Unending public service recruitment scandals – TheNigerialawyer

Culled from Punch Editorial Board

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.