Revitalizing the fundamentals of communicating official communications inside the Nigerian civil service: selected communication strategies

Abstract

The spirit and heart of any social organization be it in the public or private sector is communication. In a big bureaucracy like the Civil Service, it is no exaggeration to say that the communication function is critical to efficient and effective public service delivery and good governance. However, in the contemporary Nigerian civil service, the communication culture or tradition that made the institution unique from other institution is drastically declining with time as the experienced officers on the civil service customized communication have retired and are retiring daily. Sad enough, many of the officers in the system today are not adequately measured up to the expected standard demand of them by the institution, thereby resulting to poor fundamentals of communicating communications in the system which has its negative impact on developmental processes in Nigeria. It is on this note that the study aimed at examining the best practices that make communication unique in the institution. The paper is documentary research on selected communication strategies in the Nigerian civil service, and therefore, relied on qualitative data obtained from textbooks, Civil Service Handbooks and internet. The experience of the author as a retired technocrat from the public service also played critical role in this study. The data was subsequently analyzed using content analysis technique in the presentation of this study. Findings revealed that there was dearth of informed relevant literature on the communication culture in the institution which portends a danger for inter-generational knowledge and information transfer. The study, therefore, suggests the need for the institution to urgently restore in-house seminars that were once monthly activity facilitated by the superior officers or retired technocrats for serving officers in the past. This would definitely go a long way to revitalizing the fundamentals of the customized communication in the Nigerian civil service.