Alhaji Hamidu Kadi-Kuta was appointed Head of
Service, Niger State about three months ago. He
was Chief of Protocol during the immediate past
administration. He also served as Permanent
Secretary in some ministries.
In this interview, the Head of Service bares his
mind on his appointment, challenges and his
vision for the state civil service.
Recently, you were appointed as the Head of
Service in Niger State, how did you receive the
appointment? Did you envisage it?
To be honest, I didn’t expect it. You may not rate
me among the super ambitious individuals. I went
through the service and put in my best. Anywhere
I found myself, I did my best and I never looked
beyond my nose in terms of progression.
I leave that
to God and
those who
see me
perform. I
never
imagined
that I will
become the
Head of
Service one
day. For the
Permanent
Secretary
position,I
may have
prayed and I
got it. That I
was sure,
but Head of Service, I never ever thought of it and I
will tell you why. In Niger State until now, that
position, you don’t even know how to place it.
Is it a regular career civil service routine post or
was it a political position. If you look back, you
will see the office as political as far as I am
concerned, so when my name was announced as
the new Head of Service, I was lost because up till
the last minute when my name was called, I was
not sure.
How many years to go in the civil service?
I still have 4-5 years to go.
How have you been coping with the new office?
I see the position as an enhanced position to
perform better with almost the same routine I have
been used to. It is almost the same job a
Permanent Secretary will be doing and I have been
doing this because I have been there before. I was
in that office for nearly five years as Permanent
Secretary, Management Service and most of the
things I am handling now were based on the
circular I issued that time.
So I find it easy. One thing with administration is
that if you are dispassionate about it, you are not
personal or emotional, you have no problem.
Everybody will come with his own issue and you
treat it on merit.
My concern is the long standing inactivity of the
civil service.
Despite the huge resources invested in the system,
we are far away from where we are going. Not one
third of the population of the civil service actually
appreciates or understands the concept of the
3:2020 project of the Chief Servant aimed at
placing the state as the third best economy in the
country by the year 2020. Even some of the
Permanent Secretaries don’t have that flair for the
future.
So all the training we are doing is to now bring
them out of the pit because we are getting too far
behind compared to other states. In terms of
qualifications, I see a lot coming in. I have seen so
much training going on but the implementation or
application for the overall interest of the system is
what is lacking.
Are you insinuating that those certificates are fake
or not legally acquired?
I don’t think so because the schools, the
institutions have been sensitized. The system has
a way of rejecting fake certificates and I will tell
you how we do it. Before you leave for training,
there are processes you have to follow. We have a
policy and you go within that training policy, i.e.,
training manual.
Once you are in school, you identify with the
Department of Establishment that you are o
training and the course you are going for has been
identified already and the institution you are going
is also understood and so you cannot then come
back with a certificate either before you end the
course because, after the course, you are to defend
what you have acquired and we also find out
whether your certificates is genuine or not.
We are not talking about the certificate here but the
productivity of civil servants after attending
courses because it is being said that some of the
top civil servants cannot even raise a simple
*MEMO.
That is what I was saying earlier that one third of
the civil servants don’t understand the import of
the entire thing. That is the truth and, worse still,
the directorate cadre, as we have it now, should be
the driver of the civil service, but I can assure you
that we still have a long way to go with the top
cadre. Indeed, we have a lot of work to do.
After coming back from those courses, are civil
servants subjected to examinations to qualify them
for promotion and those who don’t live up to
expectation, you do away with them or is there any
law in the pipeline to flush out those who cannot
make it?
Civil Service laws are already there. You cannot
attempt an examination more than three times on
the same position and remain in service.
Until this administration, promotions were
supposed to be mass.
Whether there is vacancy or you are qualified to be
there, people just fill the gap, but now, it is not so.
You cannot just move en-mass because, one,
there must be vacancy and you must have
qualified and you must satisfy the conditions laid
down for the next grade. We also introduced
retreat which is to sit for lectures, sit for
examination and pass or fail; if you pass, you are
elevated, if you fail, you are demoted to your
previous grade.
This actually costs money especially to conduct
promotion exams for all cadres; so what we are
planning for now is in-house retreat for the
promotion of those concerned and the state Civil
Service Commission is capable of doing this
beautifully.
How do you differentiate politics from civil service
because there are a lot of politicians still serving?
That’s right, but, you see, politicians come from
two directions.
We have civil servants who opt to serve at political
level and they are allowed by the rule of the game.
One can easily go in, serve politically and come
back. The only thing is that you must apply to be
absent on leave for the period of serving. The law
allows it even to carry party cards but the only
thing is that you cannot contest without retiring or
resigning from your post.
What is the numerical strength of the civil servants
now and what is the exact requirement of the
state?
The numerical strength of civil servants in the state
now is put at thirty thousand but the ultimate
number of the civil service is determinable by the
quality of the population and not by fiat. If you give
me the option, I will say it shouldn’t be like that.
Let us see, first, how are they, where do they
belong and how qualified are they?
We are not going for number but quality of service.
For instance now, we have up to 40-50% that we
can say are round pegs in round holes and this is
not good enough.
And the state government cannot weed out the
unproductive civil servants?
We can weed. Why not but the implications are
vast. If you weed, what will they be doing in the
community? It will then amount to robbing Peter
and paying Paul. As far as I am concerned in this
state, there is no any other source of employment
except the civil service.
Though government is not a welfare organization,
it spends more money on paying salaries and
other allowances than the development of the
state. What is helping us out is the good initiative
of the Chief Servant, Dr. Mua’zu Babangida Aliyu,
in the introduction of Public Partnership Project
(PPP).
Another problem we are facing is that people just
don’t want to leave the service. There are people
known to have changed their dates of employment
and other relevant information in the past simply
because they don’t want to leave and they go on
changing every time.
Some even carry the CVs of their children looking
for job in the same system. You know I have been
there and I know what I am talking about. They
don’t want to leave and they are asking
government to take their children again. They
should leave the positions for their children to take
over.
One of the problems confronting most of these
workers and why they don’t want to leave is the
world of unknown especially how to get their
pension and their gratuity after disengaging.
I don’t think so. In 2007 when the Chief Servant
came in, that time coincided with the new pension
scheme; so in Niger State, we are already 4-5years
into that implementation. This is the first time in
Niger that government dedicates fund every month
for the payment of pension and gratuity. I can also
assure you that 60% of civil servants in this state
are on the new pension scheme.
Only 20% that will soon retire are on the old
scheme, so I don’t think it is the fear. What is the
fear is that most of the civil servants don’t have an
idea of what to do after service, i.e., post
retirement programmes. Most of them don’t think
of anything. In fact, most of them see their final
package, i.e., gratuity as what to expend on what
they want to do which is risky.
It is really suicidal because no matter what they
give you when you retire and you have no plans
while in service, you are finished. You don’t have
the skill to do business, you don’t have the
acumen, you have the society to take care of, you
have politics playing around you because another
temptation is that the moment a civil servant gets
out there, some of them go into politics and the
money is gone, and the civil servant will be lost.
Are you then planning to organize a pre-retirement
seminar for your people to get them prepared?
That is what we are doing now. That is the new
style because since the assumption of office of the
Chief Servant, Dr. Babangida Aliyu, he has always
emphasized the need to renew our curriculum in
schools to introduce skill and technology. ‘Go
there and be self-reliant; when you finish school,
you don’t need to come out and be looking for
government jobs’, but it is only those who have
between 10-15years to serve that can pick up that
kind of skill, those who have less than 2years to
go, what would they do?
The work force now is about 40% of those to retire
in the next five years. We should also remember
that in the past administrations, there had not been
employment until when the present administration
took over. The Chief Servant when he took over
looked at some critical service areas and he has
allowed it. In other words, what we are dealing
mostly with in the civil service are old and retiring
public officers who have lost interest in the civil
service and who don’t have any skill at all and who
you cannot sell the idea to. These are some of the
challenges we are facing in post-retirement life.
Ghost workers have always been a problem at
local, state and even federal levels; what is the
situation like in the state?
That is another challenge which I can also refer to
as a disaster and it all goes down to that life
outside there. What do I do when I get out there
and so let me acquire and acquire by all means?;
so ghost workers exist, but serious efforts have
been made to flush a lot of them out of service.
In fact, as I speak with you, about four thousand
have been identified and flushed out. However, we
have realized that we have to review the style of
flushing out. We go out and tell them to present
their credentials to prove that they are civil
servants, but still, some of them don’t come
thereby making it difficult to identify and catch
them. We discovered in the exercise that one
person has four to five different accounts collecting
money from government. These are people
supposed to undergo serious punishments. They
will not only lose their jobs, they will also be
prosecuted.
About how may many have been caught in that
category.
Oh! Plenty. Why I cannot tell you the figure is
because the firm handling the exercise is still on
and I don’t want to pre-empt their report because
they are almost finishing. Meanwhile, those caught
are already listed and we know who they are. The
first step is to deny them access to funds; they
don’t even know what is happening to them now
and they are going round lobbying and begging.

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/09/niger-dead-draw-salaries-ssg/