By Obi Nwakanma
Philip Chukwuedo Asiodu is one of those Nigerians you might rightly call an old civil service mandarin. These were of the cadre known in the Yakubu Gowon administration in Nigeria as “super perm secretaries.” I think the “super”in the Permanent Secretary came from “supernumerary” and it does locate the stature and situation of the office at its highest bar. Philip Asiodu seemed born to that office.
From Kings College in 1954, Asiodu went on to Oxford, on the recommendation of his old principal, who incidentally from the records later was the head of the British Intelligence Services in British West Africa, even as he was principal of Kings. Such were the days. In any case, Asiodu came down from Oxford in 1957, smack in the moment of decolonization. Nigeria was in colonial transition. Bright, young Nigerian graduates for the first time were being recruited in good number into the Administrative Cadre of the civil service, before then, the lone preserve of English colonial administrators.
It was a transition that actually began with Azikiwe’s nationalist agitation in 1946, and the agreements arrived at with Arthur Richards to begin recruiting Africans into the administrative service of the colonial civil service. That was how the first set of old hands were moved from Executive positions to the Administrative services where policies in the service are actually made.
Men like Simeon Adebo in the Railways, Charles Daddy Onyeama, Pius Okigbo, as DO (Development Officer, Aba) and Abdulaziz Attah who worked in the Eastern services on his return also from Oxford in 1948. But the true wave began in 1957, at the beginning of home rule. Young graduates from Ibadan and elsewhere – the likes of Peter Chigbo, Cornelius Adebayo, Christopher Okigbo, Leslie Harriman, Philip Asiodu, Allison Ayida, who came later in 1958 after his Masters at the London School of Economics and so on were brought to the service as Assistant Under Secretaries.
People like Professor Eme Awa had returned with a PhD in Politics from the United States with a brief stint as Assistant Professor in New York State University in 1957, to join as Senior Assistant Under Secretary. It was a star-studded service of young, upwardly mobile young men, and they were catered for, and given great training in the service under the old British administration which had taken its model in the old Chinese Mandarinate designed by Confucius. The typical civil servant was a well-trained professional, but he was above all, an intellectual of varied capabilities.
Asiodu was one such star of the service. He moved from the Foreign Service to the Home Service, and spent a lot of his administrative experience as Permanent Secretary in two critical areas, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Mines and Power, from which Petroleum was carved out. As Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Mines and Power, Asiodu oversaw Nigeria’s Energy policy in the crucial industrializing phase of the postcolony that executed the Second National Economic Development Plan, and he was also Chairman of the Board of what was then known as the Nigerian National Oil Corporation (NNOC) which later gave birth to the NNPC.
Asiodu comes to policy issues therefore with a lot of cache; a boatload of experience and insight. He is a fine theorist and practitioner of the craft of public administration, and we can say this without much guilt or doubt. It is therefore always important to listen to him carefully and closely when he talks about the loss of institutional memory in the Nigerian service.
It was with such care that I read Asiodu’s exasperation at what has become the Nigerian civil service and Nigeria’s policy environment. Let me say, of myself, that having never worked in the civil Service, except for a brief stint as Training Development Officer in charge of Students Industrial Work Experience at the Industrial Training Fund, during National Service, I come to policy issues basically from close interest and close study of various administrative models rather than from any significant direct experience in the service. It seems to me that in situating the decline of the public service, Mr. Asiodu basically exculpates himself and the Civil Service of which he was part until 1975. I think that he does not fully account for the rot in the service, because that rot had started to emerge before the purges of 1975.
True, it was far more under control; true there were greater disciplinary processes, oversights, and accounting models that limited the corruption the civil service, we need to emphasize that the Nigerian Civil war destroyed the Nigerian Public Service. Experienced and capable men left the service for Enugu, and second rate people were quickly recruited and promoted to take their places. The messy postwar events under Gowon exacerbate the decay of the institutional processes; those who returned from the East after the war, in the triumphalist mood of the Federal side either humiliated them out of the service or failed entirely to absorb them and secure their experiences.
A great example is the case of Godwin Onyegbula, who had been Permanent Secretary in the Foreign Service, and served in the same position for Biafra. Men like Onyegbula, with their wealth of experience were let go at the end of the war. Those who were absorbed lost their places, and felt uncertain about their tenure. The loss of institutional memory began thence. I think Mr. Asiodu must acknowledge these facts. But the point he makes nonetheless is clear and points to a terrible crisis: Nigeria’s Public Service is in dire straits, and there is urgent need for reform, from the Foreign Service to the Home Services.
The quality of people recruited into the service in the last twenty-five years at least does not reflect a civil service whose survival and effectiveness must be based on merit. I look around, of my generation of Nigerians, the crassest went to the civil service. Such a service cannot pretend to be the “thinking arm”of government, particularly because governments no longer think.
The government of Nigeria acts on primitive impulse. It has neither a programmatic basis nor a clear raison d’etre. Mr. Asiodu is equally spot on the fact that no government can govern on the current model of the service with many special assistants and a highly politicized service not based on merit and selection. It used to be in the past, that the Civil service and the Universities took first choice of the graduates from the Universities; these days, the best Nigerians are taken first by industry.
Whatever is left either goes to the Civil Service or to the streets. This is a recipe for disaster and underdevelopment. The Babangida reforms basically turned the Nigerian Civil Service into little political fiefdoms. This must be rethought. It is time for the Federal Government to streamline the administrative structure of government service, under a maximum of ten ministries; reform the administrative service, and return it to its place as the engine of government policy and development agenda. Nigeria once certainly had a proud civil service which was destroyed by an interplay of forces, starting from 1967.
Nigeria will need to start the recruitment of the best and brightest, and in due course, restore institutional memory; what is basically called “the tradition” of the service encoded into its strictest operational rules or what it used to call the “General Orders.” Luckily men like Asiodu are still around to help guide that process. It is about time that government invites them into a room for a necessary debriefing. That time ticks too, for soon many of them will also disappear forever into history; and all that memory would be lost.
