How Tinubu administration could better optimise civil service post-2027

IN its first four years in office, the Tinubu administration rode on the back of the Renewed Hope Agenda and the urgency of achieving a $1trn economy by 2030 to articulate and push energetically a series of macroeconomic policies and projects—from the removal of fuel subsidy and the new tax laws to the foreign exchange floating and security interventions—that are meant to reflect the capacity of democratic governance to affect the quality of life of millions of Nigerians. When put together and within the larger picture of governance reforms in Nigeria’s sixty years of national development, no one can fairly dismiss the depth and breadth of these governance efforts of the Tinubu government. They cumulatively aggregate lots of possibilities that will take time to take root and transform the well-being of Nigerians.

Unfortunately, however, more is required if the defining developmental efforts of the first four years of the administration must translate into a deepening of the people-centred amelioration of governance that redirects policies into directions that millions of Nigerians can tangibly feel as dividends. In other words, the Tinubu administration needs to pivot from the macro-level economic and governance foundation of the first four years into more intensive operational housekeeping at the level of the public service. This will ensure that the administration’s best governance and developmental policy efforts are brought closer to home for millions of Nigerians than the statistics of economic and developmental progress that seem too far from the daily existential experiences of Nigerians.

The federal civil service is perhaps one of the administration’s most strategic partners in getting it closer to the people who are yearning for it to do more in times of promising, life-changing and far-reaching policies. For any experiment in democratic governance to succeed today, the public service has become an indispensable, strategic and indeed inevitable partner that must be the focus of an energetic change management initiative if the next four years of the Tinubu administration must be truly and positively eventful. To make the 2027–2031 administrative cycle really defining for Nigerians, the Tinubu administration needs to bring the federal civil service to the forefront of the Renewed Hope Agenda in terms of its complementary function in a democracy. Clearly, civil service institutional strengthening is not significantly on the radar of any strategic national consideration at the moment and perhaps advisedly so (see Premium Times, 16 April 2025). I had addressed this concern in an earlier contribution titled “Why the Nigerian Government Pays Lip Service to Civil Service Reforms”. If it were not so, the FGN would have been quick to take advantage of the implementation of the Oronsaye Report in addressing the institutional redundancy-induced cost-of-governance problematic, for example. Implementing the report is, however, not as straightforward as it is presented, as it is fraught with many landmines and complications that could distract a focused government. For a government struggling to do so much within its limiting four-year tenure, balancing the long-term gestation period it takes to get the impact of systemic and structural institutional reforms with the short-term four-year tenure it has calls for deep circumspection, strategic intelligence and judgement. Two, institutional reforms, especially the rationalisation and rightsising of MDAs, which come with extensive pain due to deep and expensive psychological pain and trauma that will attend them, added to the impact of subsidy removal and forex deregulation, can be very confounding. And any government will think twice before pursuing that kind of tricky and potentially messy change path. There are, however, much more manageable institutional reforms that stand tall as critical success factors post-2027.

There is a two-pronged fundamental starting point for such a change management pathway that puts the civil service at the forefront of the administration’s governance legacy. The first side of it is the urgent need to critically consider positioning as the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HCSF), a reform-minded, knowledgeable, and professional bureaucrat and public manager who is equipped with the twenty-first-century literacies, competences and passion to drive the public service through the change management exercise. The second dimension of the appointment is the imperative need to also reprofile the cohort of permanent secretaries for the task of getting things done, especially through enhanced institutional IQ, problem-solving, reinforced expertise and multidisciplinary capacity for generating policy intelligence. These two-pronged leadership considerations are significant because transforming the federal civil service demands a leadership component that will make the HCSF and permanent secretaries critical change agents who can translate the Tinubu administration’s design into a proactive policy implementation design that reaches the people. In the case of the permanent secretaries, there is the need to rethink the selection and assessment criteria to ensure that those appointed are the directors who embody institutional memory, possess mentoring and coaching competences, and are administratively grounded through several years of capacity development, practical exposure, multitasking and self-development.

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We need to first concede that the federal civil service has been the focus of very important and well-conceived institutional and administrative reforms and reform frameworks. On the one hand, we have the Federal Civil Service Commission Strategic Plan geared towards upholding the constitutional mandate of benchmarking professional excellence and meritocracy in the civil service. On the other hand, there is also the Federal Civil Service Strategy and Implementation Plan (FCSSIP), which is meant to improve service delivery through the implementation of a performance management system that is meant to boost the optimal functionality of the MDAs. However, getting the civil service to become a world-class institution demands more than putting these reform advisories and frameworks in place. It requires channelling them through disciplined reform pathways.

The essence of a change management framework is that it pushes a reform design into a capability review of the MDAs and their need to deliver on their performance improvement plans. In other words, its remit is to ultimately transform the business model by which the MDAs operate in delivering the government’s policies. The change management framework commences with two primary questions: How do MDAs operate and transact their business? What administrative model do they deploy as standard operating procedures? These questions refocus attention on two fundamental pathways for reforming the federal civil service to enable it to backstop the Renewed Hope Agenda, post-2027, which are the following: (a) resetting basic Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and (b) strictly enforcing Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) Performance Improvement Plans.

Focusing on the SOPs implies getting the basics of institutional reforms right. And getting the basics of reform right means putting structures in place to re-engineer the civil service standard operating system. This is foundational to any attempt to get the civil service working. It entails rethinking the structural foundation of the bureaucracy by first de-bureaucratising outdated administrative practices and deepening project management practices. The Tinubu administration has already taken a step in the right direction by ordering the Personnel Audit and Skills Gap Analysis (PASGA) project, which provides an unprecedented opportunity for the strengthening of the manpower requirements of the federal civil service and the imperative need for re-evaluated and upgraded service-wide job roles achieved through a proper alignment that matches skills to job descriptions. Most importantly, the skill and personnel audit enables the government to automatically reduce costs by eliminating ghost workers, and reduce structural overstaffing without implementing any structural changes that any stakeholder might resist.

PASGA is, however, the preliminary move that signals the urgency of professionalising the gatekeeping process. This is a sine qua non for the restoration of a competency-based HRM. In this regard, the FCSC has been at the critical forefront of the need to institutionalise merit-based e-recruitment and computer-based promotions. This is meant to permanently break the cycle of patronage that interferes with and dilutes the operational standards of the civil service. The basic housekeeping, as a corollary, also demands the need to fast-track the professionalisation of the HR and Planning, Research and Statistics functions in the MDAs in terms of deepening policy analysis and enabling policy management cum operations research for evidence-based policymaking. This will be a crucial forerunner to concretising the performance bond that the MDAs have to enter into with the Tinubu administration. This move must be followed with measures directed at getting the public service to achieve more digital penetration and therefore enhanced system efficiency. This implies directing every MDA to transcend paper-based administration by encoding its core workflow into very clear and digitised SOPs. This helps to deepen the bureaucratic efficiency of the MDA by making the citizen or business experience predictable and transparently aligned to timelines and processes regardless of which officer is in charge. A significant dimension of the SOPs requires institutionalising the incentive and consequence management procedures. This is a framework that ensures that merit and efficiency are rewarded while negligence and inefficiency receive swift and predictable administrative consequences and sanctions. A fruitful way of initiating this is to activate the newly approved Incentive and Consequence Management Policy for use in all the MDAs.

Putting the SOPs in place is meant as the basic housekeeping framework that will generate the needed momentum to elevate the MDAs into high-performing administrative units. To implement the MDAs’ performance improvement plans, therefore, the task is for the Tinubu administration to put policies and procedures in place that will significantly boost the institutional IQ of the federal civil service. This way, the administration will be able to hold the leadership of the MDAs accountable for specific policy targets. The challenge is not just to transform the business model of the MDAs. Rather, the Tinubu government needs to significantly determine what level of institutional reform it needs to prioritise in each of the MDAs. In other words, the administration needs to articulate which of the MDAs are most critical in its attempt at making actionable the Renewed Hope Agenda. Once the fundamental MDAs have been identified, then we are concerned with the question of how the prioritised MDAs need to be re-engineered to be able to more effectively and efficiently manage the business of government for optimal performance and productivity.

I have been a fundamental insider in the public service, given my number of years familiarising myself with and researching its administrative dynamics, to be able to hazard some crucial recommendations in this regard. For me, there are three sets of MDAs that would be critical for the Tinubu government and its efforts to prioritise those that can jump-start the national development agenda. The first are those that are required to deliver on national priority programmes and projects, including job and wealth creation. The second set are those MDAs tasked with seeing to the implementation of infrastructural and project-rooted masterplans and blueprints that involve investment possibilities, small- and medium-scale enterprises, rule-based market players, and more. The last set of MDAs are those the government needs for welfare-oriented and social-impact services, as well as for human capital development.

These three sets of MDAs are then those that can be incentivised to gain the reform momentum the Tinubu administration needs for the next administrative cycle. The first order of business for them will be to formulate detailed data-driven performance improvement plans (PIPs) that are designed with specific capacity gaps in mind and with a clear outline of the timelines to fulfil the PIPs. The second leg is that permanent secretaries, their tenure and assessment metrics will be tied to unique key performance indicators. The performance bond signed with them must then be measurable through data-driven performance tracking. The government and the MDAs will also need efficient technical support teams that will be deployed for service-wide capability reviews. This will be required to keep up the administrative and performance energies of MDAs that are flagging.

The Tinubu administration must also keep up the performance orientation and capability of the prioritised MDAs by funding specific and specialised managerial training and capacity development. These managerial training workshops will not be generic. Rather, they will be strategic in ways that yield institutional investments in the form of specifically training civil servants to think and manage like project managers who design, execute and manage complex government policies.

What will sustain the Tinubu administration through the next administrative cycle will be a performance-driven civil service system that needs to be de-incentivised from its bureaucratic culture and be energised—through basic administrative and structural housekeeping—to achieve the objectives of the government. The federal civil service therefore carries the burden of national transformation if it can be reprofiled to pivot democratic governance beyond macroeconomic progress.

•Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.