In some African nations, the lack of working public institutions has made sustaining public sector effectiveness and enhancing the morale of public servants during economic crises an overwhelming task for many leaders. Faced with competing demands for resources, some of these governments must often perform a delicate balancing act in allocating resources among various sectors.
“To mitigate and overcome bias against management, the trained civil servants should understand that corporate decisions are made collectively and communicated timely and clearly to the right persons and through the right channels.”
The problem that arises in choosing whether to fund infrastructure and other visible deliverables or allocate resources to public service training is well known to budget managers in government. But the centrality of public sector workers in the implementation of government policies and programmes is never in doubt. Some Nigerians have also recognised that civil servants must receive the required training, exposure, and skills upgrade to operate at peak level.
Therefore, any leader that believes leadership transformation lies at the heart of broader public sector transformation will focus on offering programmes that build the capacity of civil servants and other public sector officials, at all costs.
It should be of note that improving the Nigerian civil service on a regular basis is why the Civil Service Transformation Department was established to provide strategic leadership on all initiatives related to civil service reforms. Its primary objectives include ensuring service-wide innovation and cultural awareness through effective change management and leveraging technology to enhance efficiency and effectiveness across the civil service. Although the specific date of its creation is not explicitly stated, it operates as a department under the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (OHCSF) and plays a pivotal role in implementing reform initiatives outlined in the Federal Civil Service Strategy and Implementation Plan 2021–2025 (FCSSIP25).
To transform Nigeria’s civil service, focus should be on a multi-pronged approach: enhance training and capacity building, promote meritocracy and transparency, embrace technological advancements, and foster a culture of accountability and ethics.
This can be further broken down to adopting retraining programmes that afford high-potential Nigerian public servants an opportunity to strengthen the skills they need to build cultures of excellence, effectiveness and integrity throughout the institutions they lead, which becomes imperative. The retraining programmes should aim to broaden participants’ public leadership skills and provide them with conceptual and practical tools needed to meet the challenges of leading in the public service in an increasingly complex and changing world.
It would be amazing how these ideas and initiatives developed from what they learnt would create so much impact in the various departments where they work. For example, participants in a retraining problem-solving project would be able to define the problem(s) in their workplace, the initiative or intervention expected to address the problems, steps taken to tackle the challenges and the expected results.
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Often, poor internal/external communication is a major problem in the public service, a challenge most civil servants are familiar with. A civil servant that attends a course on effective communication skills should be able to design measures to address systemic weakness in internal communication in his/her department. This can be achieved by creating a shared online corporate activity calendar; distribution of post-event communiqués to staff; biannual staff pulse checks to obtain feedback, etc. To mitigate and overcome bias against management, the trained civil servants should understand that corporate decisions are made collectively and communicated timely and clearly to the right persons and through the right channels.
Also, to improve the technical competencies of a team, conducting a capacity needs assessment of members and further training opportunities are essential, especially when collaboration is stressed. This, according to experts, will make the civil service competitive and the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) be encouraged. This, they believe, will improve and increase the good work ethics of public servants through extrinsic and intrinsic motivation – the application of both external and internal reward systems of motivation. When the civil servants realise that their promotion is hinged on not their years in service but on their contribution to the overall welfare of the service and their work ethics, there will be an intentional shift in mindset to improve on deliverables at all times – the KPIs can talk. The effective use of the KPIs will help monitor procedures to accurately assess every unit’s overall performance.
On the part of the government, there should be an increase in funding for public services, ensuring efficient resource allocation. Above all, investing in and seeing to the training and retraining and capacity building of public servants as an essential tool to galvanising the daily workflow will help build the individual, preparing and making them viable even at retirement.
So far, we believe these recommendations will enhance problem-solving skills and job satisfaction and improve self-esteem. Our expectation is that with consistent implementation over time, a critical mass of public service champions would emerge to drive the change we all desire.
