The challenges of implementing civil service delivery reforms in Nigeria

The need to explore the activities of the Civil Service Reform in Nigeria is imperative because management and provision of services to citizens are through the public services. Thus, this research set out to explore the challenges faced by the civil services in Nigeria and find solutions to the critical situation. Due to
this, the federal government of Nigeria initiated several reforms aimed at repositioning civil service in the country. Nevertheless, the reforms are still inefficient, and past remedies by reforms committees had little effects. Therefore, the study explores the challenges of the civil service reforms through in-depth interviews and Focus Group Discussions. These methods was used to
triangulate the data through the NVivo 10 Qualitative analysis software to analyze the transcribed data thematically. The study discovers that civil service quality delivery has deteriorated while the series of reforms carried out have not improved civil service delivery. The findings reveal that previous reforms were not fully implemented and the failures was due to the lack of continuity in the
policies, diversion of public funds, poor assessment of the needs of manpower and so on. The study was situated within the framework of the Bureaucratic Theory, the Theory of Public Choice, and the System Theory. The research discovered and concluded that the continuous failures of the civil service to meet quality services can be traced through the level of satisfaction, sincerity and so on. Hence, the study has contributed to the management of the civil service reform in Nigeria. It will be beneficial to the civil service in the area of development and service delivery outcomes at all levels of governance as well as the parastatals. Most importantly, it will be useful for the immediate repositioning of the civil service to enable a sustained good service delivery. Based on the findings, the study suggests that due to the lack of attention at the state and local civil service, future studies should focus on these respective areas.