It is outrageous to learn that the bulk of the senior Directors calling the shots in the Civil Service of the Federal Government are dunces. A recent examination for the promotion of Directors to Permanent Secretaries produced mass failures.

The Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Dr. Folashade Yemi-Esan, last week, revealed that out of the 85 candidates who sat for the exam, only 20 passed, leaving 65 failures. Another fact revealed was that four other directors failed to sit for the exam. The candidates were required to score 50 per cent to scale through to the oral interview stage.

This shocking story is yet another indicator that the machinery that governs Nigeria is in a state of failure. How did these individuals get into the system? How did they manage to gain promotions to the coveted level of directorship? Does it mean that assessment exams are not conducted to determine who deserves promotion up to directorship level? If so, what then are the criteria for promotion or demotion?

The answers to these questions are obvious. Many of these so-called Directors came into the Service through political patronage, corrupt connections and job racketeering. When a person gains a coveted position through such corrupt means, they are not in the Service to serve or strive for achievement. They are there to help themselves to the booties of high office.

This is why policy implementation fails in Nigeria. The people employed by the state to drive policy implementation have neither the qualification and competence nor the patriotic motivation to do so. Well-crafted policies are allowed to gather dust in the shelves while the funds allocated for them end up in the private pockets of crooked civil servants.

Imagine directors refusing to attend promotion exams! It is also possible that many of those who failed the exams deliberately did so, possibly to hold on to their current posts because of their “lucrative” nature. Some of them probably do not want to be promoted, bearing in mind that permanent secretaryships are tenured terminal points of service careers.

We saw what happened in the Judiciary some years ago, when the President of the Court of Appeal then, Justice Ayo Salami, not only rejected the intention of the National Judicial Council, NJC, to promote him to the Supreme Court but also sued his employers. This was because he had become powerful politically, and did not want to “go up”.

We hope there are adequate sanctions in the Civil Service rule book to deal with exam failure. Directors who fail exams should lose their positions to more qualified and competent replacements. If the Directors will simply return to their coveted seats after failing promotion exams, then it means that there is no motivation for service excellence.

That is unacceptable.

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