allAfrica.com: Nigeria: A Ministry for the Niger Delta? (Page 1 of 2)

PRESIDENT Umar Yar'Adua resumed this week after his "hejira" to Jeddah with some dramatic changes in his government.

The first order of business was the removal of Mr. Babagana Kingibe as the powerful Secretary to the Federal Government. Yar'Adua has appointed Ahmed Yayale, from the Ministry of Defence where he was recently minister, to replace him.

Mr. Yayale comes with years of bureaucratic experience, having served in the past as head of the Federal Civil Service.

A few Nigerians would recall that there was such a time when the Secretary to the Federal Government was also the Head of Service. But in one of his numerous tweaking of the civil service, General Ibrahim Babangida, separated the offices, and made the head of service an autonomous office.

I personally think the old system was by far more efficient. It made for a more organic, more coherent, more purposive service if the chief secretary - that is the secretary of state as he was once called - was also the head of the permanent secretaries.

I watched the civil service of my father's generation gradually give way to the decay and implosion that currently characterises the Nigerian public service. From the time of the Notitia Dignitatum, to the current era, state bureaucracies have remained the fundamental organisation for the effective administration of any state.

That branch of government always constitutes the organic, intellectual, and administrative arm of the public sector, whose mission has also been to provide the framework for the permanent bureaucracy of state.

Typically in the UK, whose service provides the traditional frame for the Nigerian civil service, the civil service is remunerated from the civil list. Nigerian civil service is in many ways a chip off the block of the old colonial service.

There was such a time when the "mandarins" of the Nigerian service, those so-called "super permanent secretaries" held the fate of the state. They were products of a highly self-aware service; a bureaucracy which saw itself as entwined with the progress of the state, and which admitted the best that the nation produced in its finest hour. There is, to date in societies that still take themselves very seriously, a highly selective civil bureaucracy.

The civil service is indeed typically, highly selective. It recruits its staff strictly on merit after a very competitive civil service examination. For instance, the civil service still competes with industry elsewhere to recruit the best candidates coming out of the universities.

Frequently, the civil service raids industry to recruit, and the point is simple: the state requires a highly select body of administrators to provide the brain thrust of the public service delivery system. The Nigerian service, at some point, could claim such a mission too.

From 1957, when that first group of Nigerian university-trained young men were recruited directly to the administrative service, the Nigerian civil service tried to establish a tradition whose aim was to transform post-colonial Nigeria into the black power house. Many of us grew up hearing about the potential of Nigeria as "the black super power."

A number of setbacks and reforms has since made that dream unrealistic. Nigerians no longer in fact, dream or care about being a "black super power," they have been reduced simply to the most pragmatic of aspirations: a little meal on the table, a little security, a few hours of light everyday, possibly at night, enough to put on the fan to lull them to the restless sleep of a hot Lagos night, and a little security. In the past, the greatest insecurity to the Nigerian was "Wetin You Carry?" and the

"Highway Robber." Today, it is the kidnapper, the militant, and the PDP. Anyway, the Nigerian civil service, like all the institutions created to make Nigeria a nation of great dreamers, went into coma together with the dream.

One of the greatest problems with the Nigerian civil service, in any case, is the reduction of the value of the public sector as the primary institution for the delivery of social services. Since the era of privatization and the rise of the private sector as the new domain of economic wisdom and profit, the public service has become more or less an oxymoron, if not an anachronism.

That is why Umar Yar'Adua's recent changes seem completely at odds with the general direction and purpose of his government, his party, and their aims. The recent expansion of the bureaucracy of the Federal Government continues to raise questions about the direction of this government.

The most surprising and possibly most controversial of the changes announced by the president this week is the creation of the Ministry for the Niger-Delta. I would have been quite satisfied if I thought that a creation of the ministry dedicated to the Niger-Delta would solve the problems, or that the expansion of the Federal Government from 26 ministries to 28 manned by 42 ministers, would bring succour to "ordinary" Nigerians.

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