Two separate trending recruitment scandals illustrate vividly how pervasive corruption and manipulation have corroded the public service. While the Senate is embroiled in a storm over the sharing of illegal employment allotment slots in federal agencies, the Inspector-General of Police and the Police Service Commission are fighting dirty in public over the recruitment of 10,000 new cops. Like the country itself, the public service is broken and increasingly dysfunctional. President Muhammadu Buhari should deliver on his promise of change by stamping out gross malpractices in public service hiring processes.
The drama playing out in public is sordid indeed. At the Senate, the committee on federal character has vowed to probe and expose lawmakers and officials trading in allocation and sale of job slots in federal agencies as well as secret recruitment. This is bad enough, but pales in comparison to what is happening at the premier law enforcement agency, the Nigeria Police. A programme to recruit 10,000 fresh officers there has become enmeshed in scandal, featuring alleged flagrant violation of the rules, nepotism, secrecy and sectionalism. Thrown overboard are federal character principles, merit and due process.
Senators are reportedly spoiling for a confrontation over the distribution of job slots allegedly awarded by some federal agencies and allegedly cornered by the chamber’s principal officers. The scam is compounded by secrecy in recruiting and by the sale of job positions by civil servants that Danjuma La’ah, chairman of the committee, has vowed to probe. Among agencies to be probed are the Federal Inland Revenue Service, the NDLEA, National Space Research and Development Agency, National Open University. Ironically, caught in the nefarious web also is the Federal Character Commission, that is empowered by the constitution and enabling law to check these very malpractices, ensure even spread of jobs at the federal and state levels, equal opportunities to all qualified Nigerians and ensure adherence to the laid down processes. The bitter fight between the IGP and the PSC has drawn in the Attorney-General of the Federation and the courts.
Truly, this reflects the failure of institutions in the country and explains why service delivery is miserable, poverty reigns and development is so elusive. The rot is systemic: our army of unemployed youths – 55.4 per cent of the total – are constantly short-changed, denied a level playingfield by appointed and elected officials to compete for the few openings. Whereas the rules prescribe advertisement, tests and/or interviews to select candidates, callous officials brazenly break the rules. Disdaining advertisement, they secretly recruit, allot slots to themselves to bring in their children, wards, girlfriends and other relatives. Those who do not have connections stand no chance.
It reaches right to the top such as when the FIRS, Central Bank of Nigeria and the NNPC were exposed in 2017 to have allotted spaces to the country’s most senior political office holders. Civil servants, in concert with syndicates, are also alleged to sell positions for as much as N1.5 million per person, according to La’ah. Senators and other lawmakers believe they are entitled to slots “for our constituents” as revealed by Oluremi Tinubu, who, at the Senate ministerial screening, openly complained to nominee, Babatunde Fashola, of being denied slots for her Lagos Central senatorial district in his first term as minister: “So when you get there this time” she warned, “just remember senators here…I want you to put it in your agenda that we all (senators) need slots for our constituents.”
This is not all: the Ministry of Finance discovered in 2017 that 183 federal agencies carried out illegal recruitments of 13,780 workers, 6,917 without the statutory approval from the office of the Head of Service and 2,314 engaged by seven universities without the approval of their governing councils and without regard to stipulated process. Buhari should step in and stop the nonsense that alienates the youth and makes them desperate to relocate abroad at all costs for opportunities, navigating the hazardous trans-Saharan and Mediterranean Sea passage. An in-house enquiry also revealed how syndicates, under a fraudulent, unofficial “replacement” policy, would replace a retiring director on N300,000 per month with six persons on N50,000 each per month without approval.
Buhari should enforce the rules and hold the HoS and heads of the MDAs responsible to pursue only merit-based recruitment. The federal character principle has been so badly abused and the FCC should be shaken up and made to implement their mandate as spelt out in sections 14 and 153 of the 1999 Constitution and by the FCC Act 1996 that, incidentally, also extends its mandate to the states and empowers it to intervene in the MDAs violating the equity principle.
Nigeria should log on to global best practices to build a public service that can deliver development. This has enabled countries like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and Finland to claim the top five positions in the International Civil Service Effectiveness Index and deliver excellent living standards for their people. Singapore’s, described by the United Nations as “one of the most efficient and least corrupt,” recruits through a rigorous and transparent process of advertising openings, short-listing tests and interviews in a meritocracy. The United States’ two-tiered recruitment system features the majority “competitive service” open to all qualified candidates under a competitive, merit-based transparent system, and “excepted service” where special skills are required such as in the intelligence agencies. The common thread is merit and openness and deployment of IT systems that reduce unnecessary human contact and, thus, influence-peddling.
The Federal Civil Service Commission needs urgent reforms to reposition it to attract the best as part of a total overhaul and drastic paring of the oversized and inefficient bureaucracy. Abuses that are also rampant in the security services, should be stamped out and perpetrators flushed out and prosecuted where crimes have been committed. The Senate should pursue the issue to a logical conclusion and lawmakers should concentrate on making laws and conducting oversight; they should stop blackmailing the MDAs for job slots while ministers and heads of agencies should stoutly resist illegal requests.
