The Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms, Mr Dasuki Ibrahim Arabi, has advised state governments to emulate reforms by the Federal Government aimed at repositioning the public service.
Arabi gave the advice in Gombe on Tuesday shortly after a meeting with top management of the Gombe State Bureau of Public Reforms Service.
He stated that the Nigerian public service was gradually being repositioned through digital transformation as a result of the intervention of his agency and that there was need for such reforms to be replicated at the state level.
He said that his visit to states of the federation was to encourage them to key into the directive of President Bola Tinubu for all state governments to create their bureau of public service reforms.
He stated that Tinubu had been particular about such reforms as it remained key to better service delivery in governance and to help bridge the gap between what the government was doing and the people.
He said his agency was currently partnering critical stakeholders to introduce and promote adoption of technology to deepen accountability and transparency in the operations and services of public institutions.
“Whatever we do at the federal level, if we are not able to get it cascaded down to the states, we will not succeed.
“Data has shown that at the federal level, everybody that works under the federal government are about 2.7 to 2.9 million.
“Now when you take this number of people out of the 220 million people, that means a greater percentage of us are in the state and that is what makes this visit very important,” he said.
According to the dg, such reforms at the state level are important to have a national uniformity in terms of the transformation that the federal government wants to drive especially the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Tinubu.
Arabi said his engagement with stakeholders at the state level was to ensure that public servants understood the tools for such reforms and are able to use them effectively to improve the quality of public service.
He said part of the reforms was for states to digitalise governance, adding that digitalising the system would help reduce cost of governance, ensure transparency for the citizens to track the activities of the government.
Arabi commended Gov. Inuwa Yahaya of Gombe State for creating the Bureau of Public Service Reforms which he said had helped the state in terms of the achievements that it had recorded since 2019.
“We are seeing the results of some of the interventions but we want the state to do more, key into the reforms most especially around the digitalisation of process,” he said.
On his part, Mr Abubakar Hassan, the Director-general of Gombe State BPRS said the state had made tremendous achievements since it initiated public service reforms led by Gov Yahaya.
Hassan said that some of the awards that the state government had recorded in the country could be attributed to the reforms in public service.
He said that any call to strengthen such reforms in Gombe State was a welcomed development.
According to him, there was need for the state to build on earlier reforms to have stronger service delivery to citizens of the state.
“Presently, the director has proposed so many things we ought to have been doing or have done at the state level.
“We assure him that definitely some of these things he has come with will be surely adopted and we will try and see how to work it out for the benefit of our state,” he said.
