Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has called for a reform of the Nigerian Civil Service.
Gatekeepers News reports that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has called for a reform of the Nigerian Civil Service, noting that it will help the service achieve more.
Osinbajo made the call at the Presidential Villa when he received a brief on the Federal Civil Service Strategy & Implementation Plan 2021-2025.
The Implementation Plan was presented by the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Dr Folashade Yemi-Esan.
The meeting is a Presidential Level Briefing of the reform process of the Federal Civil Service which has been on since 2017.
The reform is being led by the Steering and Implementation Committees with membership drawn from the public and private sectors as well as engagement of development partners.
Osinbajo while speaking after listening to Yemi-Esan’s presentation and subsequent contributions by ministers and other participants at the meeting, said for the first time in a long time, serious attention is being paid to the various issues in the civil service.
”I think that we should really do something that is bold, big and that will really make the difference in order to address some of the issues especially that of accommodation for civil servants.
“We can do much more with mass housing. We have a target now of 300,000 houses under our ESP social housing scheme. CBN has allocated N200 billion, but we have seen that we can provide mass housing, and we can make civil servants beneficiaries of the scheme.
“Though the housing scheme is very modest, it is the sort of thing that we can at least do, to begin to take into account, the fact that everybody who worked for the civil service deserves to live in their own home. There must be a strategy for giving everybody a place to live in.
“it is a vital part of what we are trying to do”, noting that “we must address it. A civil servant ought to be able to own a home and justify to his family the reason why he went for the job”.Osinbajo said
Osinbajo also related his experience while serving as Attorney General in Lagos State, he said that like what was done with the reform of the Lagos State Judiciary, fixing the welfare of federal civil servants would be key to addressing challenges associated with productivity and corruption.
The Head of the Civil Service of the Federation also presented a report on the implementation status of the Federal Civil Service Strategy Plan 2017-2021.
Earlier in her presentation, Dr Yemi-Esan identified staff welfare particularly, remuneration and housing as areas that require better focus and urgent intervention by the Federal Government.
She appealed for improved support, particularly in funding the implementation of successive strategy and implementation plans to overhaul the service for better productivity.
She added that the current reform in the Federal Civil Service has enabled the government to save huge sums through the verification of personnel payroll and digitization of some operations, among others.
