The British, for all their imperial sins, did manage to leave behind one decent export — a disciplined civil service. Bureaucracy may be boring, but it’s the quiet heartbeat of governance. They found the spice of order in the mundane: rules, files, and men in neatly pressed suits who knew that policy doesn’t make itself.
In the colonial and early post-independence years, Nigeria inherited a civil service that was apolitical, efficient, and — in its own stiff-upper-lip way — the real machinery behind the scenes. Politicians came and went, but the Permanent Secretaries ensured that the trains (or at least the memos) ran on time.
During the 1967 Aburi conference, an attempt to preempt the Nigeria civil war, an air head young military head of state Col Gowon was steered by the experience and knowledge of the civil service including the late Oba of Benin, Erediauwa, then Prince Solomon Akenzua a permanent secretary in the foreign office to reconsider what he had agreed to with Oxford trained military officer, Col Ojukwu. The original Aburi agreement had the effect of turning the Nigeria state into a Bantustan of Simi locking regions with a short lifespan.
Then came 1975 — and with it, General Murtala Mohammed’s civil service purge. Overnight, over 10,000 public servants were sacked with immediate effect, many without due process, as part of a “clean-up” that was meant to make government leaner and more honest. Instead, it gutted the very institution that anchored governance. Fear replaced competence, loyalty replaced expertise, and survival replaced service.
From that moment, the Nigerian civil service never fully recovered. The message was clear: government work was no longer a profession — it was a political hazard. The mandarins who once advised, guided, and corrected political leaders were replaced by “yes-sir” clerks who took dictation rather than decisions.
And so, the long descent began. Successive military and civilian governments discovered that a weakened civil service was a convenient tool — pliable, uncritical, and incapable of saying “No, Sir, that’s illegal.”
Today, what we call “government” is more often a group of political appointees improvising policy between photo-ops and fuel scarcity. The result? A state without a steering wheel, governed by men who mistake headlines for strategy.
The British left behind a system built on institutional memory. Nigeria, somewhere between 1975 and today, swapped it for institutional amnesia — where every administration starts afresh as if the country were an annual experiment in governance.
So yes, the British may have taken our gold, cocoa, and confidence — but we threw away the one export that could have kept the country functional: a civil service that served.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 