The tenure policy suspension, matters arising and the way forward

I feel a sense of duty to my nation to speak out in respect of the recently announced suspension of the Tenure Policy, for three main reasons:
• first, as someone like many others in the teeming population of the supporters of President Muhammadu Buhari, who, judging from their antecedents, people expect should be in a position to offer explanations in defence of certain actions of the administration that they feel uncomfortable to relate with;
• second, in realisation of the fact that I was the desk officer that midwifed the processes that culminated in the Tenure Policy, in my capacity as the pioneer Director General and Permanent Secretary of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms from 2004-2007 and, therefore, probably the one with the most comprehensive information on the subject; and
• thirdly, as an active member of the Council of Retired Federal Permanent Secretaries (CORFEPS) with the motto “continuing patriotic service” and, on the Executive of which I am the current National Publicity Secretary.

Conflicting Signals on the Policy Thrust of the Public Service
Since the circular issued by the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, to convey the suspension of the Tenure policy by the President, came to public attention two weeks ago, the one question that many people have been asking many of my colleagues in retirement and me is: What is the Policy Thrust of the Buhari Administration with respect to the Public Service? Unfortunately, being outside the administration and armed with only our passion, commitment and patriotism to our country as our drive as members of the Council of Retired Federal Permanent Secretaries, under the leadership of distinguished retired civil servants like Chief Philip Asiodu and Mrs. Francesca Emanuel, it is becoming increasingly difficult to explain or offer defences for some of the actions coming out from the bureaucracy in recent times.

By way of example, I wish to cite three actions that relate to the issue at hand:In November last year, 18-20 Permanent Secretaries were retired in one fell swoop. No one could say for sure if the action was the fallout from their assessment in terms of inefficiency, incompetence, disloyalty or corruption? The explanation in some quarters that it was to remove those who were senior to the newly appointed acting Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HCSF) was circumspect as it did not fully explain the situation, since some of those retained were senior to her. Because there was no official reason given for their removal, the public was allowed to run away with various speculations, notable among which was corruption, even when the post-service freedom of movement and expression at the disposal of most of them does not give credence to such speculation.

Then, in February this year, there was the purported “Extension of Service” granted to the Perm Sec Petroleum Resources who clocked 60 years of age earlier that month. The civil service and its labour unions became agitated and people like me tried to calm the situation by explaining it in favour of Government, using the principles/guidelines of the Tenure Policy. In particular, my intervention was obvious in an interview by The Guardian Newspaper, which was reported in its Sunday, March 27, 2016 edition (pages 20 & 21). The reportage stated, among others:

• that because the Perm Sec position is a political appointment, tenure and not 60 years of age is the instrument for determining when the officer should exit the service; and, arising from this,that for the officer in question, who was appointed and first deployed as Perm Sec only in early 2013, her 4-year tenure was not due to lapse until early 2017.

Now, barely 4 months later, the Tenure Policy has been suspended and a lot of people are seeking to confirm if the earlier action of the approval of extension of service, after 60 years of age, can be sustained. Judging from the tone of the circular conveying suspension of the policy, “President Muhammadu Buhari has directed the suspension of the tenure policy with immediate effect and all concerned are to comply accordingly”, the impression of many stakeholders is that the President must have overridden the advice of the principal office holders responsible for the subject matter.

Incidentally, that impression is not without strong basis, considering that the current leadership of the civil service, Permanent Secretaries and the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HCSF), are all beneficiaries and products of the Tenure Policy. For example, the HCSF was a Deputy Director when the policy was instituted in 2009; therefore, she is believed to be in support of the policy.

The inference from the decision of the President is that her brief, I expect there was one, and any similar briefs from other relevant principal office holders like the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) were not strong enough to convince the President.

At the personal level, conscious of my antecedents as the pioneer Director General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms and the publication on the Tenure Policy in my latest book Restoring Good Governance in Nigeria, Volume 2: Leadership & Political Will, the media, since the suspension was announced, has relentlessly put me under pressure to comment on the issue. So far, I could only speculate that “the suspension is to enable Government carry out a thorough review of the Policy”! How I wished that my speculation can be confirmed by those who have the official authority to speak on the issue. Unfortunately, nothing has come to light so far from either the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (OHCSF) or the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF), to explain the rationale for this latest decision.

It is imperative that public servants are able to see consistency in the actions of Government and be convinced that those actions are channeled towards a discernable policy direction for the Public Service; otherwise, there is the risk of further whittling down the energy of the very few civil servants that are trying to hold aloft the already weakened service.

The premise of classifying permanent secretary as a political office within the bureaucracy
Under the presidential system of government that we now practice, the power to appoint and remove permanent secretaries are vested in the President. In addition, the remunerations of Perm Secs are as prescribed, not by the National Salaries and Wages Commission, but by the Revenue Mobilization, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) and are classified under political office holders.

Accordingly, upon retirement every Perm Sec qualifies for severance allowance like other political office holders. The retirement stipulations of 60 years of age and 35 years of service are instruments of career appointments and these are for the grade levels under the control of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC). Permanent secretaries are not under the control of the FCSC but the President, which makes their appointment political. The instrument for determining how long a political appointee stays in a post is “tenure”, or “at the pleasure of the President”.

How the tenure policy came about and a glimpse into its positive impact on the public service system
How the tenure policy came about and a critical analysis of its implementation has been copiously documented in Restoring Good Governance in Nigeria, Volume 2: Leadership & Political Will, pages 67-144. For brevity, the salient points are as follows:The idea that metamorphosed into the Tenure Policy did not start with Stephen Oronsaye as HCSF or Yar’Adua as President. It started 5 years earlier in 2004, in response to what was observed as the main problem of the service, as stated in my 2005 publication where I said, “As a former university teacher, I can spot talents and potentials and I make bold to say that they abound in the civil service, except that in many cases they are tucked away in obscure deployments where they reel under the yoke of uninspiring Directors…..The million dollar question then is: what is it in the mainstream civil service that kills initiatives and frustrates talents? This is the main challenge before the Bureau of Public Service Reforms and we are determined to fish and remove it from the service so that initiatives can blossom and talents can flourish to enable the service to truly stand out to work for the people.”

The data collected from the OHCSF, the 2004 nominal roll of officers on GL 08- 17, were subjected to various analyses. Hitherto, the general opinion, based on an earlier study was that the service was composed of “aged workforce”; but there was no characterisation of this aged population of the service.

Our analyses revealed that Assistant and Deputy Directors were, indeed, retiring ahead of their superior officers on GL 17 and Perm Sec grades on account of age! It was a crisis of succession with grave consequences for all the human resources management processes of the federal service. We found many instances where Assistant and Deputy Directors who had just undergone overseas training on issues relating to their next grade of advancement were retiring barely 2 months after the courses.

By the normal career progression requirement of 3 years for maturity into next grade for GL 08-14 and 4 years for GL 14-17, it would take an officer who obtains his/her promotion as when due 27 years to attain GL 17; and since the length (limit for years) of service allowed under the Public Service Rules is 35 years, that leaves only 8 years as the maximum number of years that an officer can spend after attaining GL17.

For most officers, since the average age at which they can enter the service after graduation from university with bachelor’s degree and having completed the NYSC scheme is 25 years, the age of attaining GL 17 after 27 years of service would be around their 52nd birthday, which means that both their 8-year tenure on GL 17 and 35 years of service would co-terminate with their 60 years of age. In other words, the premise for the 8 years stipulated for tenure is also supported by the natural age of officers.

However, the analyses revealed otherwise as there were numerous cases of people staying on as Perm Secs for up to 15-16 years as well as Directors with potentials to spend 27 years on the grade, having been on the grade for 14 years, and who, at the point the policy was introduced, were not due to clock 60 years of age for another 13 years!

The problem arose because of the abuse of Decree 43 of 1988 which delegated the powers of appointment and promotion of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) to MDAs, resulting in situations where certain officers were promoted from GL 10 or 12 to GL 17 overnight; and others with barely 5-7 years post-NYSC experience were given direct appointment as Director on GL 17. Because these officers were not leaving the service, there were no consequential vacancies to take care of effective and hardworking officers who were due for promotion.

Upon the abrogation of Decree 43 of 1988 and the restoration of the full powers of the FCSC, not only was the commission unable to correct the anomalies, it became a facilitator of the floodgate of transfers from States’ civil services and defunct agencies, as well as direct appointments of politically-connected officers from failed banks and failed private businesses, who had come into the system through the window of appointment as Special Assistants and were left in the system at the expiration of the tenure of their principals.

These highly connected officers were at the center of the racket of what, in the book, Restoring Good Governance in Nigeria (RGGN), was referred to as “bizarre” regularization and “bazaar” proper placement, through which the FCSC was literarily awarding seniority of up to 10 years to certain officers to give them underserved advantage over their colleagues. The problem was so propagated that it resulted in wide-spread loss of morale and frustration within the mainstream civil service.

The Tenure Policy was therefore introduced to reverse the trend and it did, to a large extent, because in its first year of implementation, the consequential vacancies which in the previous years hovered around 15-20 rose to over 100 vacancies for GL 17 and about 10 vacancies on the grade of Perm Secs.

Incidentally, the States of the federation which had the largest number of directors affected by the 8-year rule still ended up with larger numbers of retained Directors, in some cases as many as the total number of Directors of four states combined. The ‘disadvantaged officers’ who, hitherto, had lost hope of ever becoming permanent secretaries, but whose States of origin were the same as those of Perm Secs who had been in post in excess of 8 years, were able to attain that height.

The policy opened the door for the restoration of honour to certain career management processes, as officers who had previously approached the FCSC for “proper placement” in order to get underserved seniority advantage over their colleagues saw the futility of their actions and had to withdraw their applications; while many others who had earlier secured such benefits had to appeal for reversal.

For the first time in many years, the mainstream civil service witnessed some degree of sanity in its human resources management processes of regularisation and placement. Hope was restored and morale began gradually to be restored.

Tenure Policy has Implementation Shortcoming
Obviously, there are issues with the tenure policy that need to be addressed. My book: “Restoring Good Governance in Nigeria” (RGGN) articulated a number of the implementation shortcomings of the policy, in both its content and application, under successive heads of the civil service. These include:
• the error of ascribing the same number of years to the tenure of Director and Perm Sec;
• the error of treating a GL 17 professional grade “Director” who is not a head of Department in the same way as a regular Director/head of Department; and
• the error of placing Permanent Secretaries on 4 year renewable tenure and holding them accountable to the retirement conditions of 60 years of age/35 years of service.

That successive heads of the civil service have continued, since 2010, to operate the tenure policy in the manner that has perpetuated these shortcomings raises doubt about a thorough understanding of the policy by the civil service leadership.

I have spoken about this gap in the understanding of the policy a number of times, and called for a workshop to enable the civil service articulate proper guidelines for its implementation. The call was not heeded. The furor generated by the purported “extension of service” of the Perm Sec Petroleum Resources last February arose from this lack of understanding.

Adegoroye,PhD, OON, is a retired pioneer Director General/Permanent Secretary of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR) and the current National Publicity Secretary of the Council of Retired Federal Permanent Secretaries (CORFEPS).