FG'S ATTEMPT TO REPOSITION CIVIL SERVICE LED TO ITS FAILURE - ANYAOKU

By Princewill Ekwujuru
Attempt by the Federal Government to reposition the country's bureaucracy has been described as total failure and responsible for the downright destruction of the Nigerian Civil Service (NCS).

This was the statement of Chief Emeka Anyaoku, former Commonwealth Secretary- General at the Distinguished Management Lecture organised by the Nigerian Institute of Management (NIM), a prelude to the celebration of its 50th anniversary in a topic tagged;Nigeria at 50: The challenges of Nationhood. Anyaoku said that the Nigerian civil service became less efficient than it was at independence and up till 1975 when the military regime began the distortion and destruction of the civil service through mass retrenchment.

*From left: Emeka Anyaoku, Former Commonwealth Secretary-General/Guest speaker at the Nigerian Institute of Management (NIM) Lecture in commemoration of its 50th anniversary, Dr. Sally Bolujoko, President, NIM and Chief. Michael Olawale -Cole, Deputy President of NIM at the lecture in Lagos.

His words: 'Since then, successive military regimes have lamentably tinkered with the Nigerian civil service in ways that have completely destroyed its efficiency and even lowered its credibility.'

Continuing, he said, 'the civil service has been foisted with many reforms, most of which were largely ill-thought out. In fact, at the recently held preparatory workshop on the introduction of performance contract in the Nigerian Civil Service to stem the phenomenon of abandoned projects, all those in attendance were unanimous in their verdict that all the thirteen reforms the Federal Government had initiated to reposition the country's bureaucracy, yielded nothing but failure if not the downright destruction of the civil service.

He went on to say that the net effect of the destruction of such strategic governance institution as the civil service, has adversely affected both the country's capacity to conduct credible elections and Nigerians' capacity to support healthy politics.

Nigerian politics is still not politics of issues. 'Our elections are still too expensive, and this puts them outside the reach of many good and honest politicians,' he noted.