The Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission ( FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has proffered a path to attaining viable mentorship in the civil service.

Olaopa spoke
at the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (OHCSF) Sensitization on Mentoring Market Place held in Abuja on Thursday.

He said that the event was yet another “significant component of the FCSSIP25 reform blueprint that signposts talent management, leadership pipelining and capacity development as reform imperatives.”

While noting the value of mentoring in any profession, Olaopa acknowledged that the process had taken place in some measure in the civil service in the past.

Noting the necessity of recalibrating mentorship, Olaopa, however, lamented that the profession of public administration and the civil service lose so much by letting the legacy of the administrative wisdom of vintage bureaucrats fritter away as they retire over the years.

He wondered whether the civil service had ever systematically built and managed a database of the vanishing skills of outstanding officers and mentors while they were still in service and to be leveraged when required from time to time.

Decrying the dearth of frameworks for mentorship in the civil service, Olaopa asked: “Where for example is the institutionalised mentorship-rooted learning infrastructure in the federal service that enables handholding, performance consulting and skills transfer between officers across grade levels and cadres beyond those that are merely incidental? What for example is our policy as an administrative system for the preservation of MDAs’ institutional knowledge resources and expertise with the breakdown of our traditional system of manpower forecasting and succession planning as we know it?”

For Olaopa, however, mentorship must not always be top-down. Consequently, he urged the adoption of a reverse mentoring which could narrow the skills gaps between tech-savvy young civil servants and their old seniors by the former teaching the latter how they could navigate the intricacies of artificial intelligence (AI) for policy work and public administration.

He also urged the adoption of a framework that would encourage public private partnerships (PPPs) to deepen staff exchange with the private sector and non-state institutions to accelerate skills acquisition as touching on the building of commercial skills, and the imperative need to mainstream good corporate governance principles into public governance codes.

” It will therefore be worth our while to target seasoned professionals beyond the public sector and in the Diaspora, through strategic networking, as profiled administrative leaders-potential and
take advantage of mentors who are capable of opening doors of new professional circles, key stakeholders, and all, for enhanced policy intelligence and problem-solving”, he said.

He lauded the
ongoing human resource audit authorised by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, without which, he said , a window to revisit the recruitment embargo may never have been available for many more years .

“Happily, the HR audit is going to enable us to undertake deep-seated workforce skills inventory and gap analysis, so we will be in a position to determine the service capacity deficits in time-series.If, however, this well-thought-through mentorship scheme will be game changing, then, we will need to implement deep-seated changes in our career management system. This suggests that we must restore personalised career development plans for profiled officers being pipelined for administrative leadership in time and space”, he added.

Paying tribute to the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Mrs Esther Didi Walson-Jack, Olaopa said that she had brought positive changes to the civil service. He said that he had worked with many senior people in the civil service but that Walson-Jack was exceptional.He paid tribute to her collegiality and her quest to resolve areas of conflict with the FCSC.

Stressing the importance of mentoring, Walson-Jack said that while it was not compulsory, it was imperative for those who desire to improve themselves, develop new competences, and grow to a better level. According to her, she herself has many mentors in areas such as career, marriage and spiritual life.

Reflecting on the legacies she is bequeathing as her career comes to an end, she said that there was no greater reward than leaving an organisation better than one met it, adding that the strength of a nation is tied to that of the civil service.