IF nothing is done to bridge the capacity gap that would arise from the retirement of top civil servants starting from mid this year to the end of 2013, the efficiency of the Nigerian foreign service, and by extension, her international enterprise could be hurt.
This and other fears were expressed at the weekend about the deeper, futuristic implications of the administrative circular that now mandates a certain cadre of officers (directors) to step out of service after eight years, irrespective of age or overall service years.
Sources within and outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have revealed that even though the retirement age (60) and service years (35) were in themselves policies geared towards addressing service issues, the "abnormal" manpower deficiencies that have gone unaddressed for years would catch up with the nation's foreign service, which could now lose about 75 per cent of its well horned, top level, resourceful and versatile officers.
Indeed, diplomats and advisory statesmen had not too long ago conceived a memo to draw the attention of President Goodluck Jonathan to the consequences of the disengagement policy on the nation's external interests.
Warning of the "obvious signs of paralysis that would soon catch up with the ministry," which would further contribute to the decline of Nigeria's engagement abroad, sources pointed at the "near absence of coherent, systematic and spread-out training scheme organised by the Office of the Head of Service or designated services to "address the deficiency from our higher institutions to guide new entrants up to the middle-level cadre of the service."
"The gap we are speaking about is gaping, you can all see it. We do not want this to happen and then we start complaining after the damage," a source said Sunday.
"Yes, this policy has been in use for about four years now but its broad ranging implications are about to catch up with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which unfortunately has not designed any special human institutional memory training to take care of the gaps now being opened."
Worse still, they dismissed as "ad-hoc" the training scheme now being organised by the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation, maintaining that it "does not address the sustainability, imperative necessity of a vibrant service," such as the foreign service.
According to them, the scheme does not have the international best standards that could "productively grow the service," and currently in Nigeria, only the Armed Forces "can boast such systematic and targeted results-oriented service, the reason it is still sustainable and reliable."
Nevertheless, the experts also thumped down the operations of the Nigerian Foreign Service Academy (FSA) in Badagry, contending that the school has not been able to bring about "remarkable improvements" in the fortunes of the foreign service in terms of "practical aspects of the work of the foreign service officers."
The FSA, they stressed, only targets new entrants to the exclusion of middle career officers. The practical aspects of the foreign service officers were identified to include "complex issues such as analysis of international events, negotiation skills, writing of reports, speeches and memoranda, to mundane ones as classification of files and routine minutes."
However, the Foreign Affairs Minister, Ambassador Olugbenga Ashiru, told The Guardian that there was no cause for alarm over the gap that might be created by the exit due to the retirement policy. He insisted that rife as the gap might be, the ministry was putting in place machinery that could guarantee stability in its manpower planning and progression.
