There is a quiet deadline approaching in the Nigerian public service, and it does not appear in any budget or medium-term framework. By 2030, the last officers who were trained by the men and women of the independence generation will have taken their bows. The civil servant who joined in 1965 has been gone for decades; what remained until recently was the generation he mentored, and they too are now retiring on the thirty-five-year rule. What will be left is memory at one remove: stories told in canteens and at send-off parties about how things were once done. Stories are precious, but they are not a system.
I say this as someone who has sat on both sides of the desk. As a Commissioner for Finance in Benue State, I watched files move, and I watched them stall, and I learnt that the difference was rarely the rulebook. It was whether the officer handling the file had ever been shown, by someone who cared, what the rulebook was for. As an academic at the African University of Science and Technology, I now teach graduates who will fill those desks, and I am struck by how little the public service does to receive them.
The 2030 reality check
Every institution runs on two kinds of knowledge. The first is written: the Public Service Rules, the Financial Regulations, the circulars. The second is tacit: knowing which minute to write, how to protect a permanent secretary from a bad decision without embarrassing a minister, when a memo should go up and when it should wait. The second kind is not in any manual. It passes from hand to hand, and only if someone is deliberately handing it on.
For most of our history we relied on that informal transfer and it more or less worked, because the service was small enough and stable enough for apprenticeship to happen by accident. That world has gone. Recruitment now arrives in waves, often politically timed; postings are frequent; and the senior officers who might have mentored a new entrant are themselves overstretched. Where mentoring happens, it happens by luck. A service that depends on luck for the reproduction of its own values is not a service; it is a lottery.
The consequence is what I have elsewhere called the permanent state losing its permanence. The bureaucracy survives every change of government, but it survives increasingly as a structure rather than as a culture. Officers know the procedure; fewer know the purpose. When the purpose goes, procedure becomes ritual, and ritual is easily bent.
The case for structured onboarding
Consider how a new graduate enters a well-run bank. Before touching a customer’s account, that graduate spends months in a structured programme: the values of the institution, its systems, its ethics, supervised rotations, examinations, a final assessment on which confirmation depends. The bank does this not out of generosity but because it understands that an untrained officer is a liability.
Now consider how a new graduate enters a ministry. Typically, a letter of appointment, a posting, a desk, and a hope that someone nearby is both knowledgeable and kind. The induction, where it exists, is a few days of talks. There is no supervised rotation, no assessment of understanding, no moment at which the service says: you are now one of us, and this is what that means.
I propose that no one should be confirmed in the Nigerian public service without completing a mandatory graduate trainee programme of at least twelve months, of a rigour comparable to the best private-sector schemes. Its curriculum should rest on four pillars: public service values and ethics, taught through real cases rather than homilies; systems thinking and policy implementation, so that a young officer understands how a budget line becomes a borehole and where it usually fails to; practical administration and citizen-centred service delivery, including time actually spent at a service window; and leadership and professional conduct, because the officer of 2030 will be the director of 2050.
Open the pipeline earlier
Onboarding begins too late if the first time a young Nigerian sees the inside of a ministry is on the day of appointment. Students of Political Science, Public Policy and Public Administration graduate in their thousands each year having studied the state entirely from outside it. The universities and the public service share responsibility for this. I would like to see structured internships, credit-bearing and supervised, that place students inside real institutions for a full semester. Let them sit in a budget call meeting. Let them watch a procurement committee. Let them draft a memo and have it returned with corrections. Some will discover that public service is their vocation; others will discover that it is not. Both discoveries are valuable, and both are cheaper made at twenty than at thirty-five.
Public service as a profession
Underlying all of this is a shift in how we think about the service itself. We speak of it as employment; we should speak of it as a profession, with everything that word implies: selective entry, structured formation, continuing development, a performance culture and a code of conduct that is enforced. Talent management in the public service cannot mean promotion by seniority alone. It must mean deliberate decisions about whom we recruit, how we form them, how we develop them and how we hold them to account. Values, skills and attitudes are not inherited; they are inculcated, or they are lost.
We already know how to do this
The encouraging news is that Nigeria does not need to invent this from nothing. The Aig-Imoukhuede Public Leaders Programme has shown that a values-driven, competitively selected, intensively taught programme can produce public leaders who think differently about their work. The Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation has, through the Mandatory Training Programme for newly appointed chief executives, the Leadership Enhancement and Development Programme, and the Structured Mandatory Assessment-Based Training Programme, demonstrated that structured, assessed training changes performance. These are proofs of concept.
What they have in common is that they aim at the top and the middle. The gap is at the bottom, where the future of the service is decided. The design principles are already there: mandatory participation, a clear curriculum, assessment with consequences, and linkage to career progression. Adapt them downward. Scale them to entry level. Make the first year of a public servant’s career the most formative year of it, rather than the most neglected.
Urgent, and achievable
None of this requires a constitutional amendment or a new agency. It requires a directive from the Head of Service, a curriculum drawn up with the universities, partnership with the institutions that have already shown the way, and a modest appropriation defended with the seriousness we reserve for capital projects. The public service is the one capital asset every government inherits and every government passes on. We would not hand over a dam without maintenance. We should not hand over a bureaucracy without formation.
By 2030, the stories will be all that remain. The question is whether we will have built the system to carry what the stories were trying to tell us.
By Omadachi Oklobia, PhD, Former Commissioner of Finance, Benue State and Resident Faculty, African University of Science and Technology
