A retired permanent secretary has written to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu urging him to use the impending appointment of a new Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, HCSF, to begin a sweeping overhaul of the federal bureaucracy, which he says has slid into corruption, incompetence and “sloganization.”
In an eight-page open letter dated July 10 and routed through the Chief of Staff to the President, Dr. Goke Adegoroye, pioneer Director-General/Permanent Secretary of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms, described the moment as a “golden opportunity” for the President to reset the federal service.
“It is not too late to fix it,” Adegoroye wrote. “The bureaucracy is where to start.”
A ticking clock at the top
The letter is triggered by two developments in the past two weeks: the announcement of the impending retirement of the current HCSF, Dame Didi Esther Walson-Jack, and the exposé by Adeniyi Adeyemi Mathew. By Adegoroye’s calculation, Walson-Jack must leave office “not later than 12 midnight on 26 August 2026,” giving the President a narrow window to make one of the most consequential bureaucratic appointments of his tenure.
“The last three were rated the lowest”
Citing an internal questionnaire among retired permanent secretaries, Adegoroye delivered a damning assessment of recent HCSF appointees.
“Analysis of the Questionnaire reveals not just a downward trend in leadership effectiveness in the federal civil service over the last two and a half decades, but that the last three holders of the office were rated the lowest by a wide margin,” he wrote.
All three, he noted, were drawn from professional cadres rather than the administrative mainstream — two accountants (2014–2015 and 2015–2019) and a dentist (2019–2024).
“The current trend smacks of a conspiracy of the professionals against the generalists in administration, human resources management and even planning, who are now branded as ‘those who cannot pass’ in the so-called written examinations to become perm sec,” Adegoroye wrote.
He cited April 2026 figures showing the federal permanent secretary cadre included 17 medical doctors, three veterinary doctors and 10 officers from accountancy and procurement backgrounds — deployments he argues have hollowed out administrative competence at the centre of government.
The retired mandarin was especially caustic about what he called the packaging of “management fads” as reform. “In the ensuing sloganization, basic procedures and processes that are the bedrock of civil service administration have been jettisoned,” he wrote, noting pointedly that the civil service leadership “now basks in a euphoria of a federal civil service anthem that, at 4:39 minutes, is four times longer than our national anthem.”
The Adeniyi Adeyemi Mathew exposé
The letter devotes significant space to the Adeniyi Adeyemi Mathew saga, which Adegoroye branded a “national embarrassment.” At its core, he wrote, was the fabrication of an entire government agency “complete with all the paraphernalia of office” — a deception that reportedly escaped detection by the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the Office of the Head of Civil Service and the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation until the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission filed a formal complaint.
Also Read: Federal Civil Service gets eight new permanent secretaries
“What is new in the drama is the dimension of the fabrication of an agency, complete with all the paraphernalia of office. And that is where I am dumbfounded!” Adegoroye wrote.
He said conflicting letters issued by the Permanent Secretary (Political Affairs) and the Permanent Secretary (General Services Office) over the affair were “symptomatic of the absence of coordination” in the OSGF, adding that “the government seems to be repeatedly scoring own goals.”
The saga, he warned, follows a familiar pattern in which chairmen of National Assembly committees allegedly benefit from “hidden special purpose vehicle projects inserted into their budgets” and the appointment of their wards to agencies.
“If the allegations… about huge sums of money being paid to people around the president to secure political appointments has any iota of truth… then the country is finished,” he wrote.
A Yoruba elder’s appeal
Acknowledging that his critique could be read as ethnic disloyalty — both he and the President are Yoruba — Adegoroye pushed back.
“As a Yoruba, I am almost blackmailed to submission by a society that does not expect me to say anything that can be construed as criticizing the Nigerian leader from my own ethnic group. Yet, I remain undaunted because of my commitment to your success,” he wrote.
Invoking the Yoruba proverb agba kii wa l’oja ki ori omo titun o wo — an elder in the marketplace cannot sit idly by while a child is imperilled — he expressed frustration that despite Tinubu being Grand Patron of CORFEPS, the council’s executive has been unable to secure a meeting with the President in more than three years.
Prescription for the next HCSF
Adegoroye urged the President to discontinue the practice of drawing the HCSF from professional cadres lacking core administrative experience, and to base the next appointment on specific criteria: a strong grasp of the OHCSF mandate; command of the Public Service Rules, Financial Regulations and Procurement laws; institutional memory; character and personal integrity; and “courage to stand firm in the face of undue political interference.”
He also called on the President to formally invite CORFEPS to submit a blueprint for overhauling the bureaucracy.
Adegoroye closed with a warning framed as counsel: “A president gets the civil service he deserves… Fix policy, the public service and its institutions, and as a nation we shall be on the way to fixing our politics.”
Crediblenewsng.com
