This
period is surely a very emotional one for me. I am exiting a profession that
has defined my life and my sustained focus for the last 27 years. The civil
service is an institution that I shied away from joining at a very tender age
when my blood was still boiling and my youthful energy was still very exuberant
for a more concrete job to make ends meet. If, as I was coming out of the
university, I had been told I would celebrate a silver jubilee in the civil
service, I would have laughed such a terrible proposition to scorn. But it is
the civil service that ended up taking my whole life, my youthful and aged
energies, my intellectual focus and my consistent cogitations.
I truly came to love this very institution
that stands at the very heart of the Nigerian predicament as both a problem and
a solution, simultaneously. I came to generate a very intimate knowledge of its
operations and processes; its problems and complexities; its projections and
possibilities; and the very people—the representation of Nigeria’s
diversity—that makes the institution a resilient one since its inauguration in
1954. This is the institution I am exiting 27 years after I first reluctantly
entered its complex corridors in 1988 as a rooky Principal Research Officer.
I know I have come a very long way in
un-adulterous and undiluted service. Once I became convinced enough to step
into an institution that was far from what I dreamed of becoming, I never
looked back. I channelled all my energies, physical and intellectual, into
understanding and reforming the system. I saw it quite very early that Nigeria
would not be able to move forward or make any appreciable progress in national
development and national integration until and unless it calibrates a coherent
and sustainable reform philosophy that will be grounded on institutional
rehabilitation and reconstruction. I saw it quite immediately that, quite contrary
to the reigning perception that government work is a sinecure, I had signed on
for a profession that would not permit any other side attractions. The Nigerian
civil service is a jealous partner that demands unstinting attention.
Exit is always a problem. It is a huge
problem for me. Malcolm Muggeridge understands my agony very well: ‘Few men of
action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.’ For me,
there is no grace leaving an institution you have come to love; a system you want
to willingly give your life for.
If I am asked, it is definitely not the time
for me to go. I doubt that I have served this Fatherland enough; I doubt that I
have achieved what I set out to achieve. And certainly not at this time of
imminent change that President Muhammadu Buhari is methodically putting in
place in all areas of the Nigerian institutional life. This is a season of
reminiscences for me—remembrance of pains and struggles, conceptual agonies and
practical difficulties. It is a period to come to term with my institutional
mortality. I have had no illusion of being an institutional messiah; the only
person gifted with the knowledge of reform. I am just another critical player
in a dynamic institution that has bred countless others—Simeon Adebo, Allison
Ayida, Sule Katagum, Jerome Udoji, Phillips Asiodu, Ahmed Joda, etc. And like
all players, the music must one day come to end, and the hall would become
empty.
In the play, 'As You Like It', Shakespeare captures the inexorable
trajectory of exit:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
I definitely had my entrance into this
noble and ennobling profession. Now, it is time to exit. I guess I have gone
the full ‘seven-age’ circle of my ‘acts’ as a civil servant. Now is the time to
allow others connect the vision and the action, and move the Nigerian Civil
Service beyond the imaginable.
I received hundreds of calls from all over
when the retirement notice came in; hundreds of calls showing concerns,
puzzlement, encouragement and prayers. And I assured everyone that I am still
around.
Exit, for me, is not disappearance or abandonment. George Grossmith,
the British entertainer and writer, once remarked: ‘I left the room with silent
dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.’ I may have left the civil service, but
my foot is still caught in the dynamics of reform and institutional
reconstruction.
I am a full-fledged Nigerian who, like other well-intentioned
citizens, is very much interested in the direction the nation is headed, and
what can be done to redirect its national path. I have been very much involved
in the intricate institutional dynamics of helping to make the civil service an
efficient and effective world class institution that delivers the goods of
democratic dividends to Nigerians. I have been involved at several high-powered
meetings, conferences, study groups, experts working groups and delegations at
national, continental and global levels, that attempted to hammer policies
together to inject infrastructural strength into the Nigerian society.
I have
been involved in many intellectual fora and seminars where the civil service
system in Nigeria was the critical concern. I have written 11 major books and
dozens of essays and delivered series of lectures on what went wrong and what
could be done to arrest the dysfunction. I am involved. And so it is to be
expected that in spite of professional exit, my foot would still be caught in
the mat. If I am no longer a critical insider, I owe all my colleagues still in
the system and still struggling to bring the institution into the light of global
recognition the duty of remaining a critical outsider.
Right from its founding in 1954, the civil
service system in Nigeria has remained an interesting, challenging and
confounding institution. In spite of its many challenges from independence till
date, the system has remained tenacious and strong. It weathered the Nigerian
Civil War, doggedly withstood the abuse of the military’s insensitive command
structure, and is still standing in spite of the many debilitating dysfunction,
politicisation and corruption that tear its fabric apart. This is one
institution you really love to hate, but you have to acknowledge its potentials
and possibilities.
The challenge for me now is that of how to
continue the business of reform from outside the critical space afforded by an
inside perspective on the civil service system. But then, operating from
outside the space has its own advantages. For one, it affords an outsider’s
perspective with its own objective assessment of what is wrong, what can be
done and how it can be done. Most often, what institutional complacency has
blinded an insider from seeing becomes perceptible to the critical outsider. In
this regard, I consider myself most fortunate for the opportunity to act in
both capacities.
Now, I set out to lay down a personal,
historical and institutional analysis of my critical connection to the Nigerian
civil service, my intellectual agitations over its reform, my frustrations
concerning why reforms keep failing and my optimism about an imminent
reconstruction of the system. Reform is an unceasing institutional quest for
betterment; and for me, I am entering into another phase of my unceasing
engagement with the Nigerian civil service.
_________________________________________________
by Tunji Olaopa (Retired Federal Permanent Secretary)
via Today.ng
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