Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki, said on Sunday that his administration will be remembered for restoring respect and credibility to the state’s civil service, through bold reforms.

Mr Obaseki, who spoke with journalists in Lagos, said he had been able to transform the service to one of the most respected and best motivated in the country.

He described the civil service as a critical vehicle for the implementation of government policies and vision.

Mr Obaseki said before the coming of his administration in 2016, there was much decay in the civil service and things were not working.

He said things were so bad that civil servants depended on filling stations to use toilets as the ones in their offices were bad.

According to him, his aggressive reforms changed the situation completely.

He stated, “The owners of government are the civil servants. What we had done for some 30 years or 40 years was to denigrate them, to make them feel like they are the problems. We had not encouraged them. We had not supported them. We had not enhanced their ability to deliver. When you go into areas where they worked in those years, you would not encourage your children to go into the civil service with the infrastructure on ground. When I come into the office, sometimes, you call an officer, and ask ‘where is so-and-so?’The answer would be, she is not on the seat, or he is not on the seat. He or she has gone across the road to a filling station to use the toilet, because the toilets in their own offices are bad. One of the things we did is to restore respect and credibility to them. And today, you want to be a civil servant in it, because their offices are perhaps the best office or workplaces. They have everything.’’

The outgoing governor said that civil service operations in the state had also become digitalised and no file gets missing again in offices.

According to him, if anyone imagines government as a vehicle that is moving people in a certain direction, then the engine of that vehicle is the civil service.

He said, “If that engine is faulty, that vehicle is not going to move anywhere. It is going to be stalled all the way. So, from that perspective, one has to understand that for the government to work, the civil service, the bureaucracy, has to work. Whatever the government has decided it wants to do, whatever the policy, the people that will make it happen are the civil servants. And they have a process through which they make it happen. So, if that institution is not working, if it is being castigated like we have done in the past, if there is uncertainty, of course, you will get much out.’’

Mr Obaseki, who noted that his administration invested heavily in training and retraining of civil servants, said that workers in the state had access to uninterrupted electricity and internet facilities in their offices.

The governor stated, “We have connected fibre optics. So there is high-speed internet. Now, we have gone digital. So they don’t carry files again. No file gets missing in their door. Your file will not be lost again, because everything is digital. One of the things we have done is to set up the John Odigie Oyegun Training Centre for continuous workers’ training.’’

On compensation and remuneration, Mr Obaseki said that the state never waited for the Federal Government to set minimum wage for it before raising the minimum salary of workers to N70,000.

“We just believe that, if you do not pay people well, you won’t get their loyalty,” he said.

Mr Obaseki said that his administration had provided incentives to workers, including provision of health insurance and building of a functional school system to give access to workers’ children.

The governor said that his administration never neglected retired workers as their pensions were paid regularly.

According to him, his administration has prioritised policies to reinstate pride in the service and give workers a sense of belonging.

“I am proud. It is like the kind of people, the kind of quality of staff I worked with in the private sector. So, that’s the reason why we did what we did. And for me, if Nigeria is going to move forward, we must rebuild the civil service. It is about digitisation, data, internet and artificial intelligence,” he said.

The second and last tenure of Obaseki will end on November 11.

He will hand over to the governor- elect, Senator Monday Okpebholo of the All Progressives Congress following his victory in the Sept. 21 governorship election in the state.

(NAN)