Recently, the Federal Civil Service Commission began the preparation for the implementation of the FCSC Strategic Plan (2026-2030). When the 10th Commission was inaugurated by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in December 2023, it was with a marching order that was specific and straightforward. The FCSC was charged by the president to “…competently facilitate the transformation, reorientation and digitisation 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.” The FCSC took this marching order seriously because it connects not only with the Tinubu administration’s objective of transforming democratic governance through the Renewed Hope Agenda. It is also fundamental to the constitutional mandate of the FCSC to serve as the gatekeeping structure that facilitates the transformation of the civil service into a vocational, value-oriented and efficient institution for delivering public goods to Nigerians. In other words, the FCSC stands at the juncture where it straddles the urgent imperative to institutionally reform the civil service system, and the need of the Tinubu administration to better the lives of Nigerians through a democratic governance system that delivers public goods efficiently.
As a means of articulating the trajectory of change management that would bring the marching order alive, the FCSC commenced preparation in 2024 with a critical repositioning plan that was meant to do some house-cleaning in preparation for the strategic plan and the extensive reform framework that is meant to transform the structural, institutional and procedural dynamics of the civil service system in Nigeria. As the FCSC begins the critical processes that inform the phases of implementing the strategic plan, I consider it quite significant to weigh in on a fundamental issue that bears on the constitutional powers of the civil service commissions at both the federal and state levels, and how such powers can be deployed in the pursuit of institutional reforms and systemic performance and productivity. This is my pedagogical intention in this piece: What is the constitutional limit of the powers the CSCs have? How can these powers be deployed in the pursuit of institutional reform, performance and productivity? What insights can we gain from global best practices, smart practices, and administrative discourse? How can these practices and discourses be adapted to Nigeria’s administrative context? These are some of the issues I hope this piece can engage with to enlighten my colleagues and administration scholars on the significance of the role of the federal and state CSCs, especially in the ongoing efforts to factor into the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Tinubu administration.
A fundamental part of the institutional reform process has to do with how powers are legitimised, owned and delegated for effective and efficient performance. And this has a significant import for the FCSC and the implementation process that is about to be jump-started. Modernising the operational dynamics, procedures, structures, processes and regulations of the FCSC also requires speaking to its constitutional powers and how they are to be deployed for effective planning and implementation. How then should the federal and state CSCs handle their constitutional powers? How do the MDAs fare in the calculation of constitutional authority? How should HR function be delegated if the CSCs take hold of the full powers conferred on them by the Nigerian constitution? These questions feed into the global discourse on the centralisation and decentralisation orientations in HR functions.
To concede, the significance of the gatekeeping mandate of the CSC calls for putting a very tight leash on the human resource functions involving recruitment, hiring, promotions and discipline. Putting in place a centralised operational procedure, through a central personnel agency, sounds like a crucial administrative structure that ensures that the civil service system is gatekept in ways that insulate it against corruption, patronage and politicisation while consolidating the highest standards of meritocratic practices. And it stands to reason, therefore, that CSCs would assume that it behooves them to decide whether to decentralise their constitutional powers or retain them within a centralised framework that the constitution permits them to. Unfortunately, administrative realities concerning human resource governance and the health of the system do not often favour our most idealistic aspirations.
In history and in administrative discourse, the centralisation and decentralisation orientations have never been straightforward. This is because the choice between whether the HR functions should be decentralised or left to a central agency has often been mediated by ideological considerations, which allow the policy framework of government to either conform to a liberal-market philosophy or a more centralised, guided governance model. In this sense, therefore, it becomes immediately clear why even the discussion of the question of whether HR function can best be performed functionally and efficiently by a centralised or decentralised arrangement is not settled either in scholarly circles or as administrative praxis.
Those who favour the centralised HR function have on their side the capacity of a decentralised function to quickly capitulate to corrupt practices that endanger the very gatekeeping function of the CSCs. However, such a concern must not be allowed to overwhelm two critical facts. One, the relationship between centralisation and decentralisation, especially in the administrative practices of many states, lies on a continuum.
Even though the centralised human resource governance commenced with the British understanding of the CSC, the post-World War II CSCs had to contend with a lot of administrative developments, like the expansion of the role of the state, the emerging complexity in development management due to globalisation, and especially the emergence of the new public management in the 1980s. Within the British Commonwealth sphere, the NPM demonstrate how the centralised model of the HR function led to slow recruitment and poor HR accountability. And this became the basis of the resolution that managers must not only be allowed to manage, they must also be enabled to do so if they are to be held accountable for performance outcomes and results that make the lives of democratic citizens better.
The pragmatic way administrative history has demonstrated is to bifurcate the responsibility for the constitutional mandate of the CSC in its responsibility for HR functions in the MDAs. This becomes necessary because a central agency that takes charge of HR decisions over the entire system often demonstrates an inefficient sense and understanding of the reality on the ground in local units and their critical needs, especially in terms of effective staffing decisions as well as employee dynamics concerning performance management and administrative accountability. Thus, CSCs often take a centralisation path when it comes to the staffing decisions of senior staff as well as the administrative matters concerning ethical matters. But issues regarding the day-to-day personnel management, operational staffing and administrative duties and responsibilities are decentralised and left to the discretion of line ministries and departments. The singular point that favours decentralisation of HR decisions and functions is that it focuses on achieving the organisational efficiency that locates decision-making effectively at service delivery points, especially closer to the citizens.
This solution, however, needs to be factored into administrative contextual circumstances. Nigeria is a good example. One fundamental dimension of Decree 43 of 1988—which backstopped the Babangida Civil Service Reforms—is the decentralisation of personnel management to line ministries that will transform the civil service system into a professional and performance-oriented institution. This enabled Ministers to act as accounting officers, creating professionalised, line ministries’ in-house personnel management boards. In other words, as political appointees, the ministers were constitutionally empowered to handle recruitment, promotion, and discipline. Unfortunately, the reform initiative met with lots of underlying landmines that eventually weakened it. There was, for instance, widespread politicisation of the senior-level positions, which in turn led to decreased job security and ultimately a weakened career structure in the bureaucracy. The heightened political interference reduced the neutrality that CSCs originally protected. The decentralised model dispersed internal management control to individual ministries and departments, and as such, weakened or made inconsistent these standards. This led to widespread administrative abuses and ethnic discrimination.
But then, decentralisation also has a critical role to play within the ongoing push in the Nigerian administrative communities to consolidate democratic governance. In other words, despite the loud limitations of the decentralising imperatives of HR function in the CSCs, there are critical reasons for keeping the decentralisation of HR functions in focus. One, as we noted earlier, decentralisation gives an effective push to the NPM axiom that demands that managers must be given the necessary discretionary power and jurisdiction to manage effectively. Two, decentralisation has also become one of the core planks of democratic governance, which any administrative system must reckon with if performance is to be achieved. However, given the shortcomings enumerated earlier, this administrative decentralisation of HR functions by the FCSC would have to be done in such a manner that would critically unravel the anomalies of Decree 43 of 1988.
To get a head start with the discourse, we need to move ahead and beyond the centralisation and decentralisation debate and focus on a series of critical operational questions that enable the FCSC, for example, to articulate the framework for implementing the current strategic plan. These questions speak to how the centralisation and decentralisation can feature within the context of constitutional powers of the CSCs: (a) How extensive should decentralisation of HR function be? (b) Which HR functions should be established with service-wide standards? (c) What HR functions should be delegated to individual line ministries to perform? (d) What should the role of the CSCs be in a decentralised system, however extensive or limited? These questions serve a formidable function in helping the federal and state CSCs to construct a serious framework of administrative praxis. That is to say, it is with questions like this that the discourse can be contextualised within the administrative context of the Nigerian state and its civil service system. The questions enable the federal and state CSCs to mediate the strong points of the provision of the Constitution and the constitutional powers granted to the CSCs.
This pedagogical reflection is meant to keep us abreast of the singular challenge of fully and efficiently implementing the strategic plan that puts the FCSC in a capability readiness position to chart a path that enables it to reform the human resource dynamics as a first step towards situating itself within the transformation of the ethos, professionalism and operations of the civil service vocation. The key point is that taking over the full constitutional powers to centralise the HR functions of the CSCs would be an administrative and institutional mistake. It would fly in the face of global practices, and would only be repeating the errors that many states across the world are running from. More than this, the Renewed Hope Agenda is too critical for this administration for the CSCs not to take some fundamental cues from administrative discourse.
Prof. Olaopa, the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, writes from Abuja
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