FG Stops Foreign Training For Civil Servants

The Federal Government has stopped the overseas training of civil servants, especially in areas where training institutions in Nigeria have the competencies.

Head of Civil Service of the Federation, Alhaji Bukar Goni Aji, made this known in Abuja on Thursday while leading a body of Permanent Secretaries on Peer-Review to Federal Ministry of Education.

He also pledged to reposition the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria (ASCON) and the Public Service Institute (PSI), Kubwa to be able to carry out effective training of civil servants at both higher and middle level manpower.

Goni Aji said this was in line with the decision of the Federal Government to promote made in Nigeria goods and services instead of wasting limited resources on training abroad for which institutions in Nigeria could effectively provide.

He said: At our own level and in particular in the Office of the Head of Service, we discovered that we can no longer export or import our training programmes, especially those that we have the competencies locally in Nigeria.”

 The Head of Service further said that the country was deeply embarrassed by a particular incident whereby a seminar on fighting corruption in Nigeria with Nigerians as participants and resource persons living in Nigeria, was taken out of the country to Ghana, adding that this would no longer be tolerated.

He said: “It was highly embarrassing one time, and I’m sure one of the newspapers even carried it. The seminar was on fighting corruption in Nigeria. The participants were 100 per cent Nigerians and the resource persons were 100 per cent in Nigeria but it was taken to Ghana. Does it mean that the ASCON is longer there? The University of Ibadan is longer there or Tinapa or the Public Service Institute in Kubwa?

On the Peer-review for the Permanent Secretaries, Goni Aji said the initiative was to encourage federal permanent secretaries to carry out self evaluation on service delivery and see how Nigerians could get the “value for money.”

The Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Dr MacJohn Nwaobiala, in his presentation, said the ministry had made tremendous progress on key performance indicators.

He revealed that the Ministry has so far achieved 63.79 per cent utilization of the funds released to it from the 2013 Budget allocation to the Ministry of Education.