Institutional Memory, Professional Knowledge and the CORFEPS Journal

By Tunji Olaopa The Council of Retired Federal Permanent Secretaries (CORFEPS) is an association of patriotic former public servants that embodies administrative experiences, institutional memories and professional knowledge that could pull a lot of political and administrative weight within the reform imperative to transform governance architecture, the civil service and its ecosystem.

As a multidisciplinary body of retired public servants with vast knowledge of the workings of the system, CORFEPS possesses a huge significance in connecting the institutional and reform dots in terms of where the civil service system is coming from, where it is at the moment and where it intends to be, given the democratic imperatives and development necessities of the current Tinubu administration.

It is one of the most critical stakeholders in the public administration communities of practice and service that articulates a continuing professional and institutional interest in furthering the relevance of the civil service as a significant player in the development process in Nigeria. The necessity of such a body derives from the fact that patriotic and meritorious service does not need to end with retirement.

Indeed, more can still be done in entrenching the institutional memories that retired permanent secretaries embody. CORFEPS, under the able chairmanship of Mahmud Yayale Ahmed, has been energetic in its consistent push to regain the vocational honor, professional ethos and administrative efficiency of the civil service. And in furtherance of this enthusiastic push for the significance of the civil service system as one critical cornerstone of democratic governance in Nigeria, CORFEPS has just launched an amazing initiative: the CORFEPS Journal on Pubic Policy and Governance.

This significant initiative must be situated within a larger context of the institutional reform of the civil service system, especially its status as a value-based institution founded on merit, public spiritedness and professionalism. That context facilitates a framework that allows the past and the present to initiate conversation, and for both retired and current public servants to incessantly brainstorm the future of the bureaucratic system and its capability readiness to shoulder the burden of public policy implementation.

The journal, I must say, presses the advantage of escalating the fundamental significance of professional knowledge and its role in deepening institutional progress. In other words, through it, CORFEPS provides a rare forum—draw, I dare say, from the administrative history of that golden era when administrative theorists (the gown) and practitioners (the town) were in conversation—within which administrative ideas, practices and initiatives could be discussed, extended and applied.

The inaugural edition of the CORFEPS journal is indeed a full, rich and exciting package that is sufficiently exciting to signal to the communities of service and practice that something new and challenging has arrived in the administrative space. This is because the editorial board went all out to create a splash especially with the range of topics covered, and even more specially with the array of contributors and their unique specialties.

As is to be expected, CORFEPS pulled strongly from within its own ranks for reflections that combine past administrative experiences with current observations from behind the scenes. The majority of the contributors are retired permanent secretaries who have served in one capacity or the other, and who have faced one crucial challenge or the other with wide ranging levels of successes.

In this regard, the CORFEPS journal, in its inaugural edition, is drawing on the immense institutional memories and professional knowledge of its members to ventilate both diagnostic, recuperative and reformative insights. And this is salutary in ways that serve to complement the mediatory role CORFEPS has been playing as a staunch and energetic stakeholder in the civil service reform project in Nigeria.

We now have an opportunity to listen and take note, outside of the usual high-power meetings, of the single-minded understanding of the civil service system from those who have manned its various aspects, especially the ministries, departments and agencies. Their reflections and analyses are complemented by others, critical watchers of the civil service, whose many years of dealing with the system make them significant participants in the ongoing efforts to transform it into a value-based, public-spirited, meritocratic and high-performing world class institution.

Topics In terms of the range of topics and themes discussed in the inaugural edition, the CORFEPS journal becomes an automatic administrative keepsake. The inaugural edition is divided into eight parts. Each of the segments, with the exception of the last two, speaks intentionally to the most dominant issues involved in assessing and transforming Nigeria’s democratic g