The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has urged Nigerian public servants to draw lessons from the life and legacy of Frank Caprio, the American judge celebrated globally for his compassion and integrity, who recently passed away.
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In a tribute on Saturday, Olaopa said Caprio redefined what it means to be a public servant, and his example challenges Nigeria’s civil service to rethink its role in governance and service delivery.
According to him, part of the fundamental predicament of the Nigerian state is its inability to provide the mechanisms that enable service delivery to citizens as part of the government’s dividends of democratic governance. This failure, he said, is due to the dysfunctional state of public services and, largely, to the poor image of public officials who are the very embodiment of what government looks like.
He said: “All over the world, the public servant is the person the public sees. She is the person who interfaces between the state and the citizens. She is the embodiment of the government’s social contract with the people.
“The citizens do not see the abstract ‘state’; they see only the concrete civil servants who manage security, law enforcement, electricity, water, education, highways, healthcare, and other infrastructures on behalf of the government. The citizens saw Judge Frank Caprio. They see the Nigerian policeman at countless roadblocks, or the Nigerian customs officials at the Seme Border, or medical personnel who are more religious than humane, or the high court judge who is more materialistic than justice demands.”
According to Olaopa, “The public service is a vocation that calls on any aspirant to public office to serve the public. The public spirit that drives the public servant ensures that she is not so preoccupied with the technical details of her responsibilities as to miss the human concerns and circumstances of those to whom the service is rendered.”
The institutional reform of the civil service system in Nigeria, according to Olaopa, is founded on the political will to articulate an administrative vision that enables stakeholders to build a new generation of public managers with the right spirit, sensibility, ethical code, technical know-how, and patriotic zeal.
“We need the likes of Judge Frank Caprio to restore the soul of public administration as the basis for bringing democratic governance alive,” he added.
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