public administration. There are two fundamental reasons why the coming into reckoning of the FCT-CSC is a key feature in the annals of administrative and institutional engineering in Nigeria. First, establishing the FCT-CSC carries the overall burden of gatekeeping the professionalism and meritocracy of the civil service system in Nigeria. That objective cannot be achieved while leaving out a significant subnational part like Abuja. There are a lot of gaps and administrative impediments in MDAs that lack adequately and functional supervision from CSC that enable significant sharp practices and unprofessional relations that undermine the performance and productivity of the civil service. The political interference in the internal governance dynamics of the public service, the lack of a civil service commission, and the prebendal framework that creep into recruitment, all go to undermine the constitutional independence of the civil service. It enables certain corrupt tendencies, especially in the implementation of the federal character principle as a critical component of the diversity management praxis, that steadily chip away at the public spiritedness and the meritocratic basis of performance management in the civil service. Merit is often thrown away on the altar of political and administrative patronage.
The second reason for the significance of the establishment and operational functionality of the FCT-CSC is that it removes the gross injustice and arbitrariness of limiting the career management options of the civil servants who are really committed to their vocation. The zenith of the civil service profession is the position of either a permanent secretary or the head of service. Unfortunately, and for the last several decades, civil servants in the FCT have had to retire without the option of getting to the zenith of their career. Indeed, and within this unjust administrative and institutional practice, becoming a permanent secretary to the FCT has remained one of the juiciest posting in the Federal Civil Service; a posting that steps on the aspirations of those who have the capacities to become permanent secretaries or head of service in their own right. One can then begin to see how removing the FCT from the ambit of administrative and governance framework that conditions the understanding of a civil service system in the Commonwealth especially can limit the overall understanding of even the very aspiration for institutional reform in Nigeria. And so, with deep appreciation to the institutional thinking of the indefatigable Minister Nyesom Wike, the 2018 Act establishing the FCT-CSC, which has been aging due to lack of political will to jumpstart its implementation, has finally been resolved. The FCT-CSC has now fully connected with the FCSC and its strategic implementation plan to reposition the civil service system in Nigeria as a genuinely noble vocation that will serve as the administrative mechanism for performance managing the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration.
In specific terms, the two-fold objective of the FCSC in achieving the above goal is, on the one hand, to gatekeep the public administration profession through a strict oversight on and implementation of a standardized merit system. This starts from the recruitment and entry modalities and down to the entirety of the diversity management framework, including the federal character principle. On the other hand, the FCSC is keen on transforming the CSCs into expert hubs that reflect a reformed public administration governance and human resource management professionalism that is crucially the backbone of the aspiration of the Nigerian state to become fully developmental. Overall, the FCSC aims to implement a strategy that calls on the collective cooperation of all stakeholders to restore competency-based human resource management in the Nigerian civil service and the public sector by extension.
By fully aligning with the FCSC’s strategic implementation plan, in a similar way that states, like Abia, are enthusiastically already doing, we hope that in the years ahead—while the Renewed Hope Agenda keeps unraveling productively—we will be able to put the FCSC strategic plan in full implementation.
The FCSC strategic plan is founded on four fundamental and correlated goals: (a) merit-based appointment that sees to institutionalize transparent, technology-driven recruitment aligned with federal character and meritocracy; (b) performance-driven promotion that will enable the system to link career progression with competence, measurable outputs, and accountability through modern performance management systems; (c) ethical transparency as the basis for strengthening fairness, firmness, and efficiency implementing disciplinary and ethical safeguards; and (d) institutional capacity development that instigate the civil service system to modernize governance, ICT, infrastructure, financial management, and staff welfare, as means of benchmarking globally acceptable HR practices.
To arrive at a sense of direction that the FCSC needs to take in order to be able to adequately translate these pillars of institutional reform into implementational success, we deemed it fit, as a first order of business, to carry out some basic housekeeping diagnosis, including a PPESTLE—physical infrastructure, political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors—and SWOT—strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats—analyses to determine the capacity and capability of the FCSC to initiate the strategic plan. This was also followed (a) desk reviews on civil/public service commissions in different jurisdictions, and (b) wide consultations with stakeholders to understand their needs and expectations from the Commission. And as a second step, the FCSC has commenced putting in place reform imperatives around which her capability can emerge:

1. Appointment of a certified human resource expert professionals to head the secretariats of the service commissions across the federation at earliest time possible.
2. Deployment of an initial cohort of certified and retrained HR professionals, drawn from serving federal officers in the administrative officer pool, as pioneer core staff to serve in the FCSC for an initial minimum of five years in the first instance.
3. Fresh recruitment and solicitation of a critical mass of expert HR professionals under special arrangement to set up a new professionalized FCSC secretariat.
4. Renovate and totally overhaul the deplorable FCSC complex into an enhanced working environment for staff to provide enhanced working environment for staff
5. Modernization of service commissions core operations and processes through computerization and digitization
6. Institution of monitoring, evaluation and reporting systems that allow Commissions’ proper oversight over the power delegated to the MDAs
7. Strengthening policy and research hubs within the Service Commissions to facilitate town and gown synergy that leverages research and intellectual capacities of public administration and policy scholars and practitioners for knowledge management and problem solving
8. Strengthening the Commission’s ongoing collaborative and partnership efforts with states’ CSC, regional and global communities of practice and service

It is within the context of all these unfolding developments around the FCSC’s strategic and implementation plan that the significance of the FCT-CSC becomes all the more important. The FCSC in a word has another strategic partner that could strengthen her resolve in enhancing the professionalism and performance capability of the civil service to leap-jump the Renewed Hope Agenda into democratic reckoning.

*Prof. Tunji Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission,
Abuja