Repositioning public service through professionalised HRM - Punch Newspapers

In a rapidly changing world that is becoming as complex as it is interesting, public administration and the public service have been confronted with the fundamental challenge of not just keeping up with the interesting developments, especially in technology and workplace dynamics. They are also tasked with preempting unforeseen challenges arising from functioning in a world of acute polycrisis. Worldwide, public service systems are in constant modernisation, continually pursuing structural and institutional reforms in the workplace and its human resource function. This is especially the case because of the charge of performance and productivity that determines the utility and optimal relevance of the system. A country depends on the public service and its workplace capacity readiness to deliver on its mandate of performance and productivity. This translates into the capacity of the public service system to enhance the developmental capability of the state through achieving, among other things, democratic service delivery to the citizens. Institutional reform, given these complex dynamics, is, therefore, a significant endeavour that requires collaborative networks of individual, governmental, nongovernmental and nonstate actors and agencies. Over the years, the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management has defined itself as an organisation intentionally committed to the many ramifications of engaging with institutional reform in the public sector and its public administration system in Nigeria. This is one critical reason why every edition of its international conference remains a significant event within the larger space of administrative and governance reforms in Nigeria. The 58th conference runs under the theme “Repositioning for Value and Impact”. When we connect with the theme of the 57th 2025 conference—Reimagining the New World of Work,” we see a professional body which, through deliberate curation of its annual conference themes, demonstrates a steadfast commitment to anchoring vital discourses, driving contemporary trends in management practice, and addressing the paradigm shifts and emergent trends that are shaping the trajectory of the HR profession in time and space. It, therefore, becomes quite easy to see how the CIPM becomes a very critical institutional reform partner with the Federal Civil Service Commission – and by extension the Federal civil service – in the trenches of revitalizing the public service workplace in Nigeria. Since the inauguration of the 10th Commission in December 2023, the FCSC has been running with the objective spelt out clearly by the President: to “competently facilitate the transformation, reorientation and digitization 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.” This objective is not only founded on the constitutional mandate of the FCSC, it also recognise the commission’s role as the gatekeeping mechanism for transforming the professional status of the federal civil service. The commission, therefore, in driving the agenda of professionalising its secretariat to transform into an expert HR hub in the Nigerian civil service, and in at once deepening its gatekeeping role, we see great value in the evolving strategic partnership with CIPM and other development partners in the institutional reform business. The public service was indeed inherited as a value-based institution that was dedicated to the implementation of the policy designs of the government towards the end of good governance. Unfortunately, however, and as one of the migrated structures in Nigeria, the public service system arrived in Nigeria without its value basis, stricto sensu. In other words, Nigeria (and many other African states) inherited the system as a bare structural edifice that was not deconstructed in terms of its core values and the extent to which this connects to a democratic ethos that the citizens need to enjoy the good life. It was therefore very easy for the public service to become acutely bureaucratic and therefore debilitated. The presence of what I have called bureau-pathological features—over-bloated workspace, generalist orientation, disarticulated pay and compensation incentive structure, breakdown of the internal control mechanism, weakened public values and its associated codes of ethics, the system’s accountability framework inclusive, low technology penetration, etc.—immensely contributed to how the civil service eventually degenerated into a bureaucratic paradigm that serves the statist character of the Nigerian state. In other words, this bureaucratic paradigm not only strengthens the civil service’s power relative to other institutions, but also compromises its neutrality, anonymity, impartiality, and accountability by using it as a means of political intervention in the economy and society. Restoring the value orientation of the public service, therefore, becomes a significant reform initiative that is connected with the overall task of modernising its structures, processes and procedures. Improving operations requires making them faster through flexible approaches to budgeting, management, accounting and service delivery. In this sense, public management becomes a strategic framework for getting work done. Such a strategic framework is therefore founded on the management of a dynamic workforce to make the public service what it ought to be. To reposition the civil service, therefore, involves moving the public service workplace and its HR functions towards a more professionalised and strategic HRM framework oriented to the vision of restoring competency-based HR functions and management. Since the HR function is cogent in achieving performance and productivity, there is no doubt that the professionalisation of the HR functions is fundamental to transforming the workplace.See more Punch stories on Google.Add Punch on Google However, the core public manager-professionals need to know that, to do this, human resource management can no longer be restricted to the exclusive responsibility of HR departments. Line managers and other managerial executives now require people management skills and competence to facilitate effectiveness and efficiency. This also relocates the HR function from the back office to the front office within the framework of strategic partnership with management. And rethinking the HR function implies a significant level of reform. For instance, at a basic level, it is no longer productive to treat HR in terms of personnel management, and its preoccupation with the passive role of privileging rules, regulations and procedures rather than developing and pursuing policies in manners that extract performance results and productivity bargains from people and from the processes. This automatically affects the current practice of staff performance evaluation and appraisal, which is very vague about what is being assessed and rewarded, or even how appraisal should be directed towards performance assessment and competences, rather than as a mere subjective protocol. Next, to become the ultimate change agents in the reform of the public service, the HR manager is not only expected to facilitate the establishment of a new HR model that will harness performance management system towards the larger objective of installing a new national productivity paradigm, not just in the public sector, but in the national economy. They are also essentially required to deepen the skills and competences with regard to risk management in ways that instigate action research as a component of management cum operations research and organisation development in the MDAs. This will also enable HR to institute a learning culture that challenges the bureaucratic status quo and helps it champion specific cultural transformations directed at translating desirable culture and public service values into public managers’ behaviour. All the above considerations have significant implications for the understanding of the workplace and its HR dynamics. What I consider the most urgent workplace consideration, in the face of the daunting flux of transformations in the nature of work, is what we can call the people issue. This is the issue of how persons and personnel remain the focus of whatever reforms, changes and adjustments information, data, knowledge and technologies are forcing on the reconstitution and reimagining of the civil service system, the nature of the work and the workplace. The other dimension of this people-issue is how the public service workplace is regenerated—through the challenges enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic—to mainstream into its operations, technologies and new managerial procedures and processes that shift the paradigms in terms of redefining citizens’ engagement by placing the citizens-as-customers at the centre of service delivery designs and its value-chain. This is a development that many advanced economies have already integrated into their public sector optimal functions and now take for granted. Rethinking the civil service workplace as a value-driven and optimally impactful site requires focusing the change management dynamics towards answering several questions: What are the key actions needed to ensure a better match between HR requirements and available employees? FULL LIST: 20 African countries to vote for 2026 Ballon d’Or Nigeria seek bounce-back at Chess Olympiad Nigeria must measure social security impact – Institute How can we ensure that the department has highly skilled employees in the future in order to address changing needs? How can the FCSC and partners like the CIPM work with line ministries/ agencies to attract employees with the right competences for deployment to critical areas in the department? What is required to create the right professional environment that could help breed a new generation of public managers with the professionalism and confidence to demand and deliver excellent services? How can the oversupply of employees in certain areas of the department be redirected to address other areas with shortages? If training and retraining the oversupply is not an option, how can these employees be phased out? How can under-representation of designated groups/cadre of ethnic groups be addressed professionally (in view of Federal Character), with due regard given to merit? How can the productivity of current employees be consistently improved, monitored and evaluated as a basis for interventions? These key questions could serve as the instigator for modelling distinct strategic reform action framework broken into reform stages that could transform the HR functions of the civil service system. The first stage will align with the ongoing Personnel Audit and Skills Gap Analysis project, which provides an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen the manpower requirements of the federal civil service and address the imperative need to reevaluate and upgrade service-wide job roles. This personnel audit would, however, be consolidated by the establishment of a centralized human resource information database that is similar to the current Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System for monitoring workforce recruitment and maintenance (against the scourge of ghost workers, fake employment, abuse of FCSC delegated powers by MDAs, for instance). The second stage is driven by the imperative to identify competency frameworks that will form the basis for professionalising the HR function in the workplace. This comes from proactively designing and executing merit-based recruitment exercises through, for example, the deployment of digital instruments and procedures. The third stage corresponds to the operationalisation of the performance management system that, for instance, works with key performance indicators rather than the generic annual performance review, while critically transforming the compensation package to draw a critical mass of talented workforce with scarce skills that are badly required to recalibrate the organizational IQ of the service. The PASGA project also enables this by revealing skills and competence gaps in the HR dynamic, which will drive meritocratic recruitment efforts. The critical expertise of organisations like the CIPM becomes crucial in the final stage, which demands establishing a cadre of HR professionals mandated to work with a public value charter that guides the measurement and evaluation of performance and productivity. It becomes clear that the CIM conference and its theme of value-driven institutional impact speak strongly to the direction global administrative and HR practices are headed in the twenty-first century. It also significantly positions the CIPM itself as a foresighted organization that stands shoulder to shoulder with the FCSC in delineating critical reform direction, change management and structural action frameworks that the civil service system requires as a matter of urgency in transforming the civil service into a world-class institution for achieving formidable democratic governance in Nigeria. Being a speech delivered by Prof. Olaopa, Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, at the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria’s 58th International Conference in Abuja on September 21, 2026 Kindly share this story:

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