CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
- Background of the study
The services rendered by governments the world over are being provided through a group of individuals known as the public servants under an umbrella of a system called the public service. In Nigeria, public servants comprises of senior and junior staff, as well as executive and administrative cadres who are largely distinguished based on their educational qualifications, training, skills, ranks and the duties they discharge. The public Service on the other hand refers to “the totality of the administrative structures within which the work of government is carried out” [1]. It covers agencies at the Federal levels like the Federal Civil Service, Legislatures and the Judiciary including their agencies and parastatals. The term usually denotes a wider scope of governmental agencies than the civil service. In addition it encompasses the civil service in the strict sense of the ministries and department of the central government and the field administration; it also covers local governments, the military, the police and other security agencies. The concept also covers advisory governmental bodies and the public enterprises. Public Service is a dynamic structure of government which operates based on rules that are reviewed every five years in Nigeria so as to keep in tune with changing times, to serve the current needs of society and to provide for the future requirements of the people. One of the principles of a public service is “Permanence”. The Public service is often defined as a permanent body of officials that carryout government decisions. It is permanent and its life is not tied to the life of any particular government. From this principle, it is pertinent to note that persons are employed into the service at one time and in some other time such persons do exit the service due to one reason or the other either retirement, transfer, withdrawal from service etc. This is why government from to time do recruit and offer appointments to prospective candidates to fill in the vacant positions with a view to keep the government’s work going. This again, signifies the importance of recruitment as a government tool for increasing the workforce by hiring candidates with the right qualification, attitude and enthusiasm to demonstrate commitment on the job. The Nigerianization of the civil service was coated with the perpetuated problems of sectionalism; nepotism and tribalism which according to scholars such as [2] could be traced from the rationalization and popular purges which gave birth to competitions among ethnicities in the country who want to favor their ethnic clans. These issues ever since then became very critical and never left the Nigerian public service. This paper focuses on the nature of recruitment and selection in the Nigerian public service, as well as the contributory factors to the inadequacies of the exercise. Going further, the paper will offer some suggestions on how to tackle the dilemma Every organization depends on the effective use of its available resources in order to achieve its objectives.
