In 1960s up to the mid-70s, civil service job was seen as a clarion call for any citizen to come and serve his or her father land.
It was an allegiance to dutiful service. Indeed, the earliest civil servants served the people and the nation with their heart and might.
Names like Alison Ayida, Jerome Udoji, Simeon Adebo, Fola Ighodalo and Adeyemo Bero, to mention but few, remind one of top-on-the-shelf civil servants, who have left indelible mark on the sand of civil service history. Even as we speak, these finest public servants have remained legends never to be forgotten for their loyal, sincere and diligent services to their nation.
Today, the story is largely different from that of the sublime and dignified 60s and 70s as the diligence and will to serve selflessly has greatly diminished if not totally disappeared.
Arguably, the diminishing return was traced to the 1975 forcible rough surgery performed by the late General Murtala Muhammed administration in the name of restructuring of the civil service.
Others however pointed to the sweeping restructuring by the General Ibrahim Babangida administration in the 80s, which corollary dislocated the joints of the civil service until today.
Since the said restructuring – be it the first or the second one – the scar from the surgical scalpel has remained un-healed till now.
A ray of hope may have appeared on the horizon for this hitherto revered white-collar job what is currently happening in the civil service of the State of Osun under Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola as governor.
A seed of innovation aimed at repositioning the service for optimum performance was sowed recently in the state and many have expressed strong conviction that it will germinate and bear edible fruits in the not-too-distant future.
Aregbesola’s intention to have a clean break with the past tradition of hand-picking the Head of Service (HOS) significantly goaded him to x-ray, diagnose and provide long-lasting treatment for the ailing service.
When he came to the saddle two years ago, he met a factionalised public service – one overtly split along political party divides-something that ordinarily should be alien to the civil service. A civil servant ought to be neutral and impartial on any subject matter pending government’s attention.
Having carefully studied the situation at hand, in February this year, the governor set up a committee – Public Service Repositioning Committee- to look critically at the whole system with a view to repositioning it.
Aregbesola tasked the 12-man committee headed by Dr. Goke Adegoroye, to help him achieve three things, namely – meritocracy, professionalism and capacity building.
The governor strongly believes that with these three key qualities, the civil service can begin ascent to its former enviable echelon.
The committee thus swung into action with the sole intention of creating a new order that will be a model for other public services – state or federal.
The Adegoroye Committee therefore conducted assessment exercise for all the directors in the civil service of the state. Those who performed very well among them were subsequently invited for open interview for further assessment.
At the end of the day, from over 70 prospective Permanent Secretaries that were assessed, this novel process threw up the best 29, who emerged as Permanent Secretaries across all the ministries. Before, the tradition is for the sitting governor to sit down in his office and hand-pick the permanent secretaries as well as the HOS.
For Ogbeni, that was an undemocratic way of selecting the best out of crowd. For him, this traditional ancient regime has to wither and pave way for democratic experimentations.
Hence, the new HOS would have to also be chosen by the workers themselves and not the governor. This was exactly what happened recently at the Bola Ige House, Government Secretariat, Abere, Osogbo.
The last process was the emergence of the HOS and they were to be selected by their fellow civil servants from Grade Level 14 and above.
All the 29 Permanent Secretaries were allowed to participate in Electoral College for so it appears. The civil servants, for the first time in the history of the state and perhaps that of the country, stood on the threshold of posterity to elect the man they want to lead them.
As usual, in any democratic setting, the election process was a high octane one for it was an open ballot process. The names of the 29 Permanent Secretaries were printed boldly and pinned to a table with ballot boxes in front. The senior civil servants all voted and at the end of the exercise, three candidates emerged with the highest votes.
They were – in descending order – Sunday Olayinka Owoeye (34); Adeyemi Adelowo (26) and Kolawole Adesina (19).
These three names were subsequently forwarded to the governor from which, using his executive discretion, he would select a candidate, who automatically becomes the HOS.
Aregbesola simply heeded the time-honoured Latin maxim – vox populi, vox dei. The people have spoken and so be it.
Mr. Sunday Olayinka Owoeye thus emerged as the State of Osun’s new Head of Service. All these – voting, counting, selection and announcement – took place in matter of hours and not a whole day.
To majority of the civil servant, this is a welcome development as they are now part of decision-making body in the determination of their own destiny.
They all hailed the novel system, describing it as a bottom-up system of appointment rather that the slipshod old top-to-bottom approach.
According to some of the civil servants, the impact of this novel process is that it has capacity for confidence-building and the workers tend to believe and will readily differ to a leader they elected themselves.
Again, this new system will also help a great deal in quick resolution of government-worker’s face-off whenever one arises.
Above all, the civil servants hail the governor as a real democrat and a great leader, who genuinely wants progress and development for the state.
During the swearing-in of the Permanent Secretaries and the HOS, an elated Aregbesola said that in appointing the Head of Service through the electoral college of the Permanent Secretaries, his administration has applied the best possible method that can be obtained from humans.
He openly declared that for the first time in the history of the service, government has introduced merit and professionalism as the basis of career advancement and the new system will remain so he enthused.
He continued: “The candidate not only became Permanent Secretary through merit but was selected by the merits as the best merit possible within the pool of merits.’’
“Of course, this is subject to human error of judgment beyond which we have little control if we have not yet attained divinity….Your appointment is not a call to sycophancy and supine conspiracy. I have no personal agenda and do not intend to cultivate personality cult.”
Indeed, this is a democratic civil service a la Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola that needs to be emulated across the states of the federation.
•Kunle Owolabi is of the Bureau of Communications and Strategy, Office of the Governor of the State of Osun.
