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Olaopa Lists Lessons from Judge Frank Caprio for Nigerian Public Servants

Olaopa Lists Lessons from Judge Frank Caprio for Nigerian Public Servants

The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has listed some lessons Nigerian public servants could learn from the life of Frank Caprio, the American judge who recently died.

In a tribute on Saturday to Caprio whose public service has been widely praised, Olaopa said that the American judge challenged the very understanding of who a public servant should be, especially in Nigeria.

To Olaopa, part of the fundamental predicament of the Nigerian state is her inability to provide the mechanism that enables service delivery to the citizens as part of the government’s dividends of democratic governance.

According to him, this failure is due not just to the dysfunctional state of the public services, but also largely to the bad image of the public servants and officials who are the very embodiment of what government looks like.

He said: “To ask the question of who a public or civil servant is, is therefore to get the very heart of the essence of the institutional reform of the public service in Nigeria. It is to unravel what makes the public service a service. All over the world, the public servant is the person the public sees. She is the person that interfaces 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 that manage security, law enforcement, electricity, water, education, highway, 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 custom officials at the Seme Border. Or the medical personnel who is more religious than humane. Or the high court judge who is more materialistic than justice demands.”

Consequently, to Olaopa, public service is denoted essentially by a sense of public spiritedness. To him , this simply means “that anyone coming into the public service must be aware that it is more than a job or a means of earning a living. It is a spiritual calling. The best analogy is to draw on the calling of the Levites in the Bible. When God called the Levites, it was a call that specifically demanded that they be separated from every other endeavor. And to forego any claim to whatsoever inheritances the other tribes of Israel were entitled to. It was a call to serve God. The public service is a vocation that calls on any aspirant to public office to serve the public. Serve the public. Service is a mode of selflessness. It asks the public servant to draw spiritual fulfilment from the dedication and commitment to rendering service to others. The public spirit that pushes the public servant ensures that she is not so preoccupied with the technical details of his/her responsibilities as to miss the human concerns and circumstances of those the service is rendered to.”

Noting that public spiritedness demands that the public servants must embrace the virtue of deferred gratification in the place of primitive accumulation, Olaopa said: “You do not serve the public to become obscenely wealthy. Indeed, public spiritedness insists that the public servant and officials must be held within a framework of personal and public accountability that requires that the official must be held responsible for her duties to the public.

“Public spiritedness demands more. It relentlessly pushes the public servant to reflect a professional competence that enables an effective and efficient service to the public. Professionalism in service enables the public servant to perform her duties with efficient optimality. It is this set of professional competences and skills that enable the pubic servant to manage scarce resources and achieve an equitable redistribution in ways that connotes fairness.”

He stated further that “Professionalism demands a code of ethical conduct—accountability, public spirit, responsibility, probity, transparency, neutrality, etc.—that defines who the public servant is and the limit of what she can do. This is the lesson that Judge Frank Caprio leaves behind as a significant part of his legacy to the world. He has become an exemplar, in the league of Jesus Christ, Muhammed, Mother Theresa, Queen Amina, Gautama Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Stella Adadevoh, and many others who took the public seriously enough to give their all, even their lives.”

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 to lead the transformation of a system that is meant to make the lives of Nigerians worth living.

“We need the like 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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The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has listed some lessons Nigerian public servants could learn from the life of Frank Caprio, the American judge
The post Olaopa Lists Lessons from Judge Frank Caprio for Nigerian Public Servants appeared first on THISDAYLIVE.