Nigerias Public Service and the Challenge of Sustainable Development

Nigeria’s Public Service as a service institution is a catalyst for National Development and occupies a pivotal position in the onerous task of translating government’s programme and activities into action. The Public service in Africa in general and Nigeria in particular lacks the ability to formulate, implement and monitor policies, programmes, strategies focused on economic growth and sustainable development. Lack of motivation, coupled with low salaries and poor working conditions combined to demoralise the public service and make it incapable to engage competent personnel to perform duties in professional manner. Its inclination to the orthodox public administration practice, as against administrative requirements of plans, programs and projects continues to compound its problems. A feature which has resulted to lack of innovation and its inability to advance the course of sustainable development. This paper adopts a combination of exploratory, descriptive and contextual methodology and generates data solely from books, journal articles, magazines, newspapers and the internet. A good number of countries namely, Tanzania, Australia and Malaysia cited in this paper have attained the goals of sustainable development through the practice of New Public Management by their public services. The paper recommends that Nigeria’s public service should evolve a capacity to contribute to the enunciation of realistic development objectives and programmes through a careful analysis of issues, identification of constraint on programmes / projects options regarding available national and state resources.