Prof. Tunji Olaopa and the commissioners of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) on Tuesday began a process of planning and fundamental review targeted at making the 2026 directorate-level promotion seamless.
This emerged at the 2025 Directorate Level Promotion Exercise Assessment Workshop held on Tuesday at the commission in Abuja.
Olaopa, the chairman of the commission, described the meeting as an extraordinary one convened to undertake a comprehensive and rigorous assessment of the 2025 directorate-level promotion.
He said that it was indeed clear after the conclusion of the 2024 exercise that there were many systemic cum structural weaknesses that must be corrected through creative problem-solving if the goal to restore the commission’s preeminent status as the gatekeeper for the public administration profession in the federal service and by extension, the federation, would be achieved.
He noted that since the focus of the commission was to transition without fail from a manual system of pen and paper to a computer-based test (CBT) mode last year, the commission concentrated its efforts in that direction. He disclosed that indeed, the commission resoundingly accomplished that objective.
To build on that success, he said that it had become imperative to conduct an assessment of not just the 2025 promotion but also to review experience and lessons learned with the CBT-based testing.
“Of course, there are many issues that the latter part of the assessment will throw up for us in terms of infrastructural investment and development to build the commission’s institutional capability readiness to take full responsibility for the technology-enabled process, especially as the credibility of the process is critically core to the entire operation”, he said.
Olaopa urged the commissioners and other top officials involved in the review to go beyond being merely critical of the past promotion with its attendant examination and interview.
He urged them to propose insights and solutions that would make the 2026 exercise seamless-
This, for him, is the objective of the meeting: “clarity in problem identification, with focus on solutions for problem-solving in every gap we identify, so that the lessons of experience and learning from the review of today will add up to make the 2026 resoundingly successful and impactful, going forward.”
According to him, many of the systemic challenges hindering the promotion are already being taken on at the level of the FCSC-Office of the Head of Service joint solution-focused conversation and seminal effort.
“We must necessarily cascade this whole dynamic to the level of the MDAs through periodic institutionalized meetings with directors of human resource departments who managed the commission’s delegated powers at the line ministries level. The forum has become so critical to human resource governance, regulatory control, continuous learning as well as change management and incremental improvement as we move to the higher curve of transforming the commission into a veritable hub of human resource professionalism and expert house for the service and government”, he added.
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