Buhari approves three new permanent secretaries, scraps annual performance evaluation system for civil servants

President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the appointment of three new Permanent Secretaries in the Federal Civil Service.

The appointment came following the recently conducted selection process, to fill existing vacancies.

Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Dr. Folasade Yemi-Esan, who made this known in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, also disclosed their names and states of origin in the statement.

“The newly appointed Federal Permanent Secretaries and their states of origin are as follows;

i. Jafiya Lydia Shehu – Adamawa

ii. Udo Okokon Ekanem – Akwa Ibom

iii. Faruk Yusuf Yabo – Sokoto.”

“A date for the swearing-in and deployment of the new appointees will be announced in due course,” she said.

Meanwhile, Dr Yemi-Esan says government has decided to abolish the Annual Performance Evaluation Report (APER) as it introduced a new method known as Performance Management System, as a result of a directive given by President Muhammadu Buhari.

Yemi-Esan who gave the clarification on Thursday, at the weekly ministerial briefing organized by the Presidential Communications Team, said the new system, which is in line with global best practices, will go a long way in rewarding the performance of public workers.

“Because we are not proud of the APER system, we thought that it is important to have a Performance Management System that actually rewards performance and not one where you will just fill a form and submit, just for promotion alone.

“So, we have begun implementing an ideal performance management system and because it has been decentralised, various ministries are at different levels of implementation of this. It is worthy to note that some agencies have even actually gone beyond what we are doing in the ministries and have instituted Performance Management System in their agencies. Ekiti State is also working on a Performance Management System,” she said.

She noted with dismay that the objectives of the APER system in the public service was very noble at the beginning but the implementation later became very defective thus denying the country the benefits derivable from a productive and performance output framework.

“The journey began in 2021 where the President had a retreat with Ministers on the nine priority areas of his administration and the institutional performance management was measured effectively and he gave the directive that the Office of the Head of Service of the Federation should institutionalise the employee Performance Management System in the public service to replace the APER. So, we were energized to do so,” She stated.

The Head of Civil Service added that based on the new Performance Management System, civil servants will be assessed quarterly, adding that Nigeria is planning to get its entire public service certified by the International Standard for Standardization (ISO).

“What we are planning is that by the grace of God, the whole of the civil service will become ISO certified therefore, we have advised that all Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) should go on to the ISO certification with the Permanent Secretaries as top drivers in their MDAs,” she said.

She also disclosed that over 60, 000 civil servants have been so far verified, in core MDAs with 1618 ghost workers discovered.

“We also suspended 874 officer form the IPPIS platform because they have not updated or gone through verification of their records and so those officers were removed and assumed that they were ghost workers because we gave a two-year period for officers to update their records on the platform and so those who couldn’t do that, we assumed they were ghost workers but some of them later came up and those with genuine excuses were made to go through the verification process again and restored on the IPPIS platform,” she said.