Federal Character Policy and Representative Bureaucracy in Nigeria’s Federal Civil Service

This paper examined the implementation of the federal character policy and its implications for representative bureaucracy in Nigeria’s federal civil service. The hunch of this research is that despite the introduction of the Federal Character Policy in Nigeria since 1979, the perception of many Nigerians is that the policy is yet to effectively chart the course of representative bureaucracy in the Nigerian civil service with particular regards to equitable recruitment, enhancement of competence as well as dissuading of mutual distrust, ethnic loyalty, discontent, and other primordial tendencies in the country. The research was essentially qualitative – descriptive and the documentary research method was used to carry out the investigation. Consequently, the study relied principally on secondary data that were analyzed descriptively. Findings of this study revealed that though all the major ethnic nationalities in Nigeria are represented in the country’s civil service; the representation is lopsided favoring some ethnic groups at the detriment of others. As such, the implementation of the federal character policy cannot be said to have increased the representativeness of the Nigerian bureaucracy, improved service performance, and foster national cohesion in the country. Based on these research findings, it was recommended, amongst others, that a merit-based selection framework should be developed as a major strategy for employing people across the 36 states (inclusive of the Federal Capital Territory) of the country into the federal civil service; and this should be implemented jointly by the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) and the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR).